Business Development

To develop the business in a sustainable way requires going beyond the usual Sales & Marketing perspective and therefore to work on various dimensions, depending on what shall be achieved :

• Improving the Top-line in terms of Growth by sales & marketing measures.

• Enhancing the scope either in terms of the portfolio offered or the geographic reach by some sort of Alliances or through M&A Transactions.
• Improving the Bottom-line from a Business Development perspective may be supported by positive effects due to growing volume, but typically requires additional measures like optimizing the Business Mix and correspondingly the Margin Quality, e.g. by specifically growing the service business.

• In the context of M&A transactions the actual development of the business can only
  be achieved by the Post-Merger Integration, which is more like a Business Transformation, as integrations always include strong transformational aspects,
  even as their aim is to develop the business.

Business development activities always include some adaptations and/or optimization of Processes and sometimes also of Structures. But business development is rather the
result of a strategy than it would actually drive a new strategy.

To implement a business development initiative successfully, adequate attention has to be paid to the Communication required to support the business development, and potentially also to Organizational Development as well as the necessary adjustment in terms of Corporate Culture.

In particular as part of international business development activities, Cross-Cultural Leadership plays an increasingly important role.