The Best Practices of Business Development

Monday, August 23, 2004

David Rowley, http://

by David Rowley, VP of Business Development, Macrovision

Over the last few months, we've been discussing the "strategy-driven business development process." In talking to business development and other senior executives, companies continue to struggle with implementing the "strategy" parts of the process, the foundation of a successful business development team.

Survey - Brainstorm - Strategize - Approve - Execute - Transition

Why is strategy so hard? There are many standard references on strategy (Michael Porter, Robert Kaplan, Jim Collins, Geoffrey Moore, etc.) Each has an approach to determining strategy. So why doesn't every company have a well-thought out, comprehensive, and insightful strategy that guides the entire corporation? Getting a diverse team of people to work through the process and then agree on a strategy is complex.

Here are the main reasons for the challenges:

• Strategies must be judged and analyzed by a group of people that have different backgrounds, biases, opinions, and agendas (typically without the benefit of understanding the background(s) of the person(s) who provided the information.)
• Creative ideas must mitigate the risks and leverage the opportunities. The initial "value" of each idea must be weighed with very little information available.
• Some people are better at "selling" their ideas than others. (Note: Whether or not an idea is "sold" well may not have any relation to the true value of the idea.)
• Hard decisions may have a personal impact on teams, careers, and egos.
• The resulting strategy needs to be simple enough to be broadly communicated (and understood) by everyone in the company.
• Strategic planning is often done infrequently, and therefore teams do not have enough experience with the process to become truly proficient.

All in all, not an easy task! I encourage you to look at a semi-structured process (don't stifle creativity!) that manages the human aspects of the process, such as outlined in the strategy-driven business development process:

Stage 1 - Survey
• Identify the key trends that are impacting your marketplace (buying patterns, technologies, partner activity, competition, pricing, etc.)
• Rank the trends by significance to the organization (threats, opportunities.)

Impact if you miss this step:
• Trends go unidentified that may blindside the company.

Stage 2 - Brainstorm
• Solicit suggestions for initiatives, mitigate the risks from the threats, and fully leverage the opportunities. Get diverse opinions. Encourage out-of-the-box thinking. Write brief "elevator-style" descriptions.

Impact if you miss this step:
• Only the routine, tired ideas get circulated for discussion, and the 'breakout' ideas that can truly drive revenue and growth never get surfaced.

Stage 3: Strategize
• Determine the criteria you will use for selecting initiatives (ROI, size of market, market share, revenue, time to market, complexity, core competencies, etc.)
• Do a high-level culling of initiatives that clearly will not meet the agreed-upon criteria.
• Rank the remaining initiatives by attractiveness (however you define that.)
• Perform a detailed, objective analysis on the top initiatives that can withstand the scrutiny of someone that has not been involved in the thinking to date.

Impact if you miss this step:
• People's pet projects get funded - that may or may not result in success.
• Ideas don't stand on their own merits - process becomes "political."

By putting some basic structure around the strategic planning process, you can increase your odds of success and lay a strong foundation for the remaining (and critical!) steps.

What experiences have you had with successful (or unsuccessful) strategic planning? How does your company do its planning? Drop me a line at dwrowley@mail.com

David Rowley, a 15-year BD veteran, is a vice president of business development at Macrovision, a leading provider of digital-rights management technologies for the software, audio and video markets. Prior to Macrovision, Rowley was the founder/CEO of PhotoPoint, as well as Pantellic Software.

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