{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"BDF Insights","title":"Not a funnel, a loop: a business development approach designed for technical services","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":1340,"description":"This episode starts with the question anyone who builds something has to sit with. Is there really a gap here, or am I simply talking myself into preferring my own approach?\nThe honest way to check is to go looking first. Not a token search that confirms what you already decided, but a real attempt to find something on the shelf that already does the job. If it existed, using it would have saved two years.\nWhat a system for this work has to do. Three tests. It takes its direction from the firm's strategy, so effort points where the firm has chosen to grow rather than running as an activity of its own. It stays light enough to survive a busy delivery month while carrying enough structure that anyone can map an opportunity onto it and read the next step, a compass rather than a rulebook. And it grows all three foundations together, building capability that belongs to the team rather than to one person.\nWhat already exists, and where it falls short. Capture and proposal management from government contracting has the deepest discipline available, and far too much of it for a sixty person firm. Borrow the principles, not the machinery. Consultative and solution selling contribute the discipline of mapping who really decides, and carry product sales assumptions that do not hold here: a repeatable offering, a defined buyer, a transaction to close. The professional services writers travel best, and are lighter on what you actually do on a Tuesday.\nThen the evidence that complicates the comfortable story. A 2023 study of close to eighteen hundred professional services partners found client loyalty fading, and found that two of the weakest performing patterns were the deep expert who waits to be sought out and the trusted adviser who expects the client to return. Those are the two roles most technical people aspire to. The lesson is not to hire a rainmaker. It is to build the proactive behaviours into a light system the whole team runs.\nThe gap, tested properly. Two forces...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/xyKWx8bu0sVuqy1l0KVVIGIi1Tu7mUQBfTwW2gQ8Zf4/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9hYzc0/YTY0M2M1MzlkNWEz/ZTg3ZmJkZmExYWMx/NThmOC5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}