How Operations Can Super-Charge Your BD Efforts
Many BD people see CRMs as a chore. They are time-consuming, causing you to laboriously enter minute details in ways that often seem redundant. You already know what you’re talking about, and no one likes drudgery.
What you fail to see here, however, is the ability to remove bias. The truth is you may know what you’re talking about — but sometimes it might make sense to step back and see things from a different point of view. That’s what a CRM provides. By tracking small tasks as well as the big ones, and recording all interactions, you are able to see yourself overtime and think more strategically.
We did this in order to improve our outreach funnel, and better improve our revenue efforts. We created a new Salesforce infrastructure that worked for our system (more on that later). We began holding reviews, where other team members would go minutely through our database and hold us accountable to what we did and what we were missing. And then we built dashboards so we could actually use this data. This last piece was crucial; it both informed what we put into the CRM, and how we conducted sales out in the world.
Here are a few examples of the dashboards we used, also adjusting for time periods, lead ratings, and personas:
- Leads by lead source
- Lead Age
- Leads created over time
- Leads by Title
- Account Type/Industry
- Lead Report/Overview
The true value of taking operations seriously in business development is feeling like you’re part of something bigger than yourself — an effort that you’ve helped build, and drive with every action. One that you can iteratively improve on, own as yours, and proudly represent to your team.
Sales can feel linear, like you’re just doing one thing at a time. This is one of my own personal biggest complaints. Through a CRM, you can build a repeatable, scalable pipeline. That is when you switch from just selling things to actually building — or developing — a business.
