Recently my team did the following presentation for our business development methods class:

The project was to find ways to propose a new business for a local company Treemo. We collaborated with the COO – Jeff Yee. Jeff was really a pleasure to work with, he almost instantaneously replied to our emails.

Anyhoo the presentation as you see here is proposing a company to help folks focus and improve the visibility of their amateur sports! The presentation and the related financial analysis and marketing research was very well received. We got comments like – “best presentation”, “can I go check this out? Is this real?” , “I would love to have something like this, especially since I’m a soccer mom”.

We also got very consturctive feedback like focussing more on a niche – may be niche of high school students wanted to get university scholarships via sports or may be a family oriented hub niche!!

The entire excercise was very frutiful for me, Mark & Cam. But we dont have customers or funding yet… any one out there???

A seasoned BizDev resource tells me that following skills are pillars for success of a business development manager:

• Negotiation Skills with proper business conduct
• Business Modeling with ROI asset evaluation
• Organizational Maturity Skills
• Deal Strategy Skills

Whats your opinion?

I was wondering if there is more insight and suggestions wrt tools for Market Research.

I recall from the class the various tools one can use

• - Industry associations
• - Competitor websites
• - Public financial reports of competitors.

Particularly i wanted the ball mark data on quantities, customer segments and overhead cost which wine distributors reckon with. I couldn’t get enough information from the industry associations or competitor’s website and was wondering what else could i try. I need data to estimate the bulk and $$ required to sell wine to adistributor (typically the wine industries middle men).