3 ways a business development manager can help your company

If your company is ready to enter new markets and countries, a skilled business development manager is among the most critical roles to your success. Tasked with defining and leading the sales strategy for your company, a business development manager creates strategic plans, sets priorities, maintains relationships and finds new customers to meet objectives and contribute to business growth.

At their core, business development managers are expert salespeople who know how to lead teams, find and pitch to prospects and close deals. Here are three ways that a business development manager can help your company enter new markets and countries .

A skilled and creative business development manager at the helm of your sales team will help your company enter new markets and countries with skill and strategy.

The external part of this role focuses on achieving sales and profit goals, while the internal part focuses on developing the skill sets of the sales team, the performance of which is greatly impacted by their training. The business development manager establishes standards and policies for how to:

Since a low-performing sales team can cost a company time and money, these hard and soft skills factor heavily when prospecting customers, developing pitches, making presentations, closing deals, and maintaining relationships, and it’s up to the business development manager to lead the team’s expertise in these areas.

In addition to this, as your company expands to new markets, the team’s understanding of cultural fluency and responsiveness to cultural norms in the new market can make or break deals. Your business development manager may decide to enlist local experts to join your sales team, whose insight into the language, culture and business norms of the new market or country can make your company stand out from competitors.

If your company wants to add local experts to your team quickly and compliantly, an employer of record solution can achieve this without requiring that you have a business entity in that country or market first. From Argentina to Taiwan and anywhere in between, an employer of record enables your company to hire employees and benefit directly from local knowledge, which can give your company an edge in building customer relationships and closing deals.

As an expert in market research , a business development manager monitors trends in various markets, gathers competitive intelligence, nurtures a prospect list, analyzes the characteristics and needs of potential customers, and devises strategies to identify and maximize sales opportunities.

This kind of proactive market research can reinforce your company’s decisions about which markets to expand into, aligning your products and services with prospects who have an appetite for them and paving the way for successful expansion into new markets and countries.

Whether leads are generated via referrals, word-of-mouth or cold calling, the sales team is skilled at finding ways to connect with prospects and turn them into as many customers as possible.

Often the first point of contact between your company and the customer, the business development manager and the rest of the sales team initiate interactions with prospects that gather information about what issues the prospect needs solved. That information can later be mined to create packages and pitches that deliver solutions for prospects’ needs and expectations and invite them to become customers.

In thoughtfully designing client management policies for managing relationships with both current and prospective customers, the business development manager ensures high levels of service to clients, with a focus on landing new accounts and retention. When your company is entering new markets, this kind of approach to client management is critical to success.

As you can see, the right business development manager can be an invaluable member of your company's team. It's worth it to carefully look for the right person, because the heights they can take your company to are affected by their skills, organization, effectiveness at strategizing, vision and ability to see, seize and create opportunities.

In that vein, it may be wise to hire a skilled business development manager whenever you find them, even if they’re not geographically located near your company. In cases like that, consider using an employer of record (EOR) to hire, pay and onboard your new employee. This ensures compliance and streamlines the process, allowing your company to fucus on other priorities, like handling all the new clients the sales team brings in.

Contact Safeguard Global today to speak with a global solutions advisor and learn how GEO can help you streamline your expansion into new markets and countries.