New business rarely arrives because you waited patiently for the phone to ring.

Some businesses need a better business-development strategy.

Others already know where they want to go but need help getting there.

We can review an existing sales or business-development operation, identify new markets and routes to market, help build the processes behind it, coach the people responsible for delivering it or work alongside your team to develop opportunities.

Being busy isn’t the same as building a pipeline.

Sales activity needs direction.

Who are you trying to reach? What are you selling them? Why should they buy it? Where are the best opportunities? How will you reach them? What happens after the first conversation?

We can help businesses build a clearer approach to prospecting, pipeline development, conversion and commercial growth.

Sometimes the opportunity isn’t to sell harder.

It’s to sell differently.

Direct sales may be right. But the better route might be through partners, intermediaries, introducers, affinity relationships, distributors, professional networks or another organisation that already has access to the customers you want to reach.

We’ve built routes to market ourselves across B2B and B2C environments.

We write bids because, as a charity, we have to.

Funding applications, commissioned services, partnerships and competitive opportunities are part of our world too.

That gives us a slightly different perspective when we look at a commercial tender.

Of course the technical answer, price and ability to deliver matter.

But increasingly, organisations buying goods and services are also interested in the wider picture.

Businesses can already be doing valuable things in these areas without recognising that they strengthen the story they’re able to tell.

Sometimes the opportunity is already inside the business.

Sometimes you don’t need another strategy document.

You need opportunities.

We can work alongside businesses to identify target markets, potential customers, partners and routes into organisations you want to work with.

That might involve research and market mapping, building prospect strategies, identifying decision-makers, developing propositions or supporting direct approaches.

The precise role depends on where the gap is.

The objective doesn’t.

Before adding more salespeople or spending more on lead generation, it can be worth understanding how the current operation is performing.

We can review the existing business-development function, including:

Where are opportunities coming from? What happens to them? Where are they being lost? What are people spending their time on? Is the CRM helping or merely recording activity? Does management have a clear picture of the pipeline?

Sometimes growth starts by fixing what is already there.

We don’t need to stop at advice.

We can help design the approach, work alongside your existing people or become more directly involved in delivering a particular business-development project.

And where the opportunity is suitable, we’re open to discussing commercial arrangements where part of our reward is linked to the success we help create.