The pattern that repeats itself
A business decides it needs to grow. It invests in BD activity — perhaps hiring a dedicated person, perhaps increasing the time its senior team spends on new business. Six months later, the pipeline looks busier. Nine months later, the numbers haven't moved. Eighteen months later, the BD hire has left, and the business is back where it started, slightly more cynical and considerably lighter in the bank.
This pattern is not unusual. It is, in fact, the most common commercial story I hear from founders and leadership teams. And in almost every case, the failure is structural rather than personal. The person doing the BD wasn't the problem. The structure within which they were operating was.
Structural problem one: the wrong contacts
Most BD pipelines are populated with the wrong people. Not bad people, not unimportant people — just people who are not positioned to generate the outcome the business needs in the timeframe it needs it.
There is an important distinction between contacts who could in theory become clients and contacts who are in the right position, with the right intent, and at the right moment to make a commercial decision. Most pipelines conflate these two groups. The result is a pipeline that looks full but moves slowly, because most of the activity is being directed at people who are not ready to act.
Effective commercial development starts with a ruthless prioritisation of where to focus — not based on aspiration, but based on a clear-eyed view of who is most likely to convert, on what timeline, and at what value. Everything else is noise.
Structural problem two: an unclear value proposition
Most businesses struggle to articulate clearly what they do, who it is for, and why it is worth paying for. This is not a marketing problem — it is a commercial problem. If the person doing BD cannot communicate the value proposition in a way that creates immediate clarity and relevance for the person they are speaking to, no amount of calls or meetings will overcome it.
The symptoms of an unclear value proposition in BD activity are recognisable: lots of initial interest that doesn't convert, meetings that feel positive but don't progress, prospects who say they'll come back to you but never do. These are not relationship failures. They are clarity failures.
The fix is not a new brochure. It is a disciplined process of working out exactly what problem you solve, for exactly which type of business, and what specifically changes for them when they engage with you. Then testing that articulation in real conversations and refining it until it lands consistently.
Structural problem three: no system connecting activity to outcome
The third structural failure is the absence of a commercial system — a process that connects BD activity to commercial outcomes in a way that is measurable, repeatable and improvable over time.
Most businesses operate their BD on instinct and effort. Someone has a coffee. Someone sends a follow-up email. Someone attends an event. There is activity, but no architecture: no defined stages, no conversion metrics, no accountability structure, no mechanism for learning what is working and what isn't.
Without a system, BD is entirely dependent on individual behaviour. It works when the right person is in the room with the right energy at the right time. It fails — slowly and expensively — the rest of the time.
Why hiring a BD director is rarely the fix
The instinct when a commercial function is underperforming is to hire into it. Bring in someone with the right experience and the right contacts, and the problem will resolve itself.
This sometimes works. More often, it doesn't — for a straightforward reason: a new BD hire inherits all three structural problems described above. They work hard inside a broken structure and produce results that disappoint everyone. They leave after eighteen months. The cycle repeats.
The hire-first approach also has a significant cost. A senior BD director costs £80,000–£130,000 per year before employment costs, incentives and the time invested in onboarding and management. That is a large bet to place on a structural fix that hasn't happened yet.
The more effective sequence is: fix the structure first, then hire into it. Identify the right contacts, clarify the value proposition, build the system — then bring in the person who will operate within that structure and generate consistent returns.
What an effective commercial function looks like
An effective BD function has three characteristics, corresponding to the three problems above.
Precision over volume. A defined view of the specific businesses, individuals and relationships most likely to convert — and a deliberate allocation of time and energy towards those contacts rather than the pipeline at large.
A proposition that creates clarity. A value articulation that the right prospect finds immediately relevant and compelling — not because it sounds impressive, but because it describes a problem they recognise and a solution they can see working for them.
A system that generates learning. A commercial process with defined stages, tracked conversions and a regular review cadence — so the business can see what's working, adjust what isn't, and improve over time.
None of this requires a large team. In a business at SME scale, a well-structured commercial function operated by one or two people, or by a fractional director, can outperform a larger team operating without it.
A useful test: Can everyone in your business answer these three questions consistently? Who is your ideal client? What specific problem do you solve for them? Why would they choose you over the alternatives? If the answers vary materially between people, you have a structural problem that BD effort alone won't fix.