There is a significant shift in the way organizations have been perceiving sales and business development. There is a transformation in hiring ways and standards and in the ways business development is impacting business growth. Whether you’re head of technology, operations, marketing or the owner yourself, you need to be aware of the trends that effect sales and have an impact on business development, since business development and sales drive growth.
Let’s read on to find the 5 most significant trends in business development in 2014.
# Subject Matter Expert evaluation
It’s a proven fact that buyers can gather information about your business and products through your website. But through the website, they cannot gain access to trends and practices, which determine if they are good for their situation. Hence, buyer still value SMEs.
# Context is new Emperor
Content was the king, but content without context is plain noise. Context is the new Emperor because with content packed with context is more valuable to buyers, since it educates them better.
# Collaboration
In a market with dominant buyers and weak sellers, everyone ends up losing. In 2014 the trend is to seek sellers, buyers can collaborate with. And sellers need to learn to deliver greater value to buyers. The two need to sit and workout a mutual relationship to generate authenticity and genuine humility.
# Building your own economy
Almost everyone is sick of waiting for the economy to spring back to life. But if reports are believed, the economy is going to trail along for a long time. So, the new trend in 2014 is to create your own economy i.e. to innovative with ways to put capital to work in order to create more opportunities. There is amply examples of how companies with stronger sales and business development units have begun to allocate capital to create growth.
# Simple CRM solutions
When companies realized they needed spreadsheets to organize their customer data, CRM was born. Various software made data entry very easy to deal with, but today thanks to social media, the amount of customer data has grown beyond limits, giving birth to a trend for more simplified and capable CRM solutions.
Since, it’s proven that these five trends affect sales and business development, two things that determine growth, every senior member in the organization needs to be aware of these trends.