The most successful organizations in any market or selling environment innovate and improve framework processes based upon fundamental principles. Less effective organizations follow tightly defined processes, but limited understanding of the fundamental principles reduces their flexibility to adapt to market and customer shifts. The least effective organizations lack consistent processes and fail to understand fundamental principles.

Help senior managers design a single, flexible, and scalable business development process based on industry best practices.

Organizations with a single business development process eliminate confusion about which process applies. If you have multiple processes, individuals will repeatedly rationalize why the more disciplined process does not apply to a given opportunity. Business development managers that permit ad hoc processes and rely on heroes for success are consistently less successful.

A flexible process can be adapted to different types of selling environments, markets, opportunities, and customer requirements.

A scalable process can be adapted to differing sizes of opportunities, schedules, resources, and budgets.

As with our Proposal Guide and Capture Guide, these guidelines are based upon fundamental principles of our consulting practice:

Help individuals understand the business development process.

Whether highly experienced or new to business development, individuals must use common vocabularies and definitions to work effectively and efficiently as a team. Likewise, winning complex, competitive opportunities requires a cohesive, coordinated business development team working with a common understanding of the work

process, individual roles, and required tasks.

This Business Development Lifecycle Guide is designed to help individuals on your marketing, capture, and proposal teams reach a common understanding of business development process best practices and terms. These fundamental best practices are readily applicable and adaptable when selling to governments and businesses in

domestic, international, and export markets; when selling services and products; and in situations requiring security clearances.

Individuals often use common terms with different implicit meanings. Common terms are defined to support cohesive, effective business development teams.

Record best practices in a clear, linear order.

At Shipley Associates, we have observed, studied, and recommended business development best practices since 1972. We endeavor to follow these principles in our consulting practice, teach them in our training practice, apply them...