As you know, there’s plenty of guidance on Broker Mentor to help you to develop a really effective business development plan. But with all that information available it’s sometimes easy to miss the fundamentals. So to help, here are our top six tips:

1. Stick to just one, primary marketing goal - and focus everything on achieving it

   Whether you’re doing the job yourself or briefing an agency, restricting yourself to one, single primary marketing goal is the best way to get profitable results.

   It’s like juggling: the more balls you try to keep in the air, the more likely you are to drop all of them.
   
   

2. Tie in your marketing objective to your primary goal

   You need a measurable target to make your plan a success, so convert your goal into an objective. For example, if your goal is to increase your conversion rates, then your objective might be to achieve a 40% improvement within 12 months.
   
   

3. Invest time and energy on a detailed and carefully-planned strategy

   Everyone’s heard the expression ‘fail to plan, plan to fail’, so take this on board and create a roadmap; something that pinpoints your ideal destination with clear directions on the best way to get there.

   So in this instance, with the objective in point 2 above, your plan might be to focus on boosting the number of referrals into the business; as referred prospects have a particularly high conversion rate.
   
   

4. Agree an appropriate budget (that will be cost-effectively spent)

   Here you need to maintain a positive attitude of success and not skimp on your marketing budget. Search online and you’ll find plenty of examples of a correlation between high marketing spend and rapid business growth.
   
   

5. Give yourself an achievable deadline

   Without a deadline, a goal or an objective is simply a hopeful wish. Add a deadline to it and it now becomes a specific objective to be achieved by a given date.
   
   

6. Measure the results – then keep trying to improve on them

   This last step requires you to build an analytics section into the plan. This is particularly important because it’s really hard to improve on something that you haven’t measured.
   
   

Finally, here’s a great time-saving tip - use our business development template. Download it, then over-write the questions shown, and you’ll speed up the whole process.