So, you’ve been put in charge of a business development team (or maybe you’ve been supervising one for a while), and you’re wondering how you can truly measure their success and identify areas of improvement. What do you really need in a BD report? What can the information tell you about their progress, and what can you do with it to help make them better? These questions all have answers, and I’m here to share my tips for a meaningful BD report as well as how you can leverage the information to better coach your team.
How to create a meaningful BD report
Each BD report should have a few critical components to help measure progress and success. Here’s a list of the items I’ve found make for a meaningful BD report.
- Company name & contact name – This may seem like a no-brainer, but the contact name is especially important because someone else on the team may have an inside connection with an alternate contact.
- Date entered – The date when the pursuit began or when the opportunity presented itself. This date becomes especially important as you move along in coaching your team on next steps.
- Source – Where did the lead come from? Referrals, conferences, and webinars work here.
- Services being discussed & estimated fees – What are they interested in and what’s the estimated value? It can be hard to pinpoint, but do put a solid guess here.
- Last step & next step – What was the last point of contact with the lead, and what is your planned next step?
Once you have complete information on each of your team’s contact lists, they should be divided into four reporting groups for tracking:
- Active prospects – Who you’re actively talking to on a consistent basis and they are making progress in the funnel
- Cool opportunities – Can be someone whose been moved along the funnel and stalled a bit (you would move them from active back to cool), or someone who you’ve had minimal contact with such as they attended a webinar, but they haven’t yet been actively pursued. Once they’ve been pursued and responsive, move to active contacts.
- Wins – Any prospect that’s been converted into a client.
- Losses – Losing out on services to another firm would move a prospect to this bucket. But losses can take a fair bit of judgement because they aren’t always clear cut. As a simple rule, if it’s been three months or six unanswered inquiries, then it’s time to go. Either they made a decision and they’re not letting you know, or something has come up that is more important, or they put the whole thing on the back burner.
It’s important in this process to realize the difference between a prospect and a suspect. A suspect is anyone who buys accounting services, and a prospect is someone with an identifiable need. Your reports should not contain any suspects – they’re what I call “garbage leads.”
How to coach your BD team using your reporting metrics
So, you have the information you need in your team’s report; how can you now coach them to success? While there are many subtleties that can need coaching when it comes to BD, there are a few key areas you can start with:
- Not enough activity – They need to spend more time doing BD which will filter to more activity in the pipeline. If their pipeline is chronically light, it can bring into question their effort and time investment.
- Admitting defeat – This is about using judgement when something is not going to close or is not moving forward. Identify them and put them in a separate slow burn bucket/paused bucket. Don’t obsess over something for months if there’s no traction, and then don’t remind yourself there’s no traction by keeping them in your active bucket because that could be a mental barrier to success.
- Addressing last & next activity strategies – Come up with an engagement idea to reach out to the prospect other than asking, “Are you ready to move forward.” How you can touch them with something of value, that’s creative, on an interim basis until they are ready to pull the trigger? You want to provide them with a feeling of what it’s like to work with you.
- Dealing with difficult leads – If your team member has a lead stringing them along and possibly getting to the point where they are just trying to see how much service they can get for free, it’s time to come out and address it with the prospect. You can coach your team member with a few simple phrases:
- We’ve developed a relationship with you and helped you with XYZ, and we would really like you to come on board. Are you ready?
- While I’d love to be able to help you with this problem you’ve been having, this sure seems like an engagement to me. So, if you’re ok with it, I’ll prepare an engagement letter and we can work on this problem.
- This borders on providing advice that I cannot legally provide unless we have a signed engagement letter. Would you like to move forward?
With a good reporting foundation and a few coaching tools in your belt, you can start to see significant improvement in your BD team and have something to report at the next partner or board meeting. I can help you with creating meaningful reporting and growing your coaching toolkit. Contact me today.
