Business Development Consultancy for a joint venture
Expert services & management consultancy, business development should be called “selling”. In these relationship-orientated businesses, business development is simply a more acceptable term than “sales”. But, as they are usually referring to the business of getting direct clients, they are, essentially, direct sales activities.
For us and more precisely, business development covers all areas of business growth except direct selling activities. This usually falls into three main areas:
1) Resellers and Channel Sales
2) Strategic Partners
3) Joint-Ventures
But still there is a fourth category of business development Mergers and Acquisitions but for the purpose of this article about services provided by a business development consultancy we will focus on the first three.
Let’s see how a specialist business development consultancy can help your business.
Resellers and Channel Sales
A typical business development consultancy offers services on hiring and building your indirect sales channels.
Your business development consultancy will in general give advice on the best structure to meet your business development objectives, the process of building your reseller channel is an ideal project for a business development consultancy.
In fact, the best example for a business development consultancy in this instance is a recruitment consultancy. From researching the market to find the best candidates, making a approach on your behalf and setting up the reseller agreement, a business development consultancy can support your business through the entire channel recruitment process.
Strategic Partners:
Unlike resellers or channel sales partners, who basically buy your product to resell it, strategic partners are a wider group of business development. A good business development consultancy will think outside the box while advising selecting your strategic business partner. Marketing alliances, technology collaboration, and value-added services like consultancy services are various types of strategic partnerships
Distinct to the “employment consultancy” correlation, for a strategic partnering programme, the business development consultancy is more like a “match-maker”. Most importantly, no matter what strategic partnership your business development consultancy uses, the purpose should always be to build a situation where both businesses get mutually benefitted.
Joint-Ventures:
at the same time, with strategic partnerships every company maintain its own identity and looks to build additional value through participation with each other, a joint-venture is a completely new venture in its own right. The joint-venture is typically a new company established and mutually owned by each party. If strategic partnering is “dating”, with a joint-venture you get married.
A business development consultancy, in the same way as when recruiting resellers and strategic partners will invest time understanding the market and profiling potential joint-venture partners. Also, understanding each partner’s own environment of competitors is an essential step.