Business Development In Emerging Ecosystems

Travis Clinger, Chief Connectivity & Ecosystem Officer, LiveRamp.

Business development isn’t for everyone. While it’s hard to neatly sum up everyone in the field, the tenacious drive to innovate, iterate and build partnerships that the best business development professionals have—and, at its core, the ability to foster partnerships between new companies—is challenging even for those of us who are proficient in it.

Tech was already one of the fastest-moving ecosystems; this is compounded by the introduction of AI, which has swept up existing and new companies alike as AI disrupts and creates opportunities across every part of business. But AI is far from the only emerging field. As companies test and learn through rapidly emerging ecosystems, it’s critical to adhere to three key business development tenets to win:

Know your assets and capabilities.

While it sounds intuitive, knowing the value your company brings to your ecosystem is integral to understanding how you can create exciting possibilities for your prospective partners. Companies—especially those in growth sectors—are busy enough planning and growing. To convince partners to come to the table, talk and think about how they can supercharge their growth by partnering with you, you need to be able to articulate the benefits you bring.

In an emerging field, the conversations and experience that established companies bring are themselves an asset. With smaller partners—whether they’re newer companies or new teams in larger companies—more established companies can help visualize the critical next steps for growth, as well as an aspirational vision for what the newcomers can achieve.

As companies in emerging industries look to grow and monetize their businesses, I recommend a partner that can help fast-track connections, which can also accelerate revenue. Companies looking for partners should prioritize neutrality and interoperability, which will help them plug into more parts of the ecosystem, foster stronger connectivity and ultimately serve a broader audience.

Make your hypothesis and start the conversation.

No matter how much business development experience you have or how well you know your company’s assets, approaching a nascent market boils down to making a hypothesis and acting on it. Without firsthand conversations within the ecosystem and building your own market intelligence and landscape from these conversations, you’re ultimately making guesses as to how prospective partners will want to build value with you. It’s critical to make your hypotheses for creating value, take them to market and start conversations with the market players in order to start inspiring partners on what is possible and drive deeper connections.

As you bring prospective partners to the table, outlining your company’s assets and capabilities from the first step will be helpful, but ultimately, the benefits will be for your partners to decide. Overselling benefits that may not matter to them ultimately slows your progress and may even preclude partnerships from ever happening, given more pressing things that companies may have on their to-do lists. Starting conversations isn’t just vital for deals to eventually get done; it’s also required to build your understanding of the market and is a critical first step before any successes can be achieved.

There’s no better example for making hypotheses and getting started than the AI market. While it’s been a decade of tech giants putting AI center stage in their advertising campaigns, in just the last few years, the market has achieved new velocity, with new kingmakers rising to the forefront and new use cases deployed seemingly every month. Taking too long to enter a market moving at this speed would mean starting conversations using outdated hypotheses and constantly dangling the wrong incentives for partners, which doesn’t bode well for success.

Refine and iterate.

Forming your hypothesis and kicking off conversations isn’t enough—it’s not a matter of if but when you inevitably hit a wall with your outreach to the industry. When that happens, speedily refining your hypotheses and redeploying will be critical to unsticking conversations and restoring your momentum.

Listening to partners’ feedback is critical to understanding what the ecosystem wants and what value you can bring to make partnerships more appealing. If you can get partners to share their objectives over the next 6 or 12 months, you can understand how you’ll have to grow and evolve with them, and shape your own company’s direction accordingly to continue being a critical partner for others. Furthermore, iterating quickly shows prospective partners that you’re accommodating and nimble, further spotlighting that you’re worth collaborating and investing with.

Moving Forward

While the core principles of business development remain the same, the pace of innovation and technology advancements has massively accelerated. Whether it’s broad technology, specific AI advancements or some innovation we’ve only started to scratch the surface of, there will always be blue sky for business development to explore, and we just need to remember to adhere to what we’ve known since we started.

In any emerging ecosystem, capable business development can be the difference between building a strong network at the outset, or losing momentum—and critical lead time—as you see your advantage dwindle.

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