Business Development

They are everywhere: fakes in business clothing. Long-term business relationships depend on authenticity.

Think about the people you most like to do business with. Likely, these people are trustworthy, dependable and authentic. Here are three ideas to consider for authentic business development:

1) Keep the other person’s best interest at heart.
So often in business development people think only of their own interests…getting a quick sale, steering a prospect toward a product to win a contest… People can often see if you have their best interest at heart and will reward the business people who do.

2) Get to know a prospect and customer away from the office.
Authentic business development takes place in and out of the office…at a grocery store, on the way to the airport…wherever the two of you enjoy relaxing. I have two favorite places where I’m most relaxed…most people do and this is a great place to meet.

3) Look for ways to help your prospect and customer in business.
If you can help your prospects and customers in business development, they will likely reciprocate. I look for magazine articles, referrals…anything to help my prospects and customers increase their business. These same prospects and customers show their appreciation with their business.

Authentic business development is truthful business…and we can all use more truth in business.

Mike McCann
Mike-at-GlobalBusinessCafe.com

I have just completed what seems like an exhaustive search on “business development” on the Web and, frankly, bored to sleep. All I see are the same old offerings and a parade of government agencies promoting the same resources. Give me a touch of humanity, please!

Here’s another approach to effective business development. We’re starting the summer season shortly in the northern hemisphere. During the summer season, many businesspeople begin to think about outdoor activities, family, fun and break from business routines.

As a business development professional, consider stepping out of the humdrum routine by providing a professionally unique activity for your prospects and customers. For example:

1. Boating for Business Development
Treat prospects and customers to a few hours on the water for rapport building. From rental of a ski boat to lunching on a 100-foot+ commercial event yacht, match your top prospects and customers to your choice of boating for fun away from the office.

2. Picnics for Business Development
Everyone eats! On a pretty weather day, a well-planned picnic for a few prospects and customers and their families as a relaxed and fun event will go a long way toward building rapport out of the office.

3. Fireworks for Business Development
Retain a commercial van service to pick-up and transport prospects and customers (with families) to fireworks displays. Guests should appreciate you taking care of transportation to events where congestion is common. …Another business development technique to enjoy a fun event and get to know one another outside the office.

You get the idea…for business development, organize outside the office relax and build rapport around a summer activity. What’s a popular event in your area that prospects and customers would enjoy with their families? Plug yourself in the middle of an event by providing logistics and planning to build rapport for business development away from the office.

Mike McCann
Mike-at-GlobalBusinessCafe.com

Effective business development starts with strategizing who is the most apt to buy your product or service. Here are 10 points to consider when creating your business development system:

1. Who would pay for my product or service?
What problem does your product or service solve. Use this information to help create your business development system. To start, use Google’s keyword tool to see how many people are searching for words related to your product or service.

2. Who has become my customer?
To refine business development strategy, see who has already bought your product or service. You can gain valuable insights for business development by releasing the product in a test phase and analyzing who buys.

3. Businesspeople overestimating business development numbers.
Try to create realistic business development programs. Conduct surveys, do man-on-the-street type interviews or organize small focus groups.

4. Ask your network for advice on your business development plans.
Tap into your social networks to get free feedback on your business development plans. People in your network are more likely to take the time to give you opinions and advice
.
5. Beware of making assumptions based on personal knowledge and experience.
Personal experiences and knowledge can make you believe that you understand your prospects without the need for market research. You have to interact with prospects to fully understand how to structure your business development efforts.

6. How do I coordinate business development and revenue model?
Realistically match your business development system with your revenue models. Businesspeople often overestimate the size of the customer base.

7. Match distribution model with business development model.
Do you have a store or a store and ecommerce? Are you selling locally, nationally, globally? Knowing where your customers will come from will shape your business development efforts.

8. What are my competitor’s business development efforts?
Evaluating the competition’s marketing strategy can help you define your own business development efforts.

9. Where should I focus my business development efforts?
As you start defining your target customers, try to determine whether you can efficiently market to them. Understanding how to locate your customers early on can help you establish a business development plan.

10. Keep business development efforts flexible to expand your target market?
Stay nimble with business development and always look for ways to expand your business development efforts.

Business development is an ongoing process…not a static event. Listen with two ears and plan with multiple brains.

Mike McCann
Mike-at-GlobalBusinessCafe.com

WordPress is one of the easiest and most aesthetic ways to create a Web presence for business development. Here are 24 plugins to consider for making your WordPress site worthwhile for encouraging business development:

Jetpack
…Many great features you can utilize for business development, including displaying site analytics, creating photo galleries and even spell checking your copy.

Disqus
Interested in building a community of users on your site? Get Disqus for business development.

Social Toolbar
Social Toolbar, a plugin that places a toolbar at the bottom of your blog/site allows you to display links to all of your social network profiles, including sharing buttons and a full display of your latest tweets for business development.

WP Google Fonts
Appropriate fonts invoke visitors to see you out for business and Google Fonts has a large variety.

WPtouch
Mobile-optimized sites are becoming necessary for business development. WPTouch comes complete with a new device-optimized and user-friendly version of your content.

Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms includes email signup forms or extensive applications, making your job of business development easier.

WordPress SEO
WordPress SEO from Yoast is one of the better plugins for search engine optimization, featuring XML sitemaps, customizable title and meta description options, RSS optimization and social media optimization…

W3 Total Cache
Speed up your Word Press with W3 Total Cache, a powerful plugin that caches every single element of your site so readers can read your post in no time.

NextGEN Gallery
Everyone loves visuals, and the more you can add to your site or blog, the more likely you are to build business. With NextGEN, you have the ability to add watermarks to images, create slideshows, use different display themes and organize pictures into albums…

Digg Digg
Use the Digg Digg plugin to integrate the most popular social buttons into your WordPress site for business development, which can be configured to display in various locations.

All in One SEO Pack
The All in One SEO Pack is the most comprehensive search engine optimization plugin available for WordPress users.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator for WordPress
Create a fully customizable sitemap for your WordPress website with this plugin from Dagon Design, which gives users multilevel categories, pages and permalinks support.

WP e-Commerce
WP e-Commerce offers a 100 percent customizable experience with easily modified templates to make business development easier, in addition to community support, integration with multiple payment gateways (including PayPal, Authorize.net and Google Checkout), various marketing and SEO features, checkout capabilities with SSL security and the ability to manage orders and shipping from within the plugin.

Sociable
Make your content more social with Sociable, which will automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and RSS feeds for more personable business development.

Google Analytics for WordPress
Google Analytics is the widely adopted, fully featured analytics platform.

FeedBurner FeedSmith
Have lots of different RSS subscribers that you don’t know how to manage? Just use FeedBurner FeedSmith to detect all of the possible methods through which users can access your original WordPress RSS feeds, and then redirect them back to your FeedBurner FeedSmith feed to track every single subscriber.

Google XML Sitemaps
With this plugin, you can generate an XML sitemap that will help search engines – and not just Google, but Bing, Yahoo and others – better index your WordPress website, which means crawlers can see all of your site and retrieve data from it much more quickly and efficiently.

WP-DBManager
The WP-DPManager plugin allows you to optimize, repair, backup and restore your database. You can also delete backed up content, drop/empty tables and run selected queries. WP-DPManager even supports automated backups, optimization and repairs.

Contact Form 7
This simple, yet flexible contact form plugin allows users to manage multiple contact forms for easier business development.

Editorial Calendar
The Editorial Calendar plugin lets you see all of your scheduled posts and when they’ll be posted and offers drag-and-drop functionality to change post dates, draft management, quick edits of post titles, content and times and the ability to manage posts from multiple authors.

All in One Favicon
WordPress users can easily add a favicon (the small icons next to the URL in the address bar, the page name in a browser tab and/or the page’s name in a bookmark list) to their WordPress admin pages. The All in One Favicon plugin offers complete upload functionality and supports all three favicon types, ico, .png and .gif. – visual business development.

WooCommerce
WooCommerce is one of the best e-commerce platforms for WordPress users, allowing users to turn their websites into fully functional, highly customizable online stores that deliver enterprise-level quality and features. This includes a PayPal standard gateway, Mijireh checkout, free and flat rate shipping functionality, Google Analytics and international and local shipping and local pickup…creating happy customers for further business development.

ShareThis
This social media plugin enables WordPress users to seamlessly allow visitors to share the site or blog’s content on up to 120 different social channels, including email, Facebok, Twitter, Google+… With ShareThis, users can do more to engage their audiences and increase traffic. Plus, the plugin features customization functionality that means it can be seamlessly integrated into a user’s site.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
YARPP provides a WordPress visitors with a list of posts and/or pages that are related to the entry they’re currently reading. Site owners can use this plugin to introduce their readers to other interesting, relevant content on their site.

Catch your breath and go about joining me in developing a WordPress site to make business development more pleasant and easy.

Mike McCann
Mike-at-GlobalBusinessCafe.com

Trainers often use a screencast, or snapshot of what’s happening on a computer screen. Business development professionals can also use screencasts to create an interactive business presentation for a product or service to recipients anywhere in the world.

While a screenshot is a static image of a computer screen, screencasts essentially are short movies with narration that can show prospects and customers how to use your product or service. All you need to create a screencast for business development is a microphone and a service to capture the video.

Here are three free programs to help you create a dynamite screencast:

1. Screencast-o-matic. This free program lets you start recording within 30 seconds of opening the webpage. One button opens the resizable recording frame. Another button starts the recording. Read more… »