Essentials of Business Development Online - November 2021

Course Dates Friday 19 November 2021                 0900 - 1230 Tuesday 23 November 2021             0900 - 1600 Thursday 25 November 2021            0900 - 1600 Tuesday 30 November 2021             0900 - 1600 Thursday 2 December 2021              0900 - 1600   Event Costs (for online delivery) Member Price - £675 Non-member Price - £897 Prices are not VAT applicable and reflect the total cost.  Delegate Capacity Delegate spaces will be limited on each course delivery. The smaller cohorts will help ensure you are able to make the most of the materials and the sessions. Places will be offered on a first-come-first-serve basis.   Is this course right for me? This course is for people who are new to business development in HE/research organisations or new to business development altogether.  They may not have much experience of working with business and probably not much experience of how university business engagement works. Delegates will most likely be working in higher education, public sector research organisations, and potentially in businesses too.  They may have significant experience in aspects of internal management of TT/Knowledge Exchange (KE), but less knowledge and understanding of the specific issues around business development.  They may be focusing on a discipline area or a particular sector e.g. Healthcare, Arts and Culture, Physics, Biosciences. Why should I attend this course? Universities are increasingly expecting their academics to diversify income streams, build pathways to impact and support knowledge exchange.  Academics are busy and often don’t have the skills needed to build relationships and engage effectively with business. With Impact as a major new driver, we expect that more staff with a business development or business engagement role will be recruited. It is easy to make contacts but much harder to turn these into valuable, long-term, productive relationships.  This course aims to make this process more straightforward and efficient and give the delegates tools to help them add value to the academic or scientist with whom they are working. What will I learn from the course? What is business development all about? The challenge of presenting an offer to a crowded and fragmented market (internal and external) Understanding where your offer fits in the value chain The different ways in which universities interact with business and mechanisms that can be used to facilitate that. How to engage with different markets Hear what industry really thinks of your services and how we can improve them Tips on networking and building a wide and varied network of contacts How to use tools such as marketing databases, client relationship management (CRM), marketing and social media to achieve your goals How to lead conversations with customers to generate interest and enthusiasm and move relationships towards agreements How to define the elements of an efficient deal by focussing on the needs of the parties How to be a successful account manager Delegates will have the opportunity to hear from (and speak directly with) academic, industrial and business development practitioners. There will also be ample opportunity for networking with other delegates, the course team and other contributors.  Delegates will have the opportunity to solve their own business development problems with the help of the course delegates. PLEASE NOTE: There may be a requirement for delegates to undertake some pre-course work/reading before the course begins.