Whether you’re just starting your business or you’ve already enjoyed decades of success, a business development plan is essential to maximizing your company’s growth. 

A business development plan is a roadmap for increasing market share, acquiring new leads, and generating more revenue. It lays out specific actions to take your business from where a business is now to where you want it to be.

Depending on your industry, your company’s maturity, your business goals, your resources, and your approach to business development, your plan may focus on processes like:

• Expanding into new markets, territories, or categories
• Building new sales or marketing channels
• Increasing penetration in existing markets
• Reducing churn
• Increasing customer loyalty
• Creating new teams or departments
• Investing in new locations
• Releasing new products or services
• Acquiring other companies

A business development plan lays out the steps and initiatives you’ll use to implement one or more growth opportunities, and it typically prioritizes those opportunities based on their alignment with your broader business goals. Some organizations have dedicated business development roles, while others reduce business development to a marketing or sales activity. At startups, the founder (or multiple team members) often handle this responsibility. In these scenarios, business development is a crucial part of scaling an MVP (minimum viable product) and gaining a foothold in the market. 

Because business development is so situational, there’s no single template or recipe to follow. Instead, your plan needs to outline the growth strategies that will work to take your business from where it is today to where you want it to be.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through the process of writing a business development plan that makes sense for your organization..

How to create a business development plan

When creating a business development plan, it helps to remember that the content is more important than the format. A lot of the work you’re going to do won’t necessarily appear in the final plan you share with others, but your research and analysis should culminate in some form of formal asset. This could be a word document. It could be a slide deck. It can take whatever form you want, as long as it has all of the right information. You may want to start with a standard document, and reformat it to fit your audience and use case (such as converting it to slides to share in a meeting with stakeholders).

Writing a business development plan can be broken into a step-by-step process:

• Define your current state and desired outcome
• Identify potential business development strategies and opportunities
• Choose the strategies that best fit your organization
• Explain how you’ll implement and execute your strategy
• Formalize your business development plan
• Review your plan and make adjustments as needed

1. Define your current state and desired outcome

A business development plan should start with a problem you intend to solve or an outcome you want to achieve. Begin your plan by explaining your current position and what you’re trying to accomplish. In other words: Why are you writing this business development plan? What’s the purpose of this document, and the strategy it contains?

Align your plan with specific organizational goals

From the outset, your plan should be rooted in your organization’s goals. If your business development efforts and business goals aren’t in alignment, it creates friction as you invest in opportunities and prioritize work activities that don’t fit with your company’s overarching direction.

For example, if your business has a stated goal to operate internationally and expand into three new countries within five years, prioritizing domestic growth opportunities would still develop your business, but these efforts could easily inhibit your ability to expand into new countries. 

Or, say you have a goal to sell your software to educational institutions. That will shape the types of marketing and sales activities that will be most effective in your business development plan. Increasing your presence at school-related events, for example, may be a more valuable tactic than expanding your outbound sales team to increase cold-call volume.

Perhaps you’re focusing on improving your ratings in specific areas, like quality. In this case, your business development plan would likely involve identifying the areas where customers most frequently complain about your product or service quality or addressing known quality-control problems that have resulted in bad press. It could also lead you to more actively solicit reviews, once the quality issues have been addressed. These processes may feel more removed from the types of sales or marketing activities you might associate with business development, but they directly contribute to your company’s growth and align with your goal to improve quality.

If all goes well, the areas you target in your business development plan will grow. As they grow, they’ll represent a greater share of your revenue, making them more prominent components of your business. If an online apparel company puts all their business development efforts toward promoting their catalog of dresses, this will shape consumers’ perception of their brand and overall product offering, as well as the breakdown of how each category contributes to revenue. This business development plan could drive the online apparel company to become “a dress business that sells some other clothes,” instead of an apparel company with a catalog that includes dresses. 

The smaller or lesser-known your business is, the greater the impact business development outcomes can have on your future operations and people’s perception of your brand. But whatever size and maturity your organization is, a business development plan will inevitably guide the way you allocate company resources, so it should focus on growth that complements rather than contradicts your business goals.

Make your plan’s outcome measurable

Whatever you intend to accomplish, be sure your stated goal is measurable. You need to clearly define what success looks like, and your timeline for achieving the desired outcome. Is your business development plan connected to a specific sales target for a new product or market? Do you need to acquire a certain number of new users? Open new locations?

Put the metrics for success front and center, so it’s clear how your plan will affect the organization’s growth, and after the fact, there are no questions about whether or not it worked.

Establish buy-in among stakeholders

Before your plan is set in motion, you want everyone to be in agreement about what it needs to do. If your plan is all about acquiring new customers, but one of your key decision makers thinks your resources would be better applied to launching a new product, that fundamental disagreement could create obstacles every step of the way. Have these discussions now, and before you spend too much time creating a strategy, get your team in alignment about your desired business development outcome.

2. Identify potential business development strategies and opportunities

Now that you’ve decided what you want to accomplish, it’s time to consider how you’ll do it. A business development plan lays out the processes you’ll follow to reach the desired outcome. And there could be many different paths to get there. So you need to find and prioritize the ones that have the best chance of succeeding within your timeline.

Here are some examples of business development strategies an organization might use to grow. At this stage, you want to identify as many possible routes to achieving your goal as possible. It can be helpful to have multiple perspectives involved in this part of the process. 

Acquire or optimize store locations

For a retailer, business development may focus heavily on acquiring and optimizing locations. This involves market planning, site selection, and sales forecasting — you’ll try to find store locations in trade areas and facilities that most closely match your best-performing stores. These activities heavily rely on demographic datasets and internal performance data, and lead to a business development plan (or part of one) that focuses more on real estate and lease-related processes, prioritizing the locations that best fit with your business goals.

Collect customer feedback

For a software company, an essential part of business development may involve conducting customer surveys and aggregating other types of feedback. This may help you recognize new niches within your customer base that you haven’t actively tried to reach, or use cases you haven’t considered before. Surveys and feedback that relate to your business goals can also reveal or clarify the best ways to reach your business development goals. 

Suppose your goal is to create a new software solution that complements your current products. Customer surveys can teach you how customers are currently using similar products, what frustrates them within the category, and what they would like to see from your business as you enter this new category. All of this can help you better position, market, and sell your new solution and find the most effective ways to grow into your new market.

Showcase your product or service

If you want to grow, you need to show the right people what your business does. Even if you already do this, your business development strategy can outline changes to how you do it. This may mean: 

• Demonstrating your product or service to new categories of customers
• Showing your product or service with a different emphasis or context
• Sharing a new product or service with existing customers

Showcasing your product can take many forms, including providing consultations, offering product demos, and facilitating webinars. Whether you do these activities at events or online, these highly interactive experiences give live audiences a chance to explore how your product or service might work for their unique situation and see your expertise as you respond on-the-spot to new questions and scenarios. Recording these demonstrations also creates content you can share asynchronously with those who couldn’t attend the live event.

Establish relevant thought leadership

Entering new markets, launching new products, and reaching new customers is difficult if people don’t already have a reason to associate you with the niche or industry you’re entering. But even if you already have thousands of users, you can start putting in the work now to build a reputation as a thought leader. 

This takes two key ingredients: an in-house expert you can draw insights from, and someone who has the capacity and ability to present those insights. Or more simply: a brain and a face. If you’re lucky, your organization has one person who can be both. In a pinch, you can get by without a “face,” but building a recognizable in-house thought leader gives you a lot more creative freedom and voice than publishing everything under your brand. Plus, it’s a lot easier to invite a person to speak at an event than to invite a brand.

One of the best ways to establish thought leadership is to leverage your business data. While this is most readily available to software companies, any data you uniquely collect can serve to educate people about your industry or niche, which helps build your business’ reputation as a thought leader. The more data you can share, the more likely people are to see your publications as valuable.

Don’t have data you can share publicly? Produce or commission a survey. As long as you have access to the audience you want to share insights about and a unique perspective, you can make a meaningful contribution to conversations in your space.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is another great method for growing thought leadership. It ensures that the right people will regularly encounter your brand, and even allows you to shape how they think about your product category and adjacent topics. For example, if your product is a niche online marketplace, you might create guides to selling or evaluating the kinds of products sold in your app. This can lead potential sellers or customers to your marketplace through search engines. And if you aren’t actively investing in SEO, many people in your target audience will find other solutions without ever encountering your brand.

However you build it, thought leadership is crucial for giving your brand a foothold in new topical areas. And as you develop a thought leader (or multiple of them), your business will get more speaking engagements, PR will come easier, and you’ll enjoy more earned media as journalists reach out to your experts. Done intentionally, all of this serves to give your brand greater prominence in the areas you want to grow.

Network with your target market

The more time you spend getting to know your target audience, the easier it becomes to empathize with their point of view, understand their problems, and contextualize your product or service to their situation. As leads and customers interact with your sales and marketing teams, they’ll quickly recognize your business’ familiarity with their circumstances.

Attending events or increasing your business’ presence and visibility at them can be a valuable business development strategy that gives your audience more opportunities to see and interact with you. Even if these touchpoints don’t directly represent sales opportunities, they create networking opportunities your team can leverage to become more known within your space.

Build new marketing channels

Sometimes the best way to reach new markets or increase your ability to reach existing ones is to create new avenues to interact with your target audience. Even if you haven’t maximized your reach on your established marketing channels, like email lists, a blog, or various social media platforms, starting a new channel can be the fastest way to reach the largest number of people in your target audience. Wherever your audience spends their time, that’s where you should focus your business development efforts.

The catch here is that every new channel takes significant work to use well. It’s not something you can just “turn on” and add to someone’s work load without impacting other work. While it’s common to simply stack new channels onto a social media manager’s tasks, this tends to result in lower quality work spread across each channel, which makes them all less effective.

If building new marketing channels or brands is part of your business development strategy, you may need to create new roles to go with them.

Assemble new teams or roles

When your business development efforts result in a lot of new types of work activities, or greater investment in specific types of work, you may need that work to become someone’s entire focus. Depending on how much work is involved, your business development strategy may require a dedicated new team.

If you’ve never done events, for example, coordinating booths, sponsorships, speaking engagements, and travel isn’t something you can easily shoehorn into another role. Similarly, if part of your plan involves making outbound calls to new types of customers, your sales reps will struggle to incorporate that into their current workflows.

Creating new roles and assembling new teams allows your organization to devote far more energy to your business development plan and better capitalize on the opportunities you’re pursuing.

Modify your compensation structure

Compensation structures have a huge impact on the types of work employees focus on. This is obviously most true in sales, where commission and non-financial incentives are often directly tied to specific outcomes. If your business development plan requires new types of sales or sales activities, you want to be confident that your compensation structure will support rather than resist your plan. This means actively incentivizing business development activities and connecting them to compensation — just be sure you don’t over-emphasize those activities and harm revenue.

Once you’ve identified the approaches that could work — and our list above contains just a fraction of the possibilities for your business development plan — it’s time to choose the ones that make the most sense for your circumstances.

3. Choose the strategies that best fit your organization

Part of what makes your business development plan achievable is how well it fits your organization. Executives and other stakeholders should be able to look at your plan and feel confident that it’s the right move because it looks like it will work for your organization. All of the strategies we looked at above are viable paths to business development. But your plan needs to take into account what your organization can actually do.

Here are some questions to help guide you to the right choices for your plan.

What is your organization capable of?

What do you already have the skills, experience, and buy-in to move forward with? Where you’ve had the most success in the past can help point you toward the strategies that may be most effective moving forward. Whether you’re doing something brand-new or iterating on things your organization has done before, consider where you can leverage experience to explain why your plan is achievable. 

Which paths forward represent the biggest opportunities?

You might have a great idea, but if another strategy would lead to more customers, revenue, or whatever metric of success you’re using, that may need to take priority. Your business development plan should lead your organization to where the fish are, not just to your favorite spot. Focus on the strategies that have the greatest potential for the largest impact. 

What options best align with your current sales and marketing strategies?

Sometimes your sales and marketing departments may need to shift what they’re doing to execute a business development plan. But if there are strategies that will achieve your business development goals without disrupting the processes and priorities these departments already have in place, it’s going to be significantly easier to get traction. Your sales and marketing teams are already building flywheels to make their efforts as effective as possible. So where possible, you’ll want to fit your strategy into those flywheels, rather than starting new systems from scratch.

What resources and audiences do you already have available?

It’s a lot easier to cook something when all the ingredients you need are already in your pantry. Choosing a recipe you don’t have the ingredients or equipment to follow is still possible, but it will take more time to acquire the resources you need. And depending on your timeline, it may be a poor choice. The business development strategy you choose needs to work with the resources you already have. New teams, channels, audiences, and budgets take additional time and energy to develop.

Which strategy feels most like your company?

Door-to-door sales could be a viable business development strategy. But does that fit with the way your business operates? Does it make sense for your industry, and your position in the market? Starting a podcast could be a great way to develop thought leadership, network with potential partners, and grow awareness of your organization‌ — ‌but does that work with your brand? Your organization can evolve and change over time, but your business development plan should only be the impetus for that change if you intend it to be.

What will your stakeholders agree on?

There are often multiple viable business development options. Some may be clearly more effective than others. But part of selecting the right strategies involves considering where you can achieve consensus. You’ll have an idea of what people will agree on before you create your plan, but you typically have to discover consensus through discussions. As your team, committee, investors, board members, or other stakeholders weigh in, you’ll have to decide how much effort you can put into persuading them, the likelihood that your persuasion will succeed, and ultimately whether it’s worth that effort. The faster you gain consensus, the faster you can proceed with the plan.

4. Plan how you’ll implement and execute your strategy

Once you know what business development activities you’ll use to achieve your goal, you need to articulate how you’ll implement the strategy. What existing resources will you need to allocate toward your chosen strategy (or strategies)? What new resources will you need to acquire?

This is where you’ll create a budget for your strategy and list any positions you’ll need to hire, roles that will be involved, channels you’ll use, equipment you’ll need, etc. You should also specify how long you’ll need these resources, and your timeline for key milestones. The goal is to demonstrate that you’ve clearly thought through the implications of the strategy and what it will take for your organization to execute it.

5. Formalize your business development plan

Now you have all the pieces you need to summarize your organization’s current state, future state, path to that future state, and the required resources to get there. After all the research and discussion, synthesizing your work into a single shareable document should feel like “the easy part.”

Your research and all the steps leading up to this could represent many pages of writing and calculations. Now it’s time to strike the right balance between clarity and brevity. You have a lot of flexibility to decide how much explanation is appropriate for each component, but you’ll likely want to plan to write:

• One to three paragraphs explaining your current state and future state, with the first few sentences being a concise description of your desired outcome, with the metrics and timeline you’ll use to measure success, as well as how it fits into an organizational goal. For example: “NicheSocialApp currently has 100 users in the US. This plan outlines steps we can take to work toward our goal of being the leading app in our niche. By the end of 2025, the following plan will help NicheSocialApp grow to 100,000 users throughout the US and Canada.”
• At least one paragraph per strategy you’ll use to achieve your future state. Ideally, you should plan for one paragraph to explain what the strategy will look like and how it will work, and then one paragraph to explain what you’ll need to execute it.
• One to three paragraphs walking stakeholders through the expected timeline for your plan’s major milestones.
• Clearly outlined evaluative criteria for measuring progress toward your goal.

If you present your business development plan in a meeting, you’ll still want to distribute this detailed document, but you’ll also probably want to distill your plan into a more succinct slide deck. In that format, your current and future states should probably be a single slide each. Each strategy should have a one slide explanation, and an additional slide breaking down the required resources. The number of slides needed for your timeline will depend on how many milestones you want to include, but this should focus on the most critical ones.

6. Review your plan and make adjustments as needed

After you finalize your plan and start moving forward with it, it’s important to remember that the best path to your goal may change over time. New opportunities may arise due to competitor’s decisions, other organizational moves like hiring new positions or acquiring companies, or changes in the market. 

At least once a quarter, it’s worth reviewing your plan and checking your progress. Are things moving as fast as you intended? If steps are taking too long or your strategy is encountering unexpected obstacles, it may be worth considering alternatives you ruled out before, or reassessing the resources you need to stay on track. 

Making adjustments is especially valuable for bootstrapped startups, where your budget is typically tighter and you have more agility to make changes. Just be sure that if you do need to make changes, you take the time to get everyone in alignment again. While business development can take many forms, you want to make sure your organization follows a single business development plan.

Accelerate business development with Bubble

Bubble is a leading no-code development platform. We’ve helped veteran developers and business leaders who have never touched a line of code create more than 3.1 million apps. Using our drag-and-drop interface and built-in integrations, you can rapidly develop internal tools and bring your new software ideas to market, all at a fraction of the cost of traditional programming. 

Our programming platform allows even non-developers to create professional apps, websites, and tools, opening up many business development opportunities that would otherwise be overlooked or impossible due to a lack of resources or impractical time requirements.