Business development tools can make our life a lot easier and bring us better results, faster. These are the must-have business development tools!
Time in business development is a very valuable resource. Managing the many different tasks we have on a daily basis is definitely challenging.
And while some activities need special manual attention, many more can be optimized with technology.
If you’re new to business development, you might not even be aware that there are so many tools out there to make our life easier.
A few years ago, the only business development tools I had were a landline phone and yellow pages. Now, I use technology for almost all my activities.
Go ahead and enjoy my list of business development tools.
Business Development Tools for Business Intelligence
One of the key personality traits of successful business developers is curiosity. Because this is what allows us to look for opportunities and grow our business.
A best practice is to use this curiosity to know all about our competitors, market, and industry. And use this intelligence to establish ourselves as competent in our field.
Knowing what matters to your prospects or partners will give you better arguments to convince them to partner up with you.
You will learn how they talk, what they talk about and you will always have something to start a conversation with.
Once you have all this information, you can use the same topics in your social media strategy establishing yourself as a thought leader in your field.
I really consider this task one of the most important in my job. My goal is definitely to blend in with my audience and gain their trust.
Because ultimately, winning their trust directly translates into me achieving my goals.
In order to never miss a thing in my field, I made it a routine to check all the possible sources of information.
Now, If I would do this manually, it would cost me a precious amount of hours. So what I did was to create a routine and every Monday morning I check what’s going on.
To do this, I make use of the following business development tools.
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator
- Datanyze
- DiscoverOrg
- Owler
- SimilarWeb
- Industry newsletters
- Industry communities
If you manage a business development team, make sure you empower your team with time-saving tools. Check our corporate training page to discover how we could help your team be more efficient.
Business Development Tools for Lead Generation
As soon as you know who your target is, you need to find as many leads as possible that match your criteria.
There are many ways to find leads and I personally prefer attending networking events or referrals, cause it makes the approach way easier.
But of course, if we want to be successful we need to increase our numbers and approach as many leads as possible.
I’m sure you share the same frustration when it comes to lead generation. It’s hard to find the right people and it’s even harder to find their contacts.
Without considering the fact that this is an extremely repetitive, boring, and lengthy process.
Luckily for us, these business development tools can help us find contact information and even build lists using a specific description of our target.
If your team struggles with lead generation, we can help you with that. Visit our tailored business development training page to discover our options.
Business Development Tools for Prospecting
Next in our business development process, there is actual prospecting. In this phase, we can start contacting our leads and generating opportunities.
Back in the day, this entire process was manual. I used to write every single email directly from my Gmail.
Then I figured out that I would have saved a lot of time just by using templates. And then I also realized that I could use tools to automate this process.
Especially when it came to following up. In business – in general, actually – following up on a request is extremely important.
But I struggled a lot in the past making sure I wouldn’t lose things on the way. I would punctually forget to contact someone.
So, I started looking for solutions and I discovered that from CRMs to Sales Acceleration Platforms, there is an industry entirely dedicated to solving this issue.
These business development tools are basically meant to automate the way you approach leads, making sure you maximise your chances of success.
Business Development Tools for Calling
Calling is a very important task for every business developer. So it deserves a special mention when it comes to tools that facilitate that.
My main issue when it comes to calling is related to the speed I can call. If I have to dial my phone every time, I waste too much time.
So it’s key for me to have a tool that can speed up my process and make sure I reach out to as many people as possible during my calling blocks.
Another issue I faced when cold calling, is not being able to check on what I was doing.
It became crucial at some point having reported on how many calls I would make and what the outcome was.
To be fair, most of the prospecting tools above already have calling options. However, some of them are quite costly you might not be able to afford them all.
I personally prefer to spend a bit more but have a centralized solution where I can easily retrieve all the information I need.
But, if you can’t, most of the business development tools below can be either integrated into your current CRM or sales engagement platform or are easy to use in combination.
Business Development Tools for Social Media
Being successful in business development also means making sure your audience perceives you as an authority in your field.
Therefore it’s important to leverage social media to your advantage and be always present in the mind of your audience.
In the past years, I used a lot Facebook and LinkedIn to connect with my audience ending up spending a considerable amount of time on manual tasks like posting.
Then I learned I could become more efficient and use technology to get insights about my audience, connect with them, and become a trusted member of their club.
The following business development tools help you with social listening and optimizing the time you spend increasing your social media presence.
Being a successful business developer means staying always on top of your game. Make sure to use technology to maximize your efforts and get better results.
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