An organization may be too busy looking within in order to build and scale their business and who can blame them. They have structured their business to have a sales team, a marketing team, social media and business development… which often get mixed into the sales team, which in fact is two different categories and the subject of another post.
This is a Strategy
Business development is a strategy that depends on surrounding yourself with other networks in different organisations and industries. This, of course, requires you to go outside of your business and build a new structure. In these structures, you must visit and attend regularly, build relationships, and stay in touch with the connections you have made.
Structure within a structure
There is another step that gets missed, which is building an inner circle in each network. This inner circle should be a group of people who will be continuously introducing for you. Think of them as your team who you can meet regularly with to help solve connection issues in reaching out to the people who you can sell to or collaborate with.
The key to this inner circle is that they are from all different professions, otherwise it will not be successful. Another important aspect is that each profession will have a unique set of contacts that can be tapped into. You can meet these groups of people solely in the network or outside of the network. When you create an inner circle, you need to have a purpose and meet regularly.
What you have done is create a network within another network, which means you have double your opportunity for business development. Now, imagine, you take part in 3 to 4 networks and in each network, you created an inner circle so you have now doubled your potential.
Time
Of course, this will all take time. Business development or relationship building doesn’t happen overnight, and neither does surrounding yourself with a trusted network of people that you can call your inner circle. Therefore, businesses need to understand the time it takes to create these structures and to follow the system and it is another reason why business development is not sales.
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