Based on Richard’s book Business Development That Works, in-house business development training is tailored to your people, your organisation and your targets. This is a proven system of practical processes steeped in Richard’s 37 years experience working in top business development, sales and marketing roles at leading organisations, including KPMG, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the Sydney Opera House and Royal Automobile Club, and running business development and sales workshops across Australia, the UK and New Zealand for clients who are leading players in the corporate, small to medium enterprise, and not-for-profits sectors.
Richard is a qualified trainer who shares practical tools and techniques, engaging and inspiring participants to reimagine what’s possible for developing your organisation.
Results-focused approach feeds
behavioral change
There’s a world of difference between top performing business development and sales people and those who are just getting by. Richard’s unique approach combines action-based methodology with deep-seated behavioral change – to ensure the training sticks.
Clients typically report a commensurate improvement in sales and business development results as well as teams’ attitude and energy.
Business Development That Works: a repeatable system
Richard’s system takes the guesswork out of business development. Your team will have a proven methodology, outlined in Richard’s book, Business Development That Works, based on hundreds of conversations, dozens of training and workshop facilitations, many years of coaching, and Richard’s years’ experience in top business development and marketing roles.
Whether you’re at a multinational corporation, a not-for-profit organisation or an SME, Richard carefully prepares and tailors your business development training solution to your people, goals, and current business development process. The training facilitates discussion to address real barriers to progress, ensuring focused, practical, valuable outcomes for your team.
This is a tried-and-tested methodology that has been shared with businesses and organisations.
Business development topics
This business development training focuses on three key areas: attracting the right prospects, converting prospects into clients, and better retaining clients.
Over the course of the training, Richard leads your team through examining existing processes, identifying strengths and weaknesses, and using the methodology covered in Richard’s book, Business Development That Works, to create a robust and tailored system of business development designed to achieve your organisational goals.
Attracting the right prospects
The training commences by diving deep into exactly who we’re seeking to attract. No doubt your team has already done target market analysis or perhaps ideal client personas. But do they really know exactly who they’re seeking to attract, and who they’re not?
Understanding your ideal clients is an ongoing process that needs regular review and analysis to be successful. And it’s well worth the effort. When we’re clear on exactly who our organisation is targeting, our marketing, client attraction strategies and sales processes become far more strategic and our conversion rates improve dramatically.
You’ll develop a clear, compelling and concise value proposition so that you’re better able to attract your ideal clients and develop an effective business development activity plan to find those clients, delegating and clarifying roles, and sharpening KPIs to ensure they’re highly relevant as well as achievable.
Converting prospects into clients
We walk through every step of the sales conversion process: from securing an all-important first meeting, to meeting preparation, building rapport, uncovering needs and exploring solutions.
Too often, sales are lost and money left on the table because the sales team is ill-equipped to understand the prospects’ needs and priorities. Richard’s process enables sales teams to methodically prepare, work through, and skilfully respond and adapt to prospects’ needs during meetings and pitches.
Working this way, we minimise lost time pursuing go-nowhere sales conversations and preparing proposals and pitches for disinterested parties. Following Richard’s process, we’re better primed for meetings, enabling us to prepare and present compelling, considered proposals that translate into new business.
But we don’t want to be forever prospecting and pitching. Richard covers the key processes of attraction marketing, to better enable prospects to experience your organisational expertise, demonstrate your credentials, and let clients come to you, significantly reducing your marketing spend. Most importantly, your team’s close rates will see significant improvement as we learn how to overcome the most common objectives from prospects while remaining positive, enthusiastic and resourceful through the whole sales process.
Retaining clients
Presenting compelling customer focused solutions includes refocusing our efforts from one sale at a time, to the lifetime value. We learn how to sell lifetime value to our clients rather than selling on price, and in so doing, we learn to better appreciate the lifetime value of these clients to our organisation.
In this way, we’re retraining our sales teams to more deeply appreciate how customer service and sales work hand-in-hand. We cover servicing and retention strategies that ensure our cost of sales goes down as our lifetime client value rises. Most importantly, our clients are happier and receive better results, motivating them to refer more qualified leads to our organisation.
Making high-value business development activities routine
Richard’s methodology provides a framework to clarify your team’s focus – honing their attention towards only the high-value business development activities that make a real impact. Walking through Richard’s system, we learn to make these high-value activities routine, focusing on actions that demonstrate tangible outcomes and freeing up your team’s time from pursuing leads that make little sense to the organisation.
Business development workshop: key outcomes
Customised, in-house training with Richard brings immediate as well as long-term results for you and your team. Most useful for people who work in a consultative environment, this training helps develop a clear business development strategy and the competencies within your organisation to successfully implement it.
Not only will your organisation better attract and retain the perfect, most suitable, high value clients, but you’ll also notice a marked difference in your business development team. They’re likely to be far more productive, with a renewed sense of confidence, focus and purpose.
Engaged teams enjoy their roles far more, are proactive with suggestions and solutions, and are far more enthused about their career progression. Providing transformative training with key thought leaders such as Richard should directly translate to your teams’ KPIs and your organisation’s ability to better attract and retain quality talent, meaning less need to recruit and develop new employees.
Engage Richard today to see a real translation of your team’s skills in new business, new leads and more sales.
How this process works
Richard offers in-house business development services in a number of ways. Richard can work with your business development and sales team through a series of tailored in-house facilitated training workshops augmented by ongoing one-to-one coaching and consulting, to embed effective business development practices in your organisation and monitor your progress. Team members who join your organisation after the training has started have the opportunity to attend one of Richard’s public workshops where they can come up to speed with the key concepts. In addition, Richard can speak at your conference and events.
Richard is highly adept at working closely with you to quickly understand your needs to create a suitable approach which brings real results.
All in-house workshop participants receive a copy of Richard’s book Business Development That Works and this can also be bulk purchased for conference delegates at a discounted rate.