What are the current trends in Business Development?

Although business development should, in theory, be one step ahead of the market, it is often the case that the hungry hordes of BD directors and customer acquisition managers out there spend their time hawkishly observing all the miniscule movements of the market in order to gauge where to pounce next. And rightly so. All we have is the present, after all. As Future Studies expert John Naisbitt tells us, “The most reliable way to forecast the future is to try to understand the present.”

Predicting the present

Being an effective BD professional is very much about being in the present and knowing what is going on around you – something I call “predicting the present” so you can use current data and make informed decisions about what to do next. In our case, we want to identify the trends that will impact our business in the coming months. Before collecting any data, it's crucial to start with our business goals in mind. What do we want to achieve in the coming months or years?

Disentangling the data

Once we have a goal (or goals) in mind, we need to be sure we are making use of the right stats to inform our decisions about which direction to steer the business. In a world flooded with figures, statistics, diagrams and data, it is a real art to whittle away the irrelevant. Examples of the information we might use could be: (i) customer sales data, (ii) internal historical data, (iii) industry data, or even (iv) social listening data.

Listening to life

Some believe that social listening is perhaps the easiest form of data to harvest. At its core, this is the monitoring and analysis of social media content which is relevant to one’s business. It is quick to harvest and therefore inexpensive. People love social listening data as it can be both interesting and incredible informative, which makes it a powerful tool. However, it is also holds the highest volume of noise and subjectivity.

Tackling the trends

In order to be relevant, social listening data must be fresh, and harvested from a reliable source. The fruit of our labour can then inform us about the current trends in our market. Examples of such trends in the legal and accounting world are numerous; however our job in BD is to cross-reference and double-check information so that once we chip away at what is extraneous, we are left with the essence – in other words, a sure-fire hit.

The five main trends appear to be:

• Increased adoption of AI; 
  
  
• Focus on cybersecurity; 
  
  
• Rise of sustainability in business decisions; 
  
  
• Sustained hybrid working; and 
  
  
• Growth in e-commerce.

What can we do with this knowledge? As futurist John Naisbitt says, “Leadership involves finding a parade and getting in front of it.”

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Raf Uzar heads marketing, communication and development at law firm Penteris and is a member of the UK's Chartered Institute of Marketing.