Why a Business Development Plan Comes Before Any Campaign

Activity is bought before direction is agreed

A company under pressure to grow wants to see something happening. Buying a service feels like progress. Agreeing a direction feels like delay.

So the work starts with tools and vendors, and the strategy is left to emerge from whatever they produce. It rarely does.

Every provider reports its own number

The list vendor reports how many contacts were delivered. The email platform reports opens. The calling team reports dials. The web designer reports traffic.

Each number can look healthy while sales stay flat, because none of them is measured against the one thing the company actually wanted: more qualified sales opportunities.

Nobody can name the first target

Ask a sales team three simple questions:

Which market do we go after first?

Who inside those companies makes the decision?

Why should they talk to us now?

If the answers differ from person to person, every campaign built on top of them will be diluted before it starts.

A business plan is not a business development plan

Many companies already have a business plan. It was written to describe the company to a bank, an investor or a board: the finances, the operations, the forecast.

A business development plan answers a different question: how will this company win the customers it needs? It deals with markets, buyers, message, sales infrastructure, outreach, sequence and budget. Very few companies have one written down.

Planning has a reputation for sitting on a shelf

Owners have seen long strategy documents that nobody used. A useful plan is the opposite: short enough to act on, specific enough to brief a provider with, and tied to costs and an order of work.

A Business Development Plan should leave the company with clear, written answers to the questions every later step depends on:

• One agreed sales objective, so every activity is measured against the same thing
• Where the opportunity is: the markets, segments and target accounts worth approaching first
• Who decides: the roles and buying influences inside those companies
• What to say: the value proposition and the reason a buyer should talk to you now
• What must be in place first: the sales infrastructure the campaign will rely on
• Which components to use, in what order, and what each costs
• How results will be measured and reported

With those answers, research knows what to look for, email knows what to say, callers know who to call and why, and the company knows whether it is working.

In the Aim Hii process the plan is the foundation, and everything after it follows the same path:

• Business Development Plan: the direction, the targets and the order of work
• Sales infrastructure development: the process, tools and materials the campaign relies on
• Market research, lead research, enrichment, scoring and targeting: the right companies and the right people
• Email campaigns: the setup that reaches the inbox and the strategy that earns a reply
• Outbound calling: the conversation that turns interest into a qualified opportunity

Each of those steps has its own article in this series. The plan comes first because each of them is only as good as the direction it is given.

The plan carries no obligation to continue with Aim Hii. It can be used internally, used to compare or brief other providers, or used as the basis for working with Aim Hii.

Research on planning and sales process points the same way:

• Across 62 B2B companies, those with a defined, formal sales process reported 18% higher revenue growth than those without one, and companies that mastered three core pipeline-management practices saw 28% higher growth (Harvard Business Review, 2015).
• A meta-analysis of 46 studies covering 11,046 companies found that planning improves business performance (Journal of Business Venturing, 2010).
• Entrepreneurs who wrote formal plans were 16% more likely to reach viability than otherwise identical ones who did not (Harvard Business Review, 2017).

None of this proves that any single plan will work. It does show that companies which decide in writing where they are going, and how, tend to get there more often than companies which do not.