When companies want more revenue, the instinct is often simple: Hire a business development executive.

After spending 25 years in Executive Search, I’ve seen firsthand that Sales and Business Development have some of the highest turnover rates. These roles require a very specific combination of mindset, discipline, resilience, and skill that can be difficult to identify through the traditional hiring process. Turnover is expensive. Recruiting, onboarding, training, and starting over are even more expensive.

Outsourcing Business Development helps eliminate many of those challenges by providing experienced resources, established infrastructure, and a team built to execute from day one.

Finding an experienced Business Development Executive who understands your industry and can move from onboarding to meaningful activity within a week is exceptionally rare.

There is another approach:

Instead of spending the next 90 days building a business development operation, spend the next 90 days operating one.

Revenue Recovery:

• Dormant prospects.
• Previous proposals.
• Past customers.
• Old inquiries.
• Unclosed opportunities.

Market Expansion:

• Market Expansion identifies those targets and creates consistent outreach designed to generate conversations, relationships, meetings and new opportunities.

One strategy recovers opportunities you already have. The other creates opportunities you don't have yet.

Building the function internally can involve recruiting, salary, payroll taxes, benefits, technology, data, training, management, administrative support and months of ramp time.

The better question is:

What would it cost us to build the business development capability we actually need?

Add Capacity Without Adding Headcount

Outsourcing doesn't have to replace your existing team.

Your salespeople may be great closers. Your estimators may be great at producing bids. Your executives may have strong industry relationships.

But those people may not have the time to continuously research markets, conduct outreach, follow up and create new conversations.

Your team continues doing what it does best. An outsourced business development team creates more opportunities for them to work.

Before You Hire, Ask a Different Question

Do we have a complete, repeatable system for creating business opportunities? If you do, another employee may help scale it. If you don't, another hire may simply put another person inside an undefined process.

Ready to strengthen your business development efforts? If you're considering expanding your business development capabilities without building an entire team from scratch, we'd be happy to start a conversation. https://obsidianthorne.com.