Score the function before you staff it.
The founder here is a composite. She’s drawn from a pattern I watched across the BD seats I’ve held. The pattern matters more than any one name.
Her professional services firm had reached the low eight figures. It was growing, until it wasn’t.
She closed every meaningful deal herself. Referrals came in because people liked her. Pipeline lived in her head, and in a spreadsheet nobody else opened.
So she did the sensible thing. She hired a BD manager and bought a CRM. She gave both six months.
Six months later, the CRM had 340 contacts. It had no stages. The BD manager had a quota and no function to run it in.
The founder was still closing everything. Now a salary and a software subscription were bolted to the same problem.
Every part worked. The function just didn’t exist yet, and she’d paid to make its absence run faster.
The shoebox problem
Finance solved this long ago. Mostly, it had no choice. The tax authority and the bank insisted on books.
By five million in revenue, most firms have a chart of accounts and a monthly close. A new controller walks into a working function on day one.
Nobody insists on a BD function. So it lives in the heads of whoever closes the deals. Nobody would hire a CFO and hand over a shoebox of receipts. In business development, it’s a common first move.
The bolt-on habit
The move usually looks like this. A firm in the five-to-fifty-million band feels the ceiling. Growth still runs through one or two people.
Someone suggests a fractional sales leader, a part-time BD hire, an outbound agency, or an AI tool that writes the emails. Each one bolts a resource onto the existing function. A fractional sales leader or a salesperson-for-hire carries a number inside whatever function you already have.
I’ve held BD seats from early-stage venture-backed startups to publicly traded technology companies. Across them, more often than not, the function was undocumented and routed through one or two people.
Referrals arrived by accident. The partnerships were really a list of logos.
Add a salesperson to that, and they wait for someone senior to hand them a lead. A CRM becomes a database of one person’s memory. An AI outreach tool runs the same habits at machine speed, with better grammar.
Why does this persist? The resource is easy to buy, and the redesign is hard to see. A hire has a start date, and a tool has a login.
A function has neither.
You can’t invoice for “the BD function now exists.” So the market sells what can be invoiced. A busy leadership team has never had a real BD function to compare against. It reasonably assumes the parts add up to the whole.
A function is the thing that makes the parts useful.
Redesign around what already works
What does redesign look like when the business is already working?
It starts with a map. Score the function before you staff it. We use the 20-Dimension BD Maturity Assessment: four categories (Foundation, Infrastructure, Capability, Strategic), a hundred-point scale. The score matters less than the shape.
One dimension matters most at this stage: key-person dependency. If your top BD person vanished for a month, how much pipeline would leave too?
In FounderScale’s 2023 survey of founders, three in four said the founder still closes most deals. Past five million in revenue, about one in five said so. Most named a sales team instead.
Yet the founder’s network was still their top answer for where revenue comes from. Closing changes hands before the relationships do. Either way, you’d be hiring someone into a function that routes around them by design.
Then you redesign the function around what’s already true. The relationships are real, and so is the reputation. Referrals still come in. Translation, not transformation: you keep the material and redesign the plumbing.
Bookkeeping records how a firm already makes money, in a form someone else can run. A BD function does the same for the firm’s relationships and deals.
Before anyone buys a CRM, pipeline gets stages a second person can see. Somewhere in the customer lifecycle, a referral ask starts happening on purpose. And the deal architecture in one or two heads gets written down once, so it can be run twice.
It’s unglamorous work, and it’s the difference between a function and a rainmaker with helpers.
Only then does it make sense to add capacity, human or otherwise. A BD manager hired into a designed function has stages to work and a referral motion to run. There are partners to manage, too. The same hire six months earlier would have had a quota and a blank page.
This is also where AI earns its place, after the redesign. Once the function exists, the infrastructure underneath can carry the repetitive weight. Think signal capture, first-draft outreach, pattern recognition across a partner book, and competitive watch. That’s why a senior operator can now lead a BD function fractionally, for a firm that could never afford the org as headcount.
The AI is the economics. The function is the point.
Who can do this work
One question separates a redesign from a purchase. Ask what someone would do in their first thirty days if you refused to let them hire, buy, or automate anything. A seller of resources has no answer, because the resource was the offer. A redesigner starts drawing the map.
Who can do this work? Fewer people than you’d think.
The strategy firm will draw the map beautifully, then leave before anyone runs it. A salesperson-for-hire runs plays inside whatever function you already have, and a tool vendor automates the process as it stands. Each is good at its own job.
This work needs a senior operator who has led BD and partnership functions. They diagnose yours honestly and redesign it around what already works. Then they stay until it runs without depending on any one person. Including, eventually, them.
The founder in the opening is a composite, so I won’t invent her ending. Here’s what the redesign is for.
The BD manager gets a function to run. The CRM finally gets stages. The referral ask gets a date on the calendar. The logo list turns into a partner map with a quarterly rhythm. The founder’s calendar stops being the pipeline.
On the hundred-point scale, that’s the climb out of Ad Hoc toward Defined. It’s the level at which a hire has a function to work in.
Could the next hire find the numbers?
So ask the controller’s question. If your best BD person left tomorrow, could the next hire find the numbers on day one? If not, the answer to “what should we automate” is also no. Not yet.
Start with the map. Then decide what deserves to run faster.
If that pattern sounds familiar, we should talk. Middle 3rd Solutions is a revenue infrastructure firm delivering fractional Chief Business Development Officer (CBDO) services to privately held firms from $5M to $50M+. We begin with a free conversation about fit. An ongoing engagement opens with the BD Maturity Diagnostic, so we both know where you stand. Not ready for an ongoing engagement? Try one piece of work on its own, the Diagnostic or a Strategic Brief. One fee, paid up front.
Translation, not transformation. The company you already are, more deliberately.