Business development plan for an oncology treatment company

Business Development Plan

The main challenge in terms of business development for Xoft is getting exposure in the marketplace. The Axxent product is cutting edge, and offers multiple benefits over existing technologies. The benefits of Axxent extend to both the patient and the medical practitioner. Given that the FDA is set to approve Axxent for new areas of use, Xoft needs to define their markets, find ways to sell in these markets, and develop tracking mechanisms to help guide the sales efforts.

The first step in the business development plan will be to fully ascertain the capabilities of Xoft. Before we begin talking to potential customers, we must first make sure that we have a full understanding of who we are. We need to be certain that we have ascertained all of the benefits of the product, and taken an audit of our current systems to ensure that they are working as well as they can be.

The second step will be to define the new markets. Because the focus in on developing niche markets, we will need to be creative. This means that we need to not only brainstorm ourselves, but get our customers involved. Ideally, our customers will be our partners in business development. There may be ways in which we can help them that we do not yet know about.

We will draw up a list of characteristics for each market that can help us to target our marketing resources. We need to know the potential size of each market. We also need to know how those markets are being served currently. We have a superior product, but our sales people need to be able to explain why it is superior. We should know our competitor's strengths and weaknesses. We want to arm our sales staff with as much knowledge as we can. This will also help with regards to pricing. We may have opportunities to develop sufficiently strong advantages in some markets that we can achieve a higher margin, helping the bottom line.

Potential new markets include imaging center networks, cancer treatment center networks, mobile medical networks, veterinary networks, health care systems and private practices. Each will be evaluated in terms of potential size, ease of entry, competitive mix, and other key aspects that will affect our ability to compete.

Once we have gathered this information we will be able to better categorize our potential customers.

We will need to compare our findings with the current work of the sales staff, looking not only for overlap but for any gaps or inefficiencies. Moreover, with Axxent about to be licensed for new treatments, we will have a better sense of the potential market among our existing customers.

With our different potential customer groups identified and classified, we can then define strategies to market to each. It is important that we tailor our marketing strategy to each unique group, since each type of customer will have different needs that we should address. Also, any time we have a customer that represents an opportunity to market multiple products, that creates the opportunity for sales efficiencies. This is where having an intimate knowledge of our competitors comes in. We can tailor our strategies to directly exploit their weaknesses.

We also will develop a plan for tracking our sales results. It is not only imperative that we know results for individual sales reps, but we should also be able to track by customer type, so we can better understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of our different strategies and approaches. Furthermore, we should always understand the market in which we operate. Proper results tracking helps to us constantly benchmark against our own goals and, when possible, against our competition as well.

A also feel it is important that we pay some attention to sales force motivation. We not only want to set objectives, but we want to ensure that we reach them. Part of this comes from finding ways to keep our sales team motivated.

I will design a program for communication. Our people should not operate in the dark. If one rep develops a winning technique, the rest should know about that. Also, the marketplace can change rapidly, so it is imperative that we develop cutting edge communications techniques.