[FRAMEWORK] The 5 areas of Business Development

Business Development can be defined as:

the ideas, initiatives, and activities that help make a business better

not. a very helpful definition for. someone wanting to take pen to paper and craft some clear steps to make marked improvements!

That's why I've taken liberties long ago, and sketched a Business Development framework that I can use, teach, and share to make the whole Biz Dev thing less abstract and more practical.

So what exactly are we (business) developing?

5 areas to be exact.

How we examine, clarify, innovate and weave those 5 areas together to practically apply the ideas of Business Development in real life - can vary greatly from business to business, but they almost always start out like this:

5 areas of Business Development:

1. Brand mission, positioning & messaging?

2. Who do we serve?

3. What do we offer to the customer?

4. How do we demonstrate value?

5. Revenue generation

Visually, we can present them as follows:

It's worth noting:

1. The placement of WHO - is at the core of Business Development, and used to inform the WHAT, HOW & REVENUE areas. Also note that the WHO is inside a feminine triangle - (pointy bit is down) suggesting Human Behaviour is a critical lens with which to examine this particular area.

2. The WHAT, HOW & REVENUE are all WHO adjacent and interact with the other two blue triangles they are positioned between. For example, Revenue interacts with HOW and WHAT. WHAT interacts with REVENUE and HOW.

3. The circle should be imagined as a sphere that holds the inside 4 together. Inside that sphere we have sections that will be extrapolated in different ways as we move through the 3 areas to resolve WHO & WHAT and how the Brand Mission, Positioning and Messaging will orchestrate themselves to best support this section., and so on.