Business Development Automation

Managing the Business Development Process

A global executive coaching firm wanted to redesign and automate its’ business development and pipeline management activities. Business development was the responsibility of individual coaches within the organization and limited information was available to senior management regarding the pipeline of executive coaching or other services being sold within the organization. Business development was also hindered by the lack of shared awareness of contacts within a client organization. Multiple coaches could be independently selling to different divisions without any central coordination of business development. The sales process also lacked metrics to identify won versus lost opportunities and lacked any process for identifying reasons for losing a potential engagement.

The executive coaches viewed their rolodex of contacts as proprietary information and as such were extremely reluctant to share customer information with other executive coaches. Any business development and pipeline management process would have to address data security concerns while encouraging the responsible sharing of customer information.

A central business development team started manually tracking all of the opportunities within the company, but quickly their process and data needs expanded past the functionality of excel spreadsheets. The need to standardize the business development nomenclature & process and share the opportunity data across the organization required a more robust platform.

The Solution

Business development opportunities were tracked on multiple spreadsheets and inconsistent data definitions and elements were used. Plus it was difficult to quickly view the opportunity sales lifecycle and the future pipeline of coaching engagements.

Process Redesign - The sales pipeline was standardized across the organization to report sales and business development activities utilizing a single process and controlled status and activity reporting. Directing business development across an organization of coaches required a dedicated team of business development professionals and clearly defined practices for sharing client contact information.

Tool Creation – Intellilink Developed a customized & cost effective application to support the business development and pipeline management process by utilizing Intuit’s QuickBase (TM)solution. The application allowed the business development group to control the vocabulary used in the pipeline management process. The application, being web-based, supported multiple users from all across the country and provided a single database of business opportunities and sales activities. Because of the sensitivity of business contact information, data security was implemented based on opportunity ownership to securely limit which users received access to critical sales information.