Business Development · Flagship service
Outsourced business development, done as a department.
A dedicated business development team that researches your market, opens the right conversations, qualifies opportunities against your criteria and puts qualified meetings in your calendar, backed by the marketing, data, systems and creative support a lone hire never gets.
Why the BDM hire disappoints
The job description asks one person to be a department.
Read a typical BDM job ad. Research target accounts. Build lists. Write outreach. Cold call. Manage LinkedIn. Produce collateral. Update the CRM. Nurture leads. Book meetings. Report weekly. Also: hit quota.
Nobody is good at all of it. So the person you hire does the parts they're comfortable with, neglects the rest, and spends the majority of the week on preparation rather than conversation. Meanwhile leadership manages, coaches and worries.
Business development is a function with several disciplines inside it. Fullstride staffs it that way.
A typical BDM job ad, decomposed
- 5
- disciplines inside one roleresearch, outreach, calling, systems, collateral
- 1
- person expected to cover all of themand hit quota
- 3–6
- months to recruitthen the same again to ramp
- 0
- of it survives their resignationwithout documented process
Scope
Everything upstream of the sales meeting.
- Target account research
- Defining and refining the ideal customer profile, mapping the accounts that fit, identifying the buying roles inside them.
- Prospect list creation
- Verified contact data, enriched with the signals that tell us who to call first.
- Outbound calling
- Professional, prepared, conversational calling to decision-makers. Phone remains the fastest way to establish whether there is a real conversation to be had.
- Email outreach
- Sequenced, personalised, sent from properly configured infrastructure that protects your domain reputation.
- LinkedIn outreach
- Connection and messaging cadences run in a way that reads as human, because it is.
- Relationship development
- The patient work of staying visible with accounts that aren't ready yet.
- Qualification
- Against criteria we define with you in writing (Schedule A), so “qualified” means the same thing to both of us.
- Appointment setting
- Booked into your calendar, briefed, confirmed and reminded.
- Sales follow-up
- Post-meeting nudges, “not now” re-engagement, quote chasing where you want it.
- Pipeline and CRM maintenance
- Records kept accurate, stages kept honest, notes kept useful.
- Reporting
- Weekly, tied to pipeline, with the next actions stated.
What we are actually trying to do
Not more meetings. The right meetings.
The measure of an outsourced BD function is not how many calendar invitations it generates. It is whether the meetings are with organizations that fit your profile, with people who can buy, about a problem you solve.
Every engagement starts by defining qualified opportunity in writing, and every report is measured against it.
We would rather book eight meetings your closer is glad to attend than twenty they resent.
Configurations
Four ways companies use the BD function.
As a complete outsourced BD function
You have no dedicated business development resources. Fullstride becomes it, from research through to booked, qualified meetings, handing off to your founder or account team to close.
As additional capacity for an existing sales team
Your salespeople are strong at closing and weak at prospecting, or simply out of hours. We take the top of the funnel so they can spend their time where it pays.
As a market-entry team
New region, new vertical, new service line. Rather than hire ahead of revenue, deploy a team that can test the market, generate the first conversations and report back on what the market is saying.
As support for founder-led sales
The founder is still the best closer in the business, and the worst prospector, because there's no time. We fill the calendar; the founder does what only the founder can.
Structure
Two ways to engage.
Both include the people, the tooling and the data. Both begin with a one-time setup and a three-month minimum, which is the shortest period over which an outbound program can be honestly assessed.
Dedicated BDM
Best for a single, focused outbound program.
On application
- Qualified meeting planning floor
- 8 to 12 per month
- Account-based marketing
- Not included
- Setup (one-time)
- On application
- Minimum engagement
- 3 months
Growth Pod
Best for a multi-channel programme with account-based marketing.
On application
- Qualified-meeting planning floor
- 15 to 20 per month
- Account-based marketing
- Included
- Setup (one-time)
- On application
- Minimum engagement
- 3 months
Meeting figures are planning floors used to size the programme and are defined precisely, along with the make-good terms that apply if they are missed, in the Order Form and Schedule A. They are not a guarantee of revenue or closed business. Pricing above is current launch pricing.
Founding client terms
Our first clients lock this pricing for twelve months in exchange for a case study, a testimonial and two referral introductions.
Sharing the risk on a first engagement
Some companies want to start on a structure that ties part of the fee to meetings delivered. That option exists; ask about it on the call and we will explain how it works.
Evidence
Results, in the client's words.
We publish verified results only.
We'd already gone through the process of hiring internally and it just wasn't delivering what we needed. Fullstride gave us access to a much broader capability without having to build the entire function ourselves. They came in, understood the business quickly and started putting structure around our outreach, pipeline and follow-up. It feels much more like having a growth team inside the business than using an outside agency.
The biggest difference for us has been ownership. We weren't looking for another consultant giving us a list of things we should be doing. We needed someone to actually do the work. Fullstride took responsibility for the outreach, the CRM, the messaging and generating conversations. I can see what's happening every week without having to manage another employee.
What impressed me was how commercial the approach was. It wasn't marketing for the sake of marketing or sending thousands of generic emails. They worked out who we should be targeting, tightened the way we positioned the company and built a much more deliberate business development process around it. We're now having conversations with companies we previously weren't getting in front of.
Next step
Have the conversation before you write the job ad.
Thirty minutes with a senior operator on your market, your sales motion and what the BD function would look like inside your company.