The way to get out of the ‘BD Leads swamp’ is...

Sarah* is the CEO and co-founder of a startup based in Munich* specializing in AI products for the healthcare* sector. Both her and her co-founder hold PhDs from the famous Technical University of Dresden*. They launched the company 3 years ago, and they came up with multiple innovations which will soon be patented.

While her co-founder has the CTO role leading a world-class data scientists and dev team, Sarah focuses on Business Development, among many other tasks. She has developed strong Business Development leads (BD leads) with many prospects around the world, but she now realizes that she has no time to follow up and close the deals. Her BD list includes more than 40 names of potential customers, but she is spread too thin.

The good news is that Sarah has just recruited a sales director who will come on board in two months. She is now considering how to select the BD leads on which the sales director should focus. Besides, the sales director will bring additional BD leads in. Sarah wonders how she will decide which ones are worth pursuing.

 Propelled Business Development leads

First, let’s consider Sarah’s immediate needs. Her main goal is to land critical deals which will put her company at the forefront of the market. By carefully selecting some prioritization criteria, she will focus her energy on closing “the deals that matter”. After thorough analysis, Sarah decides on the following 3 main criteria:

• Scalability/Replicability – Favor the deals which have very similar R&D needs to maximize the return on their R&D investment.

• Marketing impact – Favor the deals on which she can communicate early to gain market mindshare.

• Revenue/Cash impact – Favor the deals which will help the company to get extra funding.

Sarah then spends some time ranking the 40 BD leads along these criteria. She also groups the potential customers which will require a similar “Business Development effort”, as well as the ones which will require a similar “Delivery / Customer Support effort”, as the company’s resources are limited in these two critical areas.

 Scalable Business Development leads – As simple as ABC

Then will soon come the time of Sarah’s sales director joining the company. He will of course try and close the deals from Sarah’s prioritized list. He will also bring new BD leads in. Sarah needs a way to confidently accept or reject these additional leads.

This will be the first step to delegate her pre-sales workload, empowering her sales team to take decisions as they go, with Sarah’s approval required only at critical junctures of the sales pipeline. In summary, this will allow her business team to scale her business profitably, while getting some of her time back to focus on steering the company’s strategy.

I used to work in a company where we called this process the A-form process. Any new Business Development lead was scrutinized through a very simple and nimble process of BD lead qualification, before anyone was allowed to seriously work on the deal (answering the RFP for example).

The whole process went from BD lead qualification (A-form) to offer approval (B-form) to contract signature (C-form). We had to document some qualitative and quantitative criteria at each stage and to submit the case for executive approval at these 3 stages only.

• A-form – Should we pursue this Business Development opportunity? Approval needed before pursuing the opportunity, i.e. BD Lead Qualification

• B-form – Should we approve the deal? Potentially multiple iterations during the pre-sales / tendering process. Approval required before each major offer submission.

• C-form – What’s the expected resource and margin profile of the signed contract? The first C-form was prepared by the delivery teams immediately after contract signature.

 Next steps

Sarah is considering some of the points that we were using to qualify new BD leads using the “A-form” process and template, so that she can approve them without having to spend too much time on the opportunity herself. The “A-form” template is no rocket science, just a well-rounded set of points to consider before accepting/rejecting the BD lead. She is looking forward to using it with her new sales team.

By the way, there was nothing special behind the famous 3 letters. It was just as simple as A-B-C. I later discovered that in other companies, such processes could be more cumbersome, with limited delegation to the pre-sales teams. For nimble startups/scaleups which need to scale fast, let’s keep things simple.

* Names and locations have been modified and represent a mix of several people/companies.

Thank you.

Philippe

P.S.1. You may take the “From Tech To Growth” self-assessment scorecard. It is free, it only takes two minutes. It offers some reflective questions on your business growth and provides some tips based on your score.

P.S.2. Whenever you are ready, you can take a short, complementary appointment with me to discuss your business growth issues at hand. Go to the “From Tech To Growth” Recognition Call.

Philippe Poggianti, CEO, Poggianti Insights

[email protected]

+33-6-6404-3802