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?
The 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.
What 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.
What 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.
Then 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.
The gap, tested properly. Two forces separate these approaches: whether business development lives in individuals or in a system the firm owns, and whether it is focused on winning today's work or positioning for where the market is heading. Four types fall out of that, and the under-served square for small and mid sized technical firms is a light, strategy led system.
The shape is the argument. Most business development is drawn as a funnel, which is a line that ends when the work is won. In this kind of work, winning is the moment you get access to the thing that produces the next opportunity. So the four moves are a loop: Market Positioning, Opportunity Pursuit, Propose, and Momentum, where every finished project should leave the system stronger than it found it.
The episode also covers the rhythm that keeps it alive, why a shared spreadsheet beats an elaborate system that flatters you, and the firms this approach is wrong for.
One thing to do this week. Take your last five wins. For each one write down two dates: when you first spoke to that client about that particular problem, and when the tender or brief was issued. If the first date is always after the second, you are winning in Propose, which is the most crowded and most expensive place to win, and you are doing it on the quality of your writing. That is a real achievement and it is not a strategy.
Next episode takes the fourth article, which looks underneath all of this at the stories a firm tells itself about how growth happens, using Causal Layered Analysis from futures work. Three myths come out of it: the Magnet, the Exam, and the Lone Hunter.
The written article this episode is based on, and the rest of the BDF Insights series, are at bdfpartners.co.za
BDF Partners was founded by Frans Oosthuizen, who built and ran business development for a global engineering firm across sub-Saharan Africa before starting the practice. BDF Partners helps technical and professional services firms build a business development system light enough to survive a busy delivery month.