Business Development - What is it ? What do they really do? Part 4 - Who are stakeholders?
Finding your Stakeholders There are many potential stakeholders you could engage with in order to generate client referrals for your company, however, given that you are properly the only Business Development personal, or one of only a few, and your organisation properly hopes to operate as lean as possible, both time and resources are most likely limited.
Therefore the first steps in any Business Development Strategy are to refine down the list to those stakeholders your organisation sees as the most important to engage with to ensure you maximise the value of your efforts and build strong lasting relationships with these stakeholders.
It should be noted that that excluding stakeholders from your initial list does not mean that you won’t interact with them or won’t ever plan strategies to partner with them. No stakeholder will be turned away who attempts to partner with you or refer clients to you just because they are not listed! This is intended to be a live document and will be updated to reflect changes in the market and new market intelligence. Additionally, as strategies are undertaken and your capacity grows, both in resources & time, you will be able to expand your stakeholder engagement list.
The first step in your journey to identify you to determine which stakeholder groups, subsets, or combination of both you should target first is to list them down, as many as possible. This is a great opportunity to use the knowledge of your co-workers and get buy into the process. Ask them for their opinion on the stakeholder list or even hold a planning day to walk through it. To save time on the day you may wish to send out the list ahead of the planning day and gather feedback. The Groups and subsets listed below are intended as an initial framework to help spark your thinking and can be used to promote discussion and should be explored, expanded and confirmed during the planning day.
Locations Locations that prospective or new clients and their support network cluster naturally can be great stakeholders to engage with and a great way of getting your clients to come to you. These could be neutral unaffiliated locations that happen to have a high subset of the types of clients you’re after engaging with, such as shopping centres or kid-friendly parks. It could be an event that is targeted at your client's group or naturally attracts a large number of potential clients, such as a good food festival or a local street festival. It could accommodation provider, either ongoing or temporary, which is frequented by your clients, such as a retirement village or a holiday parks. Finally, it may be a location that is naturally affiliated with your client types, such as a community or youth centre.
Internal Business Units Often other internal business units can be a great source of clients, especially if they have previously been unaware of the type of clients you are trying to engage with. Often their business process will naturally bring them into contact with your desired customer type and they can easily refer customers to you. These can be some of the best enquiry’s as the clients will naturally be aware of your organisation and (hopefully) already have some trust and rapport built up. There are of course many ways your organisation could be interacting with potential clients but the 3 main areas are Physically Shops, Research Arm and Other service delivery arms. The physical shopfront can be a great area to both meet prospective clients and or use strategies to get them to engage with you, especially if your physical shops offer a different service than the one you are seeking to engage with. Often your organisation may have a research or outreach arm that looks at how it develops it next services, these can be a great source of engagement with stakeholder, either because the researchers already have a connection in with your stakeholder or because what your research team does is of interest to other stakeholder and can become a point of engagement and even new product design. Finally, your organisation, if big enough, may have other services arms that could cross-promote and refer clients to you, not only is this a great source of a client who you already know are willing to pay for your company’s services, but you can potentially cross-promote your new clients back to other services arms, benefiting not only the company as a whole but also creating more touchpoints with clients.
Social Groups Partnering with social groups that your clients may frequent can be a great way to easily engage with groups of clients without having to organise an event or transport for your clients. Additionally, you can leverage off the goodwill of the social groups to more easily engage with clients. There are many types of social groups and it is important that your service is a fit or the type of social group.
Social groups that provide an educative experience to clients, such as education hubs like Universities of the third age, can a great way to meet clients if you can provide an informative talk on your industry area or service. This is especially relevant if the industry has recently undergone a change that could affect them or you believe your service could help further their educational aims. If you are trying to target a highly specific market group, partnering with a social clubs based around an activity or culture can be a great mechanism for reaching your audience through a target source, again without having to organise transport or a venue.
Direct Referring Organisations Direct Referring organisations are organisations that people turn to for advice, especially during periods of change when people may become clients that do not themselves directly provision services. Often they can be trusted everyday advisors that the client already knows, such as GPs or someone whose designated role it is to provision advice during these times, like a financial planner or even someone who facilities another aspect of the such as an Occupational Therapists. As these direct referring organisations or individuals can be scattered or only see a small number of potential clients each, it is sometimes worth addressing consortiums of advisors when possible.
Client Suppliers Often there will be a correlation between the type of clients you are after and the additional suppliers a client use. For instance, you may wish to sell double glazing, and find that the types of clients who want double glazing are also re-roofing their house (general renovations) or looking at solar power hot water (energy waste-conscious). People during this time may ask this expert what else they should get done or look into to enhance what they are already getting done, therefore making them valuable referrers.
Partner Organisations You will often find that there are a smaller organisation that only offer part of the total package you offer. Rather then seeing them as the competition you should view them as a great potential partner and referrer. With the right MOUs in place you can grow a healthy and respectful working relationship in which the smaller organisation will refer a client to you to handle the other 80% as they know that you will not try to poach their client as other organisations will. Additionally, you can potentially use them for overflow working knowing they will not poach your clients after would.
Advocacy/ Pure charity groups If the sector your clients are in is going through a period of change, advocacy groups can be amazing stakeholders and partners. By working with advocacy groups to inform client, not only do you contribute back to the sector but you can leverage the advocacy’s groups brand and meet potential clients. Its important in this situation not to try to sell, you are just there to inform and hopefully, the client will want to learn more about you. It also helps if your company already has a good name in the sector.
Divergent organisations Often organisation work io the left of right of your target client pool. You can often highlight who these are via your “nuisance calls” calls from a client who have accidentally ended up at your organisation through marketing or other means who you cannot serve and often refer on to these organisations. There is a good chance if you are doing this, these divergent organisation will be referring to your clients, in the form of their own “nuisance calls” to other agencies. Often all that is needed is to establish contact, explain each other business to each other and perhaps exchange brochures. These organisation can also be organisations similar to yours, that deliver the same product but has alternative demographics or geographic focuses then yours.
Government Authorities The final group of potential stakeholders are government authorities, from small local governments authority’s to state or commonwealth level. Not only can these stakeholder create policies and procedures that can influence the sector, they often have tenders and brokerage services or grants that can put you in touch with a large number of clients, while being paid to do so.
Please note I have purposefully excluded stakeholders that I feel would fall outside the Business developments direct sphere of influence and would be most likely be engaged through operational activities or pure marketing exercises, however you may need to look at these types of stakeholders, especially with your organisations marketing and operational area does not see it as an area of focus. For instance, leveraging existing clients could be a powerful source of referral, and could include; current clients networks - clients may have friends who are need of services, existing clients support network - these support network may know of other potential clients who are need of services/want to change. Likewise direct advertising, in its many formats, can be a powerful way of passively engaging with clients.
