The Best Business Development Strategy

How incredible does it feel when you land a new big client or project? It feels great right!!

You’ve often spent months (or sometimes years) investing your time, effort and energy in bringing this client or project over the line.

But to be honest with you, it’s not the greatest business development strategy out there. It takes a lot of time and energy, pulls you away from leading your team and your business and can often take months or years before anything comes to fruition.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love it when my clients land new clients because they are so excited that their efforts have paid off, it often means exciting things for their team and business and every growing team or business needs an element of winning new work from new clients in their BD strategy.

Today I want to explore with you the less sexy and often unsung hero of business development...retaining existing clients.

Once the incredible amount of effort has been invested in winning a new client, you then have an amazing opportunity to show them how good you and your team are at what you do. 

You have an opportunity to really cement the relationship and take the steps towards turning this new client into a raving fan for life. 

This is unfortunately where a lot of engineering team leaders, market leaders and business owners let themselves and their teams down. They often fail (or do a half-hearted job) at delivering on (or ensuring that their team deliver on) the promises that were made to the client during the bid or relationship building process. 

What often happens is that they win the work, do a quick download to their delivery team and then move onto the next shiny thing to win and bring back to the office. 

This not only sets the delivery team up for failure (they’re not mind readers and often have no idea of the small but important aspects of the project that were discussed during the bid or relationship building process) but it can really get the new client offside early in the relationship. 

Here are 3 key areas to focus on to help you turn your clients into raving fans:

• Stay involved. Stay involved as much or as little as you need to throughout the delivery process to ensure an amazing outcome for your clients. This is often more in the initial phases with them and can then move to a maintenance / check in phase once the delivery team is nailing it. If you catch yourself thinking “this is a waste of my time” - it’s not. An hour or two a week checking in with your team and your client (take them for a coffee) will give you a way better return on your time than hunting for new clients.
• Communication - almost every problem or issue can either be avoided completely or solved through decent communication. Sit with your team, discuss their problems (get involved to help them solve their problems if you need to), call your clients regularly for no other reason than to just check in.
• Never let the honeymoon period end - Constantly remind them (through showing them) why they chose you in the first place. Now a lot of engineers confuse this with working stupid hours all the time to prove themselves to their clients. For the record - I’m not about this at all. Think about what makes you and your team unique and separates you from your competitors and use this to regularly show your client why they chose you in the first place. I don’t mean boozy lunches, bottles of wine or scotch either. What real and tangible things do you and your team do / have that set you apart from your competitors? Go do more of that. 

Retaining existing clients and turning them into raving fans for life is the best business development strategy I’ve ever seen.

Live Out Loud

Josh ‘Raving Fan’ Stone 

PS: If you’re interested, here are 4 ways I can help you grow your engineering team and business: 

1. Download our FREE PDF guide – “Your Leadership Style”

Use this guide to unpack your own unique leadership style and to help you understand your team members main personality styles, their strengths, their work-ons and how to lead them more effectively – Click Here 

2. Book in a 15min Strategy Session

Let's work together to understand how we can help you, your team and your business generate an additional $1M plus in revenue, double your potential project pipeline and build a high performing engineering team through proven strategies, accountability and self-awareness – Click Here 

3. Join The Leadership Code our 8-week program

If you’re serious about getting real results and want deeper and more rewarding levels of success in your engineering career – I am putting together a new Leadership Code group next month. If you’d like to work with me and my team to hone and develop your winning work, client relationship, leadership and team performance skills… just send me an email at [email protected] and put “Leadership Code” in the subject line and I’ll get you all the details.

4. Have me work with you and your team privately

If you’d like me to work directly with you and your team and help you add an additional $1m plus in revenue to your business and double your project pipeline ... just send me an email at [email protected] and put “Private” in the subject line... tell me a little about your business, your role and your team and what you’d like to work on together, and I’ll get you all the details!