What are your business development employees spending their time on? Working on spreadsheets, manually triggering emails and going through repetitive tasks just to get the job done? An average business development team spends 80% of their time on task execution and 20% on analysis and optimization. Yes, 80% of the day just moving through the mechanics of execution and not on coming up with the best initiatives to grow the business.
You know that they are doing their best with what they have, while still losing ground to more tech-savvy competitors. Why? It is because successful business development requires significant automation and most of the automation applies to marketing and sales.
Marketing and sales automation for business development and expansion effort has been around for the past 10 years and it is becoming more sophisticated. Having a CRM is not enough to compete.Â
The good news is that what was only affordable to F500 companies five years ago, now comes in an SMB version too. SaaS solutions make automation accessible, affordable, and available for you to increase staff productivity, speed up optimization of all investments, and support pipeline building.
Automation is also available to analyze all activities, acquire new customers, and retain existing ones. All the tools combined must ensure better outcomes and results than manual or semi-automated workflows.
The obvious challenge with automation is that there are 7,000+ vendors on the martech vendor landscape map and new ones appear daily.
How do you know which solution is worth buying and which one is not going to deliver?