Business development metrics offer insights into your business that help you maximize your growth and success. For example, your win rate has a major impact on how many opportunities you need to qualify, capture, and bid on to make your target revenue goals. If your win rate isn’t as high as you’d like, you’ll want to examine some metrics to determine how changes to your process, staff, or resources can increase your chances of winning.
It’s important to measure your business development progress and goals, but you don’t want to go overboard in tracking metrics. It might take 12 to 18 months of gathering and reviewing historical data before you can determine the best strategies, so you don’t want to waste time tracking and analyzing numbers that ultimately don’t yield useful information. Be selective, choosing the best ways to measure your progress at this time. You can reevaluate your metrics plan as your situation evolves.
First, define what questions you want your metrics to answer. For example, is your opportunity pipeline balanced — as in, do you have the right mix of small, medium, and large opportunities? How many proposals do you need to submit to reach your revenue goals based on your win rate? Do you have a healthy spread of short, medium, and long-term pursuits? What do your most successful proposal efforts have in common? Are you spending your proposal budget at the right time in the business development lifecycle?
Platforms such as Technomile, GovBD, and Deltek CRM are pipeline tools that provide visual reports. All tools come with some basic out-of-the-box functionality, but you will need to customize the fields and inputs to track what you want. Additionally, Power BI is a free Microsoft download that allows you to build reports and dashboards to track metrics.
Metrics you could track include:
- Active opportunities by stage, priority, lead, agency, and so on
- Bid rate, capture rate, and win rate by customer, type of opportunity, and pursuit size
- Pipeline revenue by stage – their number and their value
- Opportunity pass rate for each Gate
- Recent opportunities created or modified over the last month
- Number of opportunities in the pipeline in each opportunity status
- Backlog (won) opportunities revenue
- Opportunity prioritization
- Bid & Proposal budget tracking correlated to specific opportunities
- Resource utilization and availability
- Pipeline velocity (how quickly do the opportunities progress through the pipeline)
By tracking metrics, you gather the business intelligence information you need to maximize your company’s profitability and growth. The right metrics will take the guesswork out of your business development health, refine your management approach, implement continuous improvement efforts, and help you to make the right business decisions. You will set realistic revenue growth goals based on real data, diagnose your challenges more easily, and identify future issues before they impact your business and growth objectives.
If you would like to learn more about how to refine your business development team’s efforts, contact OST Global Solutions. We help our clients win their strategic bids through capture and proposal consulting services. Reach out to us if you would like to hear about how we can help you secure your next contract.
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