Marketers Take Flight

143: The Elements of a Great Business Development Plan

• Lindsay Diven • Episode 143

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🌟 Ready to dive deep into the world of AEC Business Development (BD) planning? In this episode of "AEC Marketing Strategies", we unravel the layers of BD Planning for the architecture/engineering/construction industry.

✨ What you'll discover:

  • Why generic BD templates don’t always cut it for AEC.
  • The link between Strategic Plans, BD Plans, and Marketing Plans.
  • Essential elements every rock-solid BD Plan must have (from SWOT Analysis to Sales Projections).


💡 Golden Nugget: A strategic plan is your 3-5 year vision (hello, Google Maps destination!). Your BD Plan? It's the turn-by-turn directions to get there. 🛣️

🎁 Freebie Alert: Get a handy BD Plan outline. Find it in the show notes at marketerstakeflight.com/143. And if you're all in, dive deeper with the BD Planning Mini-Workshop at marketerstakeflight.com/BDPlan.

🔔 Don't miss out! Subscribe for more empowerment-packed episodes tailored for AEC marketing pros. Catch ya next week! ✌️


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Speaker 1:

Hey there, I'm Lindsay Dibbin and I'm passionate about everything marketing, productivity and career growth. With over 17 years of experience in the architecture, engineering and construction industry, I know firsthand the ins and outs of this exciting field, from my early days as a marketing coordinator to becoming an award-winning marketing professional. In firm principle, I've learned the ropes through countless late nights and challenging deadlines. Now I'm thrilled to bring you the AEC Marketing Strategies podcast. Here I'll be sharing simple yet powerful, step by step marketing strategies that you can implement to achieve the same level of success. Consider me your go-to marketing mentor, someone who truly gets the unique challenges you face in the AEC industry. Whether you're an AEC Marketing Pro or Industry Newbie, this podcast is your personal coffee date with your marketing bestie. Together, we'll navigate the ever-changing landscape of online marketing and digital trends, ensuring you stay ahead of the curve. If you're ready to unlock the marketing secrets they never taught you in college and tailor them specifically to the AEC industry, then you're in the right place. Now let's get started. Hi, and welcome back to another episode of the Marketers Take Flight podcast, and today we're going to be talking all about business development plans. Maybe you've been asked to develop a business development or a marketing plan, and maybe that first place you go is to Google. You may find several templates that you download. You might find some articles that you found about business development or marketing planning, but when you start reading them you realize that maybe they're geared for more B2C or more product-based businesses. And I struggled with the same thing a few years ago when I was trying to create a BD plan for my firm. The architecture engineering construction industry is just different. We market our firms differently and we do business development slightly different than even most B2B companies, and for that reason I've decided to put together a few resources for you to get started with your BD planning. And first up is a series of podcast episodes, beginning with today's. These episodes are going to be a mix of solo shows where I introduce you to both BD and marketing planning concepts and elements, as well as bring on guests to share their best practices and give you ideas for your plans. Also, to go along with these podcast episodes, I've provided freebies to help you get started along the way. For today's freebie, you can find it over at the show notes page and that's over at marketerstakeflightcom forward slash 20 to zero.

Speaker 1:

We are on the 20th episode of marketers take flight podcast. Can you believe it? And if you're really ready to dive deep into business development planning and facilitate the process at your firm, you can sign up for my business development planning mini workshop. In this mini workshop, I teach you my proven approach to writing a business development plan, including how to develop the right mix of strategy, meetings and research. Then I walk you through how to execute the plan so it doesn't just get written and sit on the shelf. You'll walk away from this mini workshop with the knowledge and the tools to lead the business development planning for your firm. Best of all, it's online and on demand, so you can access the mini workshop at the right time for you. So learn more about that mini workshop and register over at marketers take flightcom forward slash BD plan. As in BD plan business development plan.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so let's dive into today's topic. Today I'm going to be talking about what a BD plan is, how it fits in with your strategic plan and marketing plans and the elements that make up a BD plan. But first let's talk a little bit about what exactly is a B, a business development plan? And In my experience, business development plans provide guidance to your firm on what services, clients and projects you will be pursuing for the year, and this also. The plan also includes the strategies to meet your goals, and successful BD plans also include a situational or SWOT analysis and clearly outline your goals, objectives, strategies and tactics to help you meet those goals. And, best of all, the plan provides guidance for all the members of your firm, business development, operations and marketing. It is the thing that everybody comes together and uses as a guiding principle for the year for business development. Now you might be thinking, lindsay, this sounds like a strategic plan. How is my BD plan any different? And in my mind, bd plans are kind of like your strategic plan.

Speaker 1:

Many firms write a strategic plan that determines what they want their firm to look like several years into the future. Most commonly are five years out or maybe three years into the future, and it's really great to start there, to know your destination, where you are trying to get to. You can think of it, as you know, like a Google Maps or a Waze, and if you think about it in terms like that, the strategic plan is that ending destination that you put in to Google Maps or Waze. Then the BD plans are the steps in between where you are now and your final destination. The BD plans are often the one year plans that help break the bigger goals of the strategic plans into more doable one year increments.

Speaker 1:

So let me give you an example. Let's say your five year strategic plan is to grow the firm to $100 million in revenue and 300 people, and today you're at $50 million in revenue and around 150 people. So you'll need to grow by $50 million and 150 people in five years. How are you going to get to that growth? Are you going to grow in new markets? Are you going to buy a firm? Are you going to go after larger projects, etc. Etc.

Speaker 1:

Some of the bigger picture strategies, like the decisions between organic growth and acquisition growth, are typically spelled out in the strategic plan. But the more short range goals and strategies fall into these annual BD plans, and I'll get to the BD plan elements in just a moment. But first you might also be thinking well, what's a marketing plan and how is that different from a BD plan? And some firms might try to combine these, both the marketing plan and the BD plan. Or, even worse, they refer to what a BD plan should be and just call it a marketing plan and they just kind of confuse the two. So after you have a good handle on your BD plan, which I'll explain the elements today is when.

Speaker 1:

So after you develop that BD plan, is that's the time to start developing your marketing plan. You see, a marketing plan outlines your marketing strategy for the coming year and this strategy should be based on what's inside your BD plan, because we want a lot, if not a majority, of our marketing tactics, resources and budgets to be focused on revenue growth, and the best way to do this is to make sure that we are deploying our marketing strategies that are aligned with our business development growth strategies. Let me give you an example so you know what I mean. Let's say, one of your BD growth strategies includes identifying and winning two key projects for your higher ed group. Then part of your marketing strategy should answer the questions of how well known are you in those key higher ed clients? What types of marketing materials or messages do we want to get out in front of those key clients to help position us and, you know, increase brand awareness with those clients and position us for those projects? Furthermore, if those targeted higher ed clients were in Florida, let's say, your marketing strategy should be very targeted in Florida. Those might include conference sponsorships, events, direct mail etc. To those targeted clients, instead of maybe more national conferences or direct mailings to a broader list. Continuing, if you have a content marketing plan, you may have some thought leadership pieces around specific topics of very high interest to those higher ed Florida specific clients and they might have certain needs or things going on for those higher ed Florida clients that you know higher ed Texas clients are going to have. So you're going to develop some thought leadership pieces or content pieces that are going to resonate with those Florida higher ed clients. So by waiting to form your marketing plan and strategies until after the BD plan is done or maybe near final, it makes sure to developing your marketing strategies a lot easier. It makes them very targeted and it closely links your marketing strategies to driving revenue growth, which in my experience, also makes getting your marketing budget approved, and I'm going to be going into more detail on developing your marketing plan in a future podcast episode. So make sure you're subscribed to this podcast so you don't miss that episode.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so let me recap where we are so far. Many firms may have a strategic plan and this plan looks out three to five years. So then comes the BD plan, which is a one year plan that helps you get to those strategic plan goals. Then comes the marketing plan that is focused on marketing strategies that support the BD plan and revenue growth goals. Okay, do you got it? Okay, good, so now let's talk about what goes into a BD plan. I'm going to first introduce the list of the elements of a BD plan and then go into each in a little bit more detail. Okay, so here we go.

Speaker 1:

The elements of a BD plan are number one, the executive summary. Number two, the firm overview and future trends, and in this section it includes maybe an office or a market overview, the SWAT analysis, the customer clients, future or targeted clients, strategic partners and competitors. And then the third section is sales overview, and in the sales overview we'll have the sales performance and trends, short term goals, long term goals and budget. And then in section four, is a high level overview of the marketing activities or mix, and I'll explain that a little bit further. Section five is the implementation plan and section six is the evaluation. So again, that was a very high level list, so let me go into each in a little bit more detail.

Speaker 1:

So first up is the executive summary. This section should be completed last and it summarizes the other sections of your plan and it. This section should help the executive team and the implementing team members quickly understand and support the plan, just like any other executive summary. So section two is firm overview and future trends, and in this is some subsections. So first is the market or industry or firm overview, and this includes a summary of research conducted by your team about your markets and clients, and it doesn't really shouldn't be a really comprehensive report on everything going on in the market. But you should conduct an analysis to make sure that your markets are growing, identify any that are declining, and be able to serve your firm's criteria for growth and cross marketing.

Speaker 1:

The next subsection is the SWOT analysis. Hopefully you all have heard of what SWOT is right Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. So you'll do that a SWOT analysis for your firm. But then the other part of this section is putting the SWOT into action. So during the development of the BD plan you should attempt to match your internal strengths to external opportunities. In addition, try to convert your internal weaknesses into strengths so you can identify which weaknesses you can turn into strengths or which external threats you can turn into opportunities. And when you start putting this in action, it comes up with some really good brainstorming opportunities here and that will help form some of your BD strategies.

Speaker 1:

The next subsection is current clients, and this should be a list of your current clients and possibly historical sales volume for each, and this will help give you a sense of your priority of clients, backed by some data. So it's not just clients we think that we get a lot of work from, but because you have the historical sales volume and maybe even some profitability, you can actually see it and make some objective decisions on prioritizing your clients. You can also assign a client champion and list each in this section. The next subsection are future or targeted clients and this. Here you'll want to list out all of your future and targeted clients and assess the current needs of each of those on this list and then anticipate the changes in those needs of those future clients and targeted clients and how well your organization's current services and expertise can meet those needs of those future or targeted clients. And when doing this you can expose some gaps in your current services and expertise that may be needed in the future. So next up is the strategic partners. Here you're going to want to list the sub-contultants, contractors, designers, etc. That you team with to win work, and these can be current partners or targeted partners. Here you want to list them out and assign a partner and assign a champion to each of the partners. The idea here is to treat your strategic partners similar as you would your clients. And then last in this section are competitors. Similar to your market overview, your competitive analysis doesn't have to be a thorough report listing every detail about your every competitor in the market, but rather you'll want to identify or define who your key competitors are and list their strengths and weaknesses. Most importantly, use this analysis to determine your current competitive advantages and ways to develop additional advantages over your competitors. So all of that was in the subsections in the firm overview and future trends section of the BD plan.

Speaker 1:

The next section is the sales overview section and in this this is the section for your financial projections. So in here we're gonna have first have our sales performance and trends. So in in this subsection you're gonna list your sales or contracts for the last three to five years. I like to display these in a bar chart format so you can easily see the trends and you might do different bar charts or graphics for each market or office you know, based on your accounting setup, if you have different profit centers and this really will give you a visual, again going back objectively, so you can see historically what has been trending up, what has been trending down.

Speaker 1:

Then the next section is short term goals. These should be the goals for your current year or the plan year that you're planning for. This section should start off with a maybe some brief narrative overview of the objectives. Some examples might be gain X number of new clients or offer X number of new services or expand our office by X number of new employees Just some high level narrative overview.

Speaker 1:

Then the next part of this is should be a table. I like putting them in a table because I like this to be easily digested. This table should document all of your planned opportunities, along with the pursuit manager, expected revenue and maybe even probability and weighted revenue and estimated pursuit cost. And this is the meat of your plan and the hardest part to do, because how many of you know exactly all your pursuits for next year? Raise your hand right. How many of you are raising your hand? However, it is very. If you don't know the exact pursuit, I do challenge you to at least identify the clients. And if you know, like, I'll give you an example.

Speaker 1:

I used to work with K through 12 education and we might not know, like that Orange County Public Schools had you know which middle school that they would have next year. But we knew that they would have a middle school and because they had one every year, and so we would say Orange County Public Schools middle school. So we didn't know which one it was, but we planned for at least one project from Orange County Public Schools. So here, try your best to identify you know as much detail as you can, because when you fill out this table and you all get clear business development, operations, marketing, you get clear on your high priority pursuits for the next year. It sets the priority for your implementation plan and then you can use that table. This table to you know form the agenda for your BD meetings. Your weekly or monthly BD meetings help you make better go, no go decisions, because if it's not in the table, you need to convince me why I need to spend time and resources away from what's in this table. In the short term goals table, it helps form your marketing strategy, which we talked about a little bit in this podcast, but I'm going to go into more detail in a future podcast. So by spending the time and at least putting something on paper, it really sets the priority for your entire business development team. And some people do this firm wide or they'll break it up and say office by office or market sector or studio by studio. So that was short term goals.

Speaker 1:

I'll get off my soap box now, and the next part of this, this section, is long term goals. Now, these are the goals for the next one to three years, and you know you'll answer questions like well, how will your office or market or firm look like? What kind of new clients and or project types will you be pursuing? And In my experience, this is usually just a narrative based on the goals from your strategic plan. So again, you know, if you're in year two of a five year strategic plan, what's left to achieve.

Speaker 1:

And then the last part of this section is budget, and this is the budget that you start setting to achieve your plans, to achieve your short term goals and to move your, move you closer to your long term goals, and you can get as detailed as you like, but I like putting things at least bucketing different parts of my budget. So there is, you know, some actual business development time. So client development, going out, new clients, networking, that. There's pursuit time. So we've identified all the pursuits up in our short term goals table. You know what is that going to cost us? What do we need to dedicate to that, including business development, technical and marketing time to those pursuits, and then anything else related to marketing. You know, if we have award submissions, professional photography, advertising, do we need to donate to golf tournaments and philanthropies? So you can kind of start bucketing this and get as detailed as you would like. I'm going to. In the future I'll provide some budgeting resources for you. So this was all the sales section, and this section is probably the hardest section to write and agree upon, but is really the heart of your BD plan and should be used and referenced throughout the year as you implement your BD and marketing strategies.

Speaker 1:

The next section is optional. It's the marketing activities or mix. I say it's optional because you may do a completely standalone marketing plan. However, I do like to include some brainstorming of marketing activities and strategies during the BD planning process and by including some of these thoughts in the BD plan, it helps to organize these ideas and use when developing the marketing plan. Next up, marketing activities slash mix. The marketing mix section can provide ideas and details regarding various marketing and BD activities related to achieving the sales goals. These can include things like organizations, conferences or trade shows, published articles, social media, advertising, project awards, special events, golf tournaments, donations. You get the idea.

Speaker 1:

So the next section of the BD plan is the implementation plan section. This component of the BD plan outlines the specific activities required to implement the BD plan. This includes who is responsible for performing these activities and when will these activities or when should these activities be accomplished, based on a specified schedule, like usually around quarters, like do this by quarter one, by quarter two, etc. This section also outlines the team of who will be responsible for developing, implementing, monitoring, reporting and making corrections to the plan as needed. Then last is evaluation. No plan is complete without clarity of how success of the plan is defined.

Speaker 1:

The evaluation section details how the result of the BD plan will be measured and evaluated.

Speaker 1:

It can specify the types of reports, like pipeline sales, hit rate etc.

Speaker 1:

And the frequency of the reports, so weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc. So those are the elements of the BD plans I have created in the past and have helped my clients to create. You can create a BD plan for your entire firm or, depending on your firm size or your markets, you can create one for each office, market or studio. I typically encourage you to align your BD plans with how your financial reporting goes. So if you have profit centers or you report sales or profitability by office, market or studio, I like to align the plans along those because it makes it easier for the reporting and evaluating of the plans. Okay, so if you want to get a copy of a BD plan this BD plan that I outlined today for free, just visit the show notes page over at marketerstakeflightcom forward slash 20 to zero to get a free copy of the BD plan outline. If you want to learn step by step of how to facilitate the BD planning process at your firm, check out my mini workshop over at marketerstakeflightcom forward slash BD plan. Okay, until next week. Bye for now.

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Lindsay Diven, CPSM

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