Back to basics - the importance of a business development function

Does your organisation have a long-established and mature business development team/function? Or are you tasked with introducing a new team to support the business development activity? In both scenarios, understanding and sharing the importance of a dedicated business development function is key.

As the APMP Body of Knowledge (BOK) says "Few organisations succeed on luck alone. At the core of most organisations’ success is business development - the ability to generate revenue that sustains the business or organisation."

Winning opportunities isn't just about bidding for everything, relying on previous relationships or hoping the customer has an opportunity that suits an organisation's offering. The business development lifecycle takes in everything from market identification, through opportunity assessment/planning and proposal development to submission and, hopefully, winning and on-boarding. As the BOK states:

"Some organisations mistakenly think that a repeatable business development process is unnecessary. Ad hoc business development activities are occasionally successful, but they’re mostly hit and miss. Time and again, tailoring best practices and turning them into a repeatable process has proven effective. This offers a greater ROI - leading to achieving organisational revenue goals - than ad hoc activities...Organisations can identify sales opportunities through many channels, including marketing campaigns, traditional prospecting, social media efforts, and lobbying strategies."

It should be clear from this the role business development and marketing can play!

The business development team can, and should, support the initial decision making through market, customer and competitor intelligence, and may often have leads they can follow up and develop to bring in opportunities. They will build relationships with potential customers, positioning your organisation to be forefront in their mind when an opportunity arises.

Marketing specialists can support in providing market intelligence, as well as social media and direct marketing to potential leads, developing focused marketing campaigns to support organisational products and services, and developing/running events to which customer leads can be invited.

And, of course, the bid function. They will liaise with all functions, business development, marketing and operational to plan, develop and deliver the hopefully winning proposal! They should also lead follow up and debrief tasks to learn from all activities and make process improvements for the next opportunity.

The moral of the story is, don't underestimate the importance of having a business development function - more often than not, it's the difference being growth and standing still.