Business Development is a key element in any company’s strategy. The startup and the blue chip might have different priorities, risks and opportunities, but both are going to need customers and sales to sustain them and allow them to grow. Approaches to Business Development are often quite linear; a standard set of tools and techniques which can bring prospects through marketing and on into sales, based on sensible assumptions about what has worked so far. But in the rapid changes in marketing and sales which have taken place over the last decade are any guide, sensible assumptions simply won’t provide the original insight and ideas required to work out how to sustain and develop business in the next one.
Bespoke Games lead to Bespoke Solutions and Strategies
At Evocatus, we are not big fans of linear process, or of just doing what worked in the past. We think that the world is a complex place, in which innovative approaches can always come up with better solutions, either through improvement and evolution or through genuinely new concepts. We don’t have those solutions; we’re not the sort of consultants who promise to have all the answers. What we do have is an approach which we can use to really help you find opportunities to innovate, using ideas and inspiration from the people who know your business and your market best; your own team.
We use a variety of gaming techniques to get people excited and engaged; through competition and challenge we can energise people’s minds and get them thinking in creative and innovative ways, not only about how they might approach their work differently, but about how the world in which they are looking for customers and generating business might change and evolve. By putting people into the shoes of customers, competitors and stakeholders, we can broaden perspectives and unpick those biases which come from working in close and homogenous teams.
Long Term Business Development Strategy
A business development strategy has to focus on the long term; the whole point of taking a strategic view is to create plans with the resilience and the agility to thrive in changing circumstances. We use scenario-based games to challenge assumptions and preconceptions; an immersive experience which lets people engage with potential change on an emotional level can release a real flow of the insight and ideas which lead to effective innovation. For those organisations with a Business Development Strategy already in place, gaming and running exercises can still be highly effective, both as a way to refine and test plans, but also as a way to communicate the strategy and its application across the team.
Create a Strategy that breaks free from pre-conceptions
By including an element of red-teaming in our games, we can bring the decision-making process away from the rather linear activity it often ends up being. By having members of the team play adversarial or even hostile influences, the group is forced to consider risks and threats, coming up with coherent plans to deal with them rather than simply assuming them aside. This further improves the chances of a strategy which is designed to deal with likely future situations, rather than simply being an extension of the current way of doing business.
Finally, if the organisation’s top priority is not working up a Business Development Strategy, we can include elements of everything above in a game with an alternative focus, such as a team building scenario game; London, Buenos Aires and Kuala Lumpur are all places we’ve delivered successful events in the past.