Are You Sacrificing Long-Term Business Development Success for Short-Term Gains?
November 4, 2021
When it comes to business development, one of the most crippling obstacles to growth is a short-term mindset. Executives are constantly scrambling to win easy pursuits and manage crises, rather than devoting their energies to building a stable, cohesive business development model for achieving long-term, sustainable growth.
Let’s face it: a majority of companies do not have a strategic growth plan. They are reactive, transactional, opportunistic, and short-term oriented. This results in stagnation and creates a mindset that sacrifices long-term strategy in favor of pursuing low-value prospects.
At Artemis, we believe that a long-term growth plan is truly strategic only when it aligns with the following criteria:
- Work you want to do: For long-term growth, you want to take on projects that will strengthen your foundation and propel you forward. New projects should be award-winning, showcase your top abilities, generate case studies to use for future business development efforts, excite your team members, and expand your capabilities.
- Clients you want to work with: It’s essential to set your sights on clients who can facilitate your growth. These include companies that have good reputations as partners and enable exceptional work. They are loyal, results driven, and have a history of valuing innovation and relationships.
- Profit you want to earn: Winning new business is valuable only when you are able to maintain the margins you need to grow. Focusing on low-margin pursuits will keep you busy but not move you in the direction you need to achieve your long-term growth objectives.
As discussed in a recent McKinsey & Co. piece, the pressure on executives to achieve short-term business development goals is relentless, but it is clear that the better strategy is a focus on building long-term success. And according to a study by Harvard Business Review, “Among the firms we identified as focused on the long term, average revenue and earnings growth were 47% and 36% higher, respectively…”
- Are your leaders too focused on the short-term to achieve sustainable and meaningful business development growth?
- How many of those three criteria did your last pursuit align with?
