If you are a manager at the same time an owner of a business or an organization then, one of the challenges you are faced with is the challenge of developing and taking advantage of business opportunities that are provided to you and your company. Moreover, as a manager you always have to strive for growth and development. Terrence Munangi - To achieve that aim, you have to have an effective business development strategy? Now, how are you going to do that? What does it requires creating an effective business development strategy? Read on and learn from the following tips.

1. Brace yourself up with sufficient knowledge as well as excellent management practices and strategies. As a manager who aims for growth of his or her business or organization, you have to have sufficient knowledge and excellent management practices and strategies. Well, these will all boils down to whether you will be revolutionary or evolutionary in coming up with ideas and strategies for development. The idea or strategy you will come up with will be the basis for your company to either revolutionize or evolve.

2. It takes a multi-disciplinary approach. An effective business development strategy entails a multi-disciplinary approach which includes financial, advertising and legal skills from you as the development manager. This means that you need to come up with creative ways that are flexible to be applied with just about any circumstances that may hit your business. Terrence Munangi, of course, these ways should contribute to the prosperity of your business and not its failure.

3. Create a strategic marketing plan. There are various aspects in your business wherein business development strategies can help your business to grow and prosper. Strategic marketing plan, as such, will deal with the changing customer base and market dynamics. It will also aid in understanding horizontal and vertical target market opportunities and help you learn how to pick out and develop products, services or solutions to address the needs of your target market.

4. Decide on what kind of approach in planning. Take note that a plan shouldn’t be on its own to work nor will you solely manage it to work. A plan can take the form of either a ‘bottom up’ approach or a 'top down’ approach. A plan in a bottom up approach involves employees to come up with ideas and suggestions. After which, the best one are passed on to the management. On the other hand, a plan in a top down approach involves higher position personnel such as the managers to establish the business development strategies and then, imposed them down to their subordinates. Additionally, there is the use of collaborative process where managers and employees work together as one in performing this task.

5. Evaluation. Now, after the business development strategy has been decided on, it will be your task as a manager to make sure that this strategy will work out. To do so, you will need to conduct evaluation of its weak points, strengths, the risk involve and its growth potentials. You may want to hire a strategy consultant for this matter as there are indeed, various factors that must be taken into serious consideration. However, it will be dependent on the complexities that come with its implementation. Some of these factors involve assigning of responsibilities, hiring sufficient human resources and establishing a chain of command. It will also involve a specific timeline to determine whether or not the preferred goals are being accomplished or not.

Evidently, there is no single type of business development strategy that will be enough for any business. Terrence Munangi - So as a manager, you have to brace yourself up with more and more knowledge to know what works for you and your business and determine the corresponding advantages of sticking to it.

