The most important BD tool? Why an egg-timer of course!

In this series I’ll take a chronological look at the typical steps taken to identify, win, grow and defend clients. I’ve added elements of a key client programme to the classic sales pipeline to create the catchily-titled BD Egg Timer - or BDET.

The business development egg timer or BDET

The BDET consolidates the sales pipeline and the typical goals of a client programme, providing full visibility of the revenue opportunities and threats.

All professional services businesses will operate across the BDET and each one will be different in approach, activities and priorities.  Mapping the BDET stages is a quick means of assessing:

• Are you doing enough? BD for many is still seen as a secondary activity

• Are you targeting clients and prospects? A blend of both is vital and tricky to get right

• Are you targeting the right contacts? Are they decision makers or budget holders and what’s the plan if not?

• Are your efforts working? It’s easy to segment your audience, create baselines of engagement then measure your efforts

• Where might you improve? Where are you missing opportunities or wasting effort?

The answers can then drive your next round of activity, plus at each stage of the process you can include a quantifiable angle.  For example:

Winning clients

1. Contacts – Is your addressable market big enough and are they engaging?

2. Leads – What percentage of engagement becomes discussions?

3. Meetings – How many meetings around a topic did you have?

4. Pitching – what percentage of those generate a proposal? Are you winning 30%+?

Client management

1. Grow – Whats the plan: increase volume, increase project size/complexity? Introduce new services?

2. Maintain – what’s the feedback? Where can we improve? What is our share of wallet

3. Defend – do they need less support? Has the team changed? Has a competitor grown share?

As the diagram highlights, each stage also requires a process fed by accurate and timely data across your CRM (and marketing and MIS platforms if they’re not integrated) in order to maximise return on effort.

I’ll aim to add a step per week-ish, highlighting what good might look like. Please DM me if you have any questions, want a better quality image or a sneak preview of the next stages.