In this part of our series on 2010, five heavyweight experts give business development advice on the best ways to build in the recovery.

Noel Quinn UK Head of Commercial Banking, HSBC
Ensuring that you are able to thrive in a recovery is as important as surviving in a downturn.

If companies continue to tighten their grasp on the purse strings at the expense of investment, they could unintentionally hamper their recovery and miss out on opportunities to grow and prosper.
Source: HSBC Business Recovery Report Nov 2009

Thomas Power Founder, Ecademy.com
There is nothing more powerful than networking. Build relationships of trust online – and your business will benefit from incredible connections. Develop some of your relationships offline – face to face networking still has an important place in 2010.

Debbie Weil Author The Corporate Blogging Book
As always, consistency and authenticity. If you don’t have a great product or service, no amount of clever marketing will help you grow your customer base.

Alan Stevens Director. Mediacoach.co.uk
Build your customer base by being responsive, helpful and receptive. If you do 90% of what your customers want, and do it before your competitors, it’s more important than being perfect.

Andrew Ballenthin Author, Stop Chasing Chickens
Become Expert Researchers and Prospect Social Networks. There can be a large amount of prospect and existing customer information found online. Research and know everything you can about them The more often you ask your target audience online what they want and where you can improve the further ahead you will be. Competition that is not willing to constantly change will be left behind.

Mark Mason CEO, Mubaloo
One strategy we are employing at Mubaloo is the use of social media. According to a new forecast released by eMarketer, mobile social networkers (accessing social media via mobile) will top 600 million worldwide by 2013. Social networking is a much hyped term, but it is still an emerging channel and one which businesses should be using to help build their customer base.