Business Development is, as named, a field where executives, sales teams, and marketing teams combine to further business. It is a niche field, and Business development analyst usually execute sales and marketing strategies for organisations. It is a field with a lot of promise, and with a bit of luck, you might even get to work remotely, or on site.
Whether you are a full time employee, looking to earn a few extra bucks by the side, or you are a freelancer looking to work remotely, a career as a business development executive is a lavish one indeed. Top freelance business developers usually earn huge payrolls. It is a field that holds a lot of promise and many freelance opportunities.
Job Duties For Freelance Business Developers:
Business developers have a host of job duties; as one, you will play an important part in each aspect of an organisation’s revenue generation cycle. List generation, pre sales, nurturing and presenting the final product will all fall under your purview as a Business developer. It is one field that has grown in stature since the IT revolution.
Let us have a detailed look at your duties as a business developer:
- Extensive involvement in identification and segmentation of prospecting, industry-specific, practice specific analysis and effective lead generation
- Aggressive participation across end-to-end Inside Sales Cycle
- Lead generation & Qualification
- Prospecting Business Development Strategy & Marketing Communications
- Internet Research & Intelligence
- Client Relationship Management
- Account Management
- Scheduling follow-up & Pipe Line Development
- Marketing Campaign Management
- Product Marketing,
- Key player in corporate presentations
- Prospecting & Contact management Re-engineering,
- Participating client calls with technical practice folks
- Design & Development of Inside Sales “User Material, Presentations & Collateral”
- Lead and Execute email campaigns
- Liaising with other teams to create effective marketing material
- Consistently improve the performance of email marketing campaigns and identify the enhancement opportunities to maximize ROI.
- Practice/Product Sales Process Development & Onsite Sales Support
- Look after accounts, meet, or exceed targets with respect to revenue growth, activities, profit margin, and mix of products and services sales, customer retention and customer acquisition.
- Comply with quality standards and processes for customer acquisitions, opportunities, and submission of tender and contract documents.
- Bid management processing and managing order levels, while maintaining the CRM/Database
- Keeping up to date with market and competitor activity
- Develop effective working relationships with customers through regular meetings, identifying and obtaining further sales and business development opportunities.
- Liaising with marketing teams, developing campaigns and conducting webinars
- Identifying requirements for new products & services to anticipate market trends
- Continuously analyzing and improving lead and customer satisfaction with campaigns based on improved knowledge and insight gained from analytics.
Skills:
As a BDE, you need to develop many skills and abilities to have a fair chance of doing well. Business development executives are usually the amiable and approachable types. The skills you will need are quite similar to the ones marketing specialists usually have. However, some specific skills you need include:
- Sales and marketing skills
- Accounting skills
- Human resources skills
- Information technology skills
- Strategic skills
- Data administration and Analytics
- Research skills
- IT Management Skills
- Ensuring Quality of emails
- Project Management
Business Training, Udemy, PCE and Openculture offer many courses, certifications and self-learning videos on Business development basics and in some cases best practices and the evolution of business development itself.
Being Successful As A Freelance Business Developer:
You can ensure success as a freelance business developer by doing what the generations have done before you. There are of course certain steps deemed essential to success. You should remember that talent on its own is not a determinant of success, and neither is experience. In this curious mix of sales and marketing
- Know your audience
- Increase revenue, generate leads, strengthen customer relationships, increase website traffic, and build brand awareness
- Be able to leverage principles of Interactive Marketing
- Being able to market your services and creating a Social Media presence
- Creating a responsive network, one which you can leverage to find projects and extra work
- Ability to work under pressure, and to strict deadlines
- An understanding of the industry
- Know your company’s product/service offerings from top to bottom.
- Know, through internal and external research, how your product/service may fit with companies in like and unlike business sectors.
Business Developer Salary:
Usually freelance portals offer various kinds of payment models. In the fixed-price model, the price is usually pre-determined. The hourly model is the most popular and employers usually pay a predetermined sum per hour. Finally, in the project-budget based model, you often need to auction for such projects. Usually a fixed price model may range from $20- $200 and upwards, while you have to pitch for hourly projects, and budget payments, which usually range from $5- $35 an hour. Freelance Business developers usually earn $21 an hour.
Finding Work:
Odesk, Peopleperhour, Elance and Guru offers many job opportunities to freelance business developers like you. Business development consultants are in vogue, and are often contracted by organisations to set up, execute and monitor business development activities.
Resources:
Business Training, Udemy, PCE and Openculture offer many courses, certifications and self-learning videos on Business development basics, blogs and discussion boards. You can also connect to groups on LinkedIn, Maven and other social media websites to learn best practices and the evolution of business development itself.
For more information on Freelance Business Developer please visit www.careerlancer.net
