How healthy is your business development approach?

Most established functions in a firm have an agreed way of reading their performance. Finance has its accounts and ratios. Project delivery has cost, schedule and quality. Safety has its lost-time injury rate. A leader can look at any of these and answer two plain questions: are we any good at this, and are we getting better?

Business development does have an obvious outcome measure: commercial performance. But that is the outcome of BD, not a reading of the capability behind it. It tells you what landed, and nothing about whether the firm is getting better at the work that lands it. You cannot tell improvement from a good run of luck if you never took a reading to begin with.

The difficulty is that the outcome is slow and noisy. In technical services, the distance from first conversation to signed work runs to months, often years, so today's revenue is the product of BD done long ago. The proof is in the pudding, and you should never take your eye off it. But this pudding takes a year or more to bake, and by the time you taste it the decisions that shaped it are long past. You also need to know how the baking is going.

That is what the BDF Health Index is designed to provide. It is a structured reading of the capability that produces the growth: a leading indicator, intended to move before the revenue does, and one the firm can actually control. It scores a firm's BD capability across eight dimensions, each on one maturity scale in four bands: absent, partial, systematic and embedded. Each dimension is scored from one to ten: one and two are absent, three to five partial, six to eight systematic, nine and ten embedded. It is set as a baseline at the start and re-scored on a regular cadence, so the picture it produces is a trend rather than a snapshot.

The eight dimensions

The three foundations are what growth rests on. The four phases are the cycle that tends them. The Index reads how well a firm runs that cycle, which is what keeps it from being an arbitrary list. The four phases are Market Positioning, Opportunity Pursuit, Propose and Momentum. The first four dimensions score a firm on exactly those moves, and a fifth runs across them.

• Market Focus, Positioning and Visibility asks whether the firm knows where to play and what it stands for, and whether it is deliberately becoming known by the right people for the right capabilities. (Market Positioning)
• Pursuit Discipline and Win Strategy asks whether it pursues the right work well and declines the rest early. (Opportunity Pursuit)
• Proposal, Commercial and Messaging Quality asks whether pursuit turns into proposals that are commercially sound and say something the client recognises. (Propose)
• Relationship Strength and Client Experience scores Momentum: keeping and growing the clients you already have, where most of a firm's best work comes from.
• Pipeline Health and Predictability runs across all four phases: a single, current, believable view of the work coming.

The last three score the enablers that decide whether the cycle survives a busy delivery month.

• Rhythm, Tools and Line of Sight asks whether the BD cadence, and the light tools that support it, hold when projects are demanding.
• Capability, Roles and Behaviour asks whether BD is actually owned, with the protected time and skill to do it.
• Learning and Adaptation asks whether the firm learns from wins and losses, so the system sharpens itself instead of repeating the same misses.

Scores rest on evidence

A list of eight scored dimensions can give the wrong impression. The Index is a structured qualitative assessment, not a formula for calculating growth. The scores create a shared way for a firm to see the terrain, name what is happening and decide where to act; they do not replace the relationships, conversations and judgement that remain the real work. What makes such a score defensible is three things:

• the dimensions are recurring capabilities across technical services firms;
• every score is a judgement anchored in observed behaviour and evidence, with a written justification;
• the Index is designed to assess capability while reducing the influence of short-term luck.

One boundary shows how this works. No dimension can score above five unless a system is in place, and the test is two questions: does it survive delivery pressure, and does it survive the person? Exceptional results produced by one individual are a five. Ordinary results produced by a system are a six. That is how a lucky year stays out of the reading.

The Index is a baseline for one firm

The instinct with any score is to ask how you compare to other firms. Resist it. Firms in this space differ so widely in size, model and market that a cross-firm number would be close to meaningless. "We are a six out of ten on pursuit discipline" is a number to argue about. "We moved from three to five against the same behavioural anchors, based on this evidence" is a defensible finding you can act on. So the comparison that matters is you now against you then. And once nobody is being ranked against a competitor, the defensiveness drains out of the exercise. A baseline invites candour in a way a league table never will.

The Index and revenue answer different questions

A measure earns trust partly by what it refuses to claim. The BDF Health Index measures the strength of a firm's BD capability, not the health of the firm as a whole. The clearest example is delivery quality, the first of the three foundations. It plainly affects growth, yet it is deliberately not a dimension: delivery quality is a precondition for growth, not a BD activity. The Index and commercial performance answer different questions, and they will not always move together. Read together, the two provide a fuller picture: one of the system, and one of the result. Neither replaces the other.

The baseline comes from comparing perspectives

An engagement typically begins with a focused diagnostic to establish a defensible baseline. I interview the firm's leadership and key BD people, review the evidence of how BD actually works, and synthesise the different accounts into clear themes and an initial reading. The value is not in asking people to score themselves. It is in comparing perspectives, testing stated intent against observed behaviour, and finding the patterns that matter. A low, honest baseline is one of the most useful things a firm can own, because everything after it can be read as movement, until the proof arrives where it finally counts: in the work the firm wins.

You can sketch your own first view of the eight dimensions on the Diagnose BD status page.