Business Development For Dummies

Chapter 2

Finding Damaging Gaps in Your Business Development

In This Chapter

Staying strong by addressing weaknesses

Discussing dilemmas for services firms

Assessing where your business is now

Gaps can be a real pain and usually indicate a weakness of some sort, whether they’re gaps in business knowledge, like not feeling comfortable with marketing, or things you haven’t attended to, like gaps in clothes that need repairing! Identifying and fixing weaknesses takes money and effort, but the cost of not addressing them is higher. You can’t do things you don’t understand and you may lose a sale when a hole appears in your worn suit during a meeting, turning you instantly from successful entrepreneur to hobo!

I assume that you’re reading this book to discover how to do better in business development, whether your firm’s revenue has plateaued or is seesawing (check out Chapter 1 for more details). Perhaps you’re wondering why getting business is so difficult when your firm is good at what it does and provides value to its customers. You’re busy, you want more business, so maybe you just need to do more of what’s been working. Unfortunately, simply working harder can overwhelm you and ...