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What Does a Business Development Manager Do?

A business development manager works in strategic planning, sales management, and prospecting for new clients to help grow an organization.

[Featured image] A businesswoman is discussing a proposal on her laptop with her two other colleagues.

If you’re interested in strategic planning, setting and reaching goals, and working with people inside and outside of your organization, then you may be interested in a career as a business development manager. As a member of the sales team, you’ll help identify leads, offer proposals to new clients, and build relationships with customers and co-workers alike. Business development is crucial to the growth of an organization.

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What is a business development manager?

Business development managers, sometimes abbreviated BDMs, are key members of the go-to-market (GTM) team. They are responsible for building lists of sales leads, then pitching to these prospects to build the company’s client list. In sales lingo, they help move people from the top of the sales funnel to the goal of being a signed customer. The business development role uses many business skills, including strategic planning, project management , and successful negotiation .

Tasks and responsibilities

While the role will vary depending on the company and the industry, you might expect your tasks to include:

Identifying opportunities in target markets for your organization’s products and services

Generating leads through cold calling prospective clients or networking at trade shows

Developing and nurturing relationships with key customer accounts

Keeping up with the latest industry developments, including market positioning of corporate competitors

Assessing client needs and the company’s ability to meet those needs

Following up with new leads and referrals generated from the sales team

Preparing status reports on goals

Using customer relationship management (CRM) software, such as Salesforce, to manage interactions

Successful business development managers often move into more senior business development and sales management roles.

Why pursue a career as a business development manager?

A career as a business development manager is good for someone who is outgoing, interested in sales strategies, and enjoys working with people. Good business development managers love the challenge of prospecting and are able to accept rejection with grace. They view each “no” as putting them a step closer to a “yes.” They also enjoy being part of a team that works to build and execute a business growth strategy.

Business development manager salary

According to job site Glassdoor, business development managers in the United States make an average salary of $128,962 per year (January 2024) [ 1 ]. Salaries can vary depending on the industry, location, and amount of experience you have. 

How to become a business development manager

Follow these 5 steps to become a business development manager. 

1. Acquire a foundational education. 

Many business development managers have at least a bachelor’s degree in business or a related field, while some have a master’s degree. Business degree coursework can provide foundational knowledge of decision-making, data analysis , innovation, and entrepreneurship .  

Additional coursework in communication, marketing , and psychology can introduce you to important concepts related to the “people element” of business development. 

Ready to advance your business education and gain career-ready skills? Check out the online iMBA program with specializations in financial management and digital marketing.

2. Gain relevant experience. 

It helps to have experience with the selling process. For example, as an entry-level retail sales associate , your responsibilities might include guiding customers through their purchase decision all the way to the point of sale. As an outside sales representative position, your responsibilities might include reaching out to prospects, demonstrating products, and securing new customer accounts. 

Other key areas of experience include strategic planning, business management, and successful negotiation.

Read more: 6 Entry-Level Sales Jobs and How to Get One

3. Develop technical skills. 

Technical skills that can lead to success as a business development manager include project management , navigating Microsoft 365 , and conducting search engine research . 

With businesses’ increasing need for secure information systems and robust use of data to guide decisions, you may find that specialized training in cybersecurity and data analytics gives you an edge as a business development manager. 

In addition, mastering customer relationship management (CRM) software can prepare you for a business development manager position, especially in larger organizations.

Want to learn CRM? The Salesforce Sales Operations Professional Certificate is a great way to learn how to manage teams, develop sales pipelines, and close deals effectively.

4. Enhance your resume. 

As you gain experience, skills, and education, it’s important to update your resume continually. Scour business development manager job listings to find out what companies are looking for. Highlight the qualifications that match job requirements and feature them prominently on your resume. 

Use action verbs to describe tasks you performed in previous roles, and when possible, emphasize any quantifiable outcomes.

5. Find your first business development manager position. 

With qualifications and an updated resume in hand, the next step is to begin applying for business development manager jobs you’re interested in. Which ones will contribute to the lifestyle you desire? In which of these positions will you get to work on projects and tasks that excite you? What do you admire about the companies who are posting business development manager job openings? 

As recruiters and hiring managers reach out to you to schedule interviews with companies, take time to improve your interviewing skills . You’ll want to be able to answer behavioral questions effectively using the STAR method , as well as prepare to ask your interviewer insightful questions , so that you can make the best decision for your career. 

Explore the world of business with Coursera

If you’re interested in a job as a business development professional, start by building job-ready skills through the Salesforce Sales Development Professional Certificate on Coursera—no degree or previous experience required.

Alternatively, explore whether the field is right for you (or continue developing core skills) through the Business Strategy Specializ ation from the University of Virginia or Successful Negotiation: Essential Strategies and Skills from the University of Michigan.

Article sources

Glassdoor. “ Business Development Manager Overview , https://www.glassdoor.com/Career/business-development-manager-career_KO0,28.htm.” Accessed January 17, 2024. 

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What Is Business Development?

  • Understanding the Basics
  • Areas of Development
  • The Process
  • Creating a Plan
  • Skills Needed

The Bottom Line

  • Small Business
  • How to Start a Business

Business Development: Definition, Strategies, Steps & Skills

Why more and more companies worldwide are embracing this planning process

business development project management

In the simplest terms, business development is a process aimed at growing a company and making it more successful. That can include seeking new business opportunities, building and sustaining connections with existing clients, entering strategic partnerships, and devising other plans to boost profits and market share.

Key Takeaways

  • The overarching goal of business development is to make a company more successful.
  • It can involve many objectives, such as sales growth, business expansion, the formation of strategic partnerships, and increased profitability.
  • The business development process can impact every department within a company, including sales, marketing, manufacturing, human resources, accounting, finance, product development, and vendor management.
  • Business development leaders and team members need a wide range of both soft and hard skills.

How Business Development Works Within an Organization

Business development, sometimes abbreviated as BD, strives to increase an organization's capabilities and reach in pursuit of its financial and other goals. In that way, it can impact—and also call upon the specialized skills of—a variety of departments throughout the organization.

As the financial services giant American Express puts it, "When it comes to organizational growth, business development acts as the thread that ties together all of a company's functions or departments, helping a business expand and improve its sales, revenues, product offerings, talent, customer service, and brand awareness."

For example:

Sales and Marketing

Sales personnel frequently focus on a particular market or a particular (set of) client(s), often for a targeted revenue number. A business development team might assess the Brazilian market, for example, and conclude that sales of $1.5 billion can be achieved there in three years. With that as their goal, the sales department targets the customer base in the new market with their sales strategies.

Business development often takes a longer-range perspective in setting goals than many sales departments have in the past. As the Society for Marketing Professional Services puts it, "A traditional view of sales is akin to hunting, but business development is more like farming: it's a longer-term investment of time and energy and not always a quick payoff."

Marketing , which oversees the promotion and advertising of the company's products and services, plays a complementary role to sales in achieving its targets.

A business development leader and their team can help set appropriate budgets based on the opportunities involved. Higher sales and marketing budgets allow for aggressive strategies like cold calling , personal visits, roadshows, and free sample distribution. Lower budgets tend to rely on more passive strategies, such as online, print, and social media ads, as well as billboard advertising.

Legal and Finance

To enter a new market, a business development team must decide whether it will be worth going solo by clearing all the required legal formalities or whether it might be more sensible to form a strategic alliance or partnership with firms already operating in that market. Assisted by legal and finance teams, the business development group weighs the pros and cons of the available options and selects the one that best serves the business.

Finance may also become involved in cost-cutting initiatives. Business development is not just about increasing market reach and sales, but improving the bottom line . An internal assessment revealing high spending on travel , for instance, may lead to travel policy changes, such as hosting video conference calls instead of on-site meetings or opting for less expensive transportation modes. The outsourcing of non-core work, such as billing, technology operations, or customer service, may also be part of the development plan.

Project Management/Business Planning

Does an international business expansion require a new facility in the new market, or will all the products be manufactured in the base country and then imported into the targeted market? Will the latter option require an additional facility in the base country? Such decisions are finalized by the business development team based on their cost- and time-related assessments. Then, the project management /implementation team can swing into action to work toward the desired goal.

Product Management and Manufacturing

Regulatory standards and market requirements can vary across regions and countries. A medicine of a certain composition may be allowed in India but not in the United Kingdom, for example. Does the new market require a customized—or altogether new—version of the product?

These requirements drive the work of product management and manufacturing departments, as determined by the business strategy. Cost considerations, legal approvals, and regulatory adherence are all assessed as a part of the development plan.

Vendor Management

Will the new business need external vendors ? For example, will the shipping of a product require a dedicated courier service? Will the company partner with an established retail chain for retail sales? What are the costs associated with these engagements? The business development team works through these questions with the appropriate internal departments.

10 Potential Areas for Business Development

As noted earlier, business development can require employees throughout an organization to work in tandem to facilitate information, strategically plan future actions, and make smart decisions. Here is a summary list of potential areas that business development may get involved in, depending on the organization.

  • Market research and analysis: This information helps identify new market opportunities and develop effective strategies.
  • Sales and lead generation: This involves prospecting, qualifying leads, and coordinating with the sales team to convert leads into customers.
  • Strategic partnerships and alliances: This includes forming strategic alliances, joint ventures, or collaborations that create mutually beneficial opportunities.
  • Product development and innovation: This involves conducting market research, gathering customer feedback, and collaborating with internal teams to drive innovation.
  • Customer relationship management: This involves customer retention initiatives, loyalty programs, and gathering customer feedback to enhance customer satisfaction and drive repeat business.
  • Strategic planning and business modeling: This includes identifying growth opportunities, setting targets, and implementing strategies to achieve sustainable growth.
  • Mergers and acquisitions: This involves evaluating potential synergies, conducting due diligence , and negotiating and executing deals.
  • Brand management and marketing: This includes creating effective marketing campaigns, managing online and offline channels, and leveraging digital marketing techniques.
  • Financial analysis and funding: This includes exploring funding options, securing investments, or identifying grant opportunities.
  • Innovation and emerging technologies: This involves assessing the potential impact of disruptive technologies and integrating them into the organization's growth strategies.

The Business Development Process in Six Steps

While the specific steps in the business development process will depend on the particular company, its needs and capabilities, its leadership, and its available capital, these are some of the more common ones:

Step 1: Market Research/Analysis

Begin by conducting comprehensive market research to gain insights into market trends, customer needs, and the competitive landscape. Analyze data and gather additional information to identify potential growth opportunities and understand the market dynamics.

Step 2: Establish Clear Goals and Objectives

Leveraging that research, define specific objectives and goals for business development efforts. These goals could include revenue targets, market expansion goals, customer acquisition targets, and product/service development objectives. Setting clear goals provides a focus for the business development process.

Step 3: Generate and Qualify Leads

Use various sources, such as industry databases, networking , referrals, or online platforms to generate a pool of potential leads. Identify individuals or companies that fit the target market criteria and have the potential to become customers. Then, evaluate and qualify leads based on predetermined criteria to determine their suitability and potential value.

Step 4: Build Relationships and Present Solutions

Initiate contact with qualified leads and establish relationships through effective communication and engagement. Utilize networking events, industry conferences, personalized emails, or social media interactions to build trust and credibility. As your relationship forms, develop and present tailored solutions that align with the client's needs. Demonstrate the value proposition of the organization's offerings and highlight key benefits and competitive advantages.

Step 5: Negotiate and Expand

Prepare and deliver proposals that outline the scope of work, pricing, deliverables, and timelines. Upon agreement, coordinate with legal and other relevant internal teams to ensure a smooth contract execution process.

Step 6: Continuously Evaluate

Continuously monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of business development efforts. Analyze performance metrics , gather feedback from clients and internal stakeholders, and identify areas for improvement. Regularly refine strategies and processes to adapt to market changes and optimize outcomes.

While it's common for startup companies to seek outside assistance in developing the business, as a company matures, it should aim to build its business development expertise internally.

How to Create a Business Development Plan

To effectively create and implement a business development plan, the team needs to set clear objectives and goals—ones that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). You can align these objectives with the overall business goals of the company.

Companies often analyze the current state of the organization by evaluating its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats through a SWOT analysis . That can make it easier to identify target markets and customer segments and define their unique value proposition.

A substantial component of a business development plan is the external-facing stages. It should lay out sales and marketing strategies to generate leads and convert them into customers. In addition, it may explore new potential strategic partnerships and alliances to expand your reach, access new markets, or enhance your offerings.

Teams should conduct a financial analysis and do resource planning to determine the resources required for implementing the plan. Once you implement, you should track progress against the key performance indicators (KPIs) you've chosen.

Skills Needed for Business Development Jobs

Business development is a fast-growing field across industries worldwide. It is also one that calls upon a wide range of hard and soft skill sets.

Leaders and other team members benefit from well-honed sales and negotiating skills in order to interact with clients, comprehend their needs, and sway their decisions. They have to be able to establish rapport, cope with challenges, and conclude transactions. They need to be able to communicate clearly, verbally and in writing, to both customers and internal stakeholders.

Business development specialists should have a thorough awareness of the market in which they operate. They should keep up with market dynamics, competition activity, and other industry developments. They should be able to see potential opportunities, make wise judgments, and adjust tactics as necessary. Because many of their decisions will be data-driven, they need good analytical skills.

Internally, business development practitioners need to be able to clarify priorities, establish reasonable deadlines, manage resources wisely, and monitor progress to guarantee timely completion.

Finally, people who work in business development should conduct themselves with the utmost morality and honesty. They must uphold confidentiality, act legally and ethically, and build trust with customers and other stakeholders.

Why Is Business Development Important?

In addition to its benefits to individual companies, business development is important for generating jobs, developing key industries, and keeping the economy moving forward.

What Are the Most Important Skills for Business Development Executives?

Development executives need to have leadership skills, vision, drive, and a willingness to work with a variety of people to get to a common goal.

How Can I Be Successful in Business Development?

Having a vision and putting together a good team are among the factors that help predict success in business development. A successful developer also knows how to write a good business plan, which becomes the blueprint to build from.

What, in Brief, Should a Business Development Plan Include?

A business development plan, or business plan , should describe the organization's objectives and how it intends to achieve them, including financial goals, expected costs, and targeted milestones.

Business development provides a way for companies to rise above their day-to-day challenges and set a course for a successful future. More and more companies, across many different types of industries, are coming to recognize its value and importance.

American Express. " Business Development and Its Importance ."

Society for Marketing Professional Services. " What Is Business Development? "

World Economic Forum. " The Future of Jobs Report 2020 ," Page 30.

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Career Guide: What Is Business Development?

A business developer works on a project

The business field just keeps growing. Employment in all business and financial operations jobs is projected to grow 8% from 2020 to 2030, about as fast as average for all occupations, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics . *

Business development managers, or business developers, are vital to this growth. Business developers can be in entry-level positions right out of college, all the way up to CEO and other C-suite positions.

Blake Escudier , Purdue Global Faculty in the School of Business and Information Technology, helps us understand the duties and responsibilities of a business developer.

What Is Business Development?

Business development involves developing and implementing growth opportunities within and between organizations. The goal is to create long-term value from customers, markets, and relationships.

“Business development incorporates marketing and sales,” Escudier says, “but there's much more to it.”

While marketing focuses on reaching a wider audience, and sales typically leverages a one-to-one approach, business development seeks to grow a business. The goal is more than to increase profits; it’s to make intelligent business decisions for the overall health of a business.

What Does a Business Development Manager Do?

A business developer’s role is to contribute innovative ideas to help a company grow within its industry. They conduct market research and analyze a company’s current products and services to identify opportunities to increase customer engagement.

Among the business developer’s day-to-day roles, according to Indeed , are as follows † :

  • Coordinate with sales teams to develop mutually beneficial proposals
  • Develop and maintain client relationships
  • Gather actionable information from customer and competitor data
  • Identify and research potential clients
  • Make and give presentations to prospective clients and internal executives
  • Monitor project teams to ensure contracts are executed as agreed
  • Negotiate contract terms with clients and communicate with stakeholders

Business developers must stay knowledgeable about the current market to effectively target opportunities for growth. They are expected to have expert knowledge of their target audience and to engage with prospects to generate new business.

What Are the Skills Required for Business Development?

Business development requires a wide range of skills, from marketing to sales to project management and more.

“The skills could be very broad, depending on what level you're working on with the company,” Escudier says. “But everyone in a company, in their own way, is doing business development just by doing their job.”

Among the most common necessary skills are as follows:

Customer Service and Communication

Business developers must be able to write and speak confidently and clearly. They must call prospects, maintain long-term relationships with strategic partners, listen to concerns of potential clients, and share valuable information with stakeholders.

Business developers need to have a basic understanding of marketing concepts in order to position goods and services effectively. Business developers should be able to analyze new markets, understand the competition, and identify and educate new target prospects.

Negotiation

A business developer should be able to negotiate. They must generate leads and keep them engaged as they move through the sales funnel, even though they might not be the one responsible for closing deals.

Planning and Project Management

Business development is an involved process, so managing it closely is vital to a business developer’s success. Some of the skills needed to be a great project manager carry over to the business development industry, including leadership, team management, and personal organization.

Forecasting and Data Analysis

Business development professionals must know how to analyze data to forecast future trends and use that data to present to managers and executives. The metrics business developers track will vary depending on the sales cycle, needs of the company, and industry.

Sales Management

Similar to sales professionals, a business development professional must be able to identify members of the company's target audience and effectively find and follow up on opportunities for growth. Business developers typically work closely with sales team members to move prospects along the sales process.

Who Is a Good Fit for Business Development?

“Individuals who want to grow their career would be a good candidate for business development,” Escudier says. “They think, ‘What can I do to help my company?’ That’s what business development is all about.”

According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce , business development candidates benefit from these traits:

  • Adaptability: Good business developers don’t take rejection personally, seeing it instead as a learning opportunity. They shift gears as needed to get positive results.
  • Listening: Good business developers should always be listening to clients and other employees. They need to take time to understand the client’s needs and then tailor their pitches.
  • Negotiating: This goes hand in hand with listening. Working with your client and then finding the best way to negotiate with them will benefit the company.
  • Relationship and Trust Building: Business developers realize that potential clients prefer people they know, like, and trust. Successfully building relationships involves being trustworthy and collaborative.

How Do You Become a Business Development Manager?

Becoming a business development manager will require a mix of education and experience. Here are four steps you can take to help you enter business development:

  • Get an education. According to Indeed.com , many employers will require you to have a bachelor’s degree in business administration or management, or other related fields, possibly with specializations in business development. You could also pursue a master’s degree to increase your value.
  • Find a mentor. A good mentor will help you expand your professional network and teach you more about launching a career as a business development manager. You could seek out a teacher, former manager, fellow alumni from your school, or any other experienced professional who could share their experiences, guidance, and advice.
  • Develop a range of skills. Work on the hard skills listed above, such as marketing, sales, and project management, along with soft skills like listening and planning. You should also be familiar with customer relationship management software, spreadsheets, word processing, and business presentation software.
  • Consider career goals. As a business development manager, you can climb the ranks through senior management, or you can start your own business. Focus on your goal and focus your knowledge and skills on that outcome.

What Is the Future of Business Development?

Business development is a growing field. Business development positions are the sixth most in-demand emerging job roles, according to the 2020 Future of Jobs Survey , conducted by the World Economic Forum. ‡

10 Jobs With Increasing Demand Across Industries

Escudier says he sees a growth in open positions in business development.

“One online job search company shows over 33,000 different jobs for the term ‘business development’ right now,” he says. The reasons are simple.

“Every business wants to maintain their position and not fail. Therefore, the company has to invest in business development,” Escudier says. “Today, with advances in technology and information access, with the potential for more of the internet of things and artificial intelligence, business development experts are going to have more data available to evaluate and to do their jobs better.”

Begin Your Career in Business Development

Purdue Global offers several paths to achieve the skills you need for a career in business development. Among the degrees you can explore are as follows:

  • Associate of Applied Science in Business Administration
  • Bachelor of Science in Business Administration (concentration in business development)
  • Master of Science in Management and Leadership

Find out more by contacting Purdue Global today.

About the Author

Purdue Global

Earn a degree you're proud of and employers respect at Purdue Global, Purdue's online university for working adults. Accredited and online, Purdue Global gives you the flexibility and support you need to come back and move your career forward. Choose from 175+ programs, all backed by the power of Purdue.

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*Source: U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook , Business and Financial Occupations, www.bls.gov/ooh/business-and-financial/home.htm . National long-term projections may not reflect local and/or short-term economic or job conditions, and do not guarantee actual job growth.

†Source: Indeed, “Business Developer Job Description: Top Duties and Qualifications,” https://www.indeed.com/hire/job-description/business-developer

‡Source: World Economic Forum, “The Future of Jobs Report 2020,” https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_2020.pdf

  • A Game-Changing Business Development Strategy to Achieve Consistent Growth

Joe Pope

Your business development strategy can be key to the success or failure of your firm. In this post, we’ll explore how to create a strategy and associated plan that can propel an individual, a practice or an entire firm to new levels of growth and profitability.

Business Development Defined

Business development (BD) is the process that is used to identify, nurture and acquire new clients and business opportunities to drive growth and profitability. A business development strategy is a document that describes the strategy you will use to accomplish that goal.

The scope of business development can be wide ranging and vary a lot from organization to organization. Consider the model of how professional services organizations get new business shown in Figure 1.

business development funnel

Figure 1: The three stages of the business development funnel

The first two stages of the model, Attracting Prospects and Build Engagement, are traditional marketing functions. The final stage, Turning Opportunities into Clients, is a traditional sales function. In the traditional role, business development would be looking for new channels of distribution or marketing partners.

But roles are changing and naming conventions evolve. In today’s world many firms refer to the entire marketing and sales process as business development. I know, it can be confusing. So let’s sort it out a bit.

Business Development vs. Marketing

Marketing is the process of determining which products and services you will offer to which target audiences, at what price. It also addresses how you will position and promote your firm and it’s offerings in the competitive marketplace. The result of all this activity should be an increasing awareness of your firm among your target audience — and a stronger flow of qualified leads and opportunities.

Download the Business Development Guide

Historically, business development has been a subset of the marketing function that was focused on acquiring new marketing or distribution relationships and channels. While this role still exists in many companies, the business development title has become interchangeable with many marketing and sales functions.  

Business Development vs. Sales

Sales is the task of converting leads or opportunities into new clients. Business development is a broader term that encompasses many activities beyond the sales function. And while there is some overlap, most traditional BD roles are only lightly involved in closing new clients.  

Business development is often confused with sales. This is not too surprising because many people who are clearly in sales have taken to using the title of Business Developer . Presumably this is done because the organization believes that the BD designation avoids some possible stigma associated with sales.

Nowhere is this practice more prevalent than in professional services. Accountants, lawyers and strategy consultants do not want to be seen as “pushy sales people.” This titular bias is firmly rooted despite the fact that developing new business is an important role of most senior members of professional services firms.

Since so many clients want to meet and get to know the professionals they will be working with, the Seller-doer role is well established in many firms. The preference for Seller-doers also tends to discourage firms from fielding a full-time sales force.

As an alternative approach to leveraging fee-earners’ time, some firms have one or more Business Developers on staff. In the professional services context, these folks are often involved in lead generation and qualification, as well as supporting the Seller-doers in their efforts to close new clients. In other organizational contexts, this role might be thought of as a sales support role.

The result of this confusing picture is that many professional services firms call sales “business development” and make it part of every senior professional’s role. They may also include some marketing functions, such as lead generation and lead nurturing, into the professional’s BD responsibilities.

It is this expanded role, where business development encompasses the full range of lead generation, nurturing and sales tasks, which we will concentrate on in this post.

See also: Heller Consulting Case Story

Business Development Examples

To be clear on what this role entails, let’s consider this business development example:

Bethany is the Director of Business Development at a fictional mid-sized architecture firm. She is not an architect herself. Nor is she involved with any aspect of delivering the projects that the firm has signed. Instead, her role is exclusively focused on signing new business for her firm—with either new clients or existing ones. 

For new clients, Bethany spends much of her time responding to RFPs, communicating directly with inbound leads generated by the marketing/sales enablement team, and nurturing potential clients that she met at a recent industry conference. Bethany also collaborates with the marketing team in the development of new materials she needs to sell to new accounts.

When it comes to existing accounts, Bethany also has a role. She meets monthly with delivery teams to understand whether current client projects are on scope or if change orders are needed. Moreover, she maintains a relationship with key stakeholders of her firm’s clients. If another opportunity for more work opens, she knows that her relationship with the client is an important component to that potential deal.

In this example, Bethany is the primary driver of business development but that does not mean she is doing this alone. Imagine she has a colleague Greg who is a lead architect at the firm. While Greg’s first focus is delivering for his clients, business development—and even marketing—should still be a part of his professional life. Perhaps Greg attends an industry conference with Bethany, he as a speaker and expert and her as the primary networker. The business development dynamic should not end with Bethany and should permeate the whole organization.

In this business development example, you can see that the range of roles and responsibilities is wide. This is why it is essential for business development to not be ad hoc, but done strategically. Let’s talk about that now.

Strategic Business Development

Not all business development is of equal impact. In fact a lot of the activities of many professionals are very opportunistic and tactical in nature.This is especially true with many seller-doers. 

Caught between the pressures of client work and an urgent need for new business they cast about for something quick and easy that will produce short term results. Of course this is no real strategy at all.

Strategic business development is the alignment of business development processes and procedures with your firm’s strategic business goals. The role of strategic business development is to acquire ideal clients for your highest priority services using brand promises that you can deliver upon.

 Deciding which targets to pursue and strategies to employ to develop new business is actually a high stakes decision. A good strategy, well implemented, can drive high levels of growth and profitability. A faulty strategy can stymie growth and frustrate valuable talent.

Yet many firms falter at this critical step. They rely on habit, anecdotes and fads — or worse still, “this is how we have always done it.” In a later section we’ll cover how to develop your strategic business development plan. But first we’ll cover some of the strategies that may go into that plan.

Top Business Development Strategies

Let’s look at some of the most common business development strategies and how they stack up with today’s buyers .

Networking is probably the most universally used business development strategy. It’s built on the theory that professional services buying decisions are rooted in relationships, and the best way to develop new relationships is through face-to-face networking.

It certainly is true that many relationships do develop in that way. And if you are networking with your target audience, you can develop new business. But there are limitations. Today’s buyers are very time pressured, and networking is time consuming. It can be very expensive, if you consider travel and time away from the office.

Newer digital networking techniques can help on the cost and time front. But even social media requires an investment of time and attention.

The close relative of networking, referrals are often seen as the mechanism that turns networking and client satisfaction into new business. You establish a relationship, and that person refers new business to you. Satisfied clients do the same.

Clearly, referrals do happen, and many firms get most or all of their business from them. But referrals are passive. They rely on your clients and contacts to identify good prospects for your services and make a referral at the right time.

The problem is referral sources often do not know the full range of how you can help a client. So many referrals are poorly matched to your capabilities. Other well-matched referrals go unmade because your referral source fails to recognize a great prospect when they see one. Finally, many prospects that might be good clients rule out your firm before even talking with you. One recent study puts the number at over 50%.

Importantly, there are new digital strategies that can accelerate referrals. Making your specific expertise more visible is the key. This allows people to make better referrals and increases your referral base beyond clients and a few business contacts.

Learn More: Referral Marketing Course

Sponsorships and Advertising

Can you develop new business directly by sponsoring events and advertising? It would solve a lot of problems if it works. No more trying to get time from fully utilized billable professionals.

Unfortunately, the results on this front are not very encouraging. Studies have shown that traditional advertising is actually associated with slower growth. Only when advertising is combined with other techniques, such as speaking at an event, do these techniques bear fruit.

The most promising advertising strategy seems to be well-targeted digital advertising. This allows firms to get their messages and offers in front of the right people at a lower cost.

Outbound Telephone and Mail

Professional services firms have been using phone calls and mail to directly target potential clients for decades. Target the right firms and roles with a relevant message and you would expect to find new opportunities that can be developed into clients.

There are a couple of key challenges with these strategies. First they are relatively expensive, so they need to be just right to be effective. Second, if you don’t catch the prospect at the right time, your offer may have no appeal relevance — and consequently, no impact on business development.

The key is to have a very appealing offer delivered to a very qualified and responsive list. It’s not easy to get this combination right.

Thought Leadership and Content Marketing

Here, the strategy is to make your expertise visible to potential buyers and referral sources. This is accomplished through writing, speaking or publishing content that demonstrates your expertise and how it can be applied to solve client problems.

Books, articles and speaking engagements have long been staples of professional services business development strategy. Many high visibility experts have built their practices and firms upon this strategy. It often takes a good part of a career to execute this approach.

But changing times and technology have reshaped this strategy. With the onset of digital communication it is now easier and much faster to establish your expertise with a target market. Search engines have leveled the playing field so that relatively unknown individuals and firms can become known even outside their physical region. Webinars have democratized public speaking, and blogs and websites give every firm a 24/7 presence. Add in video and social media and the budding expert can access a vastly expanded marketplace.

But these developments also open firms to much greater competition as well. You may find yourself competing with specialists whom you were never aware of. The impact is to raise the stakes on your business development strategy.

Combined Strategies

It is common to combine different business development strategies. For example, networking and referrals are frequently used together. And on one level, a combined strategy makes perfect sense. The strength of one strategy can shore up the weakness of another.

But there is a hidden danger. For a strategy to perform at its peak, it must be fully implemented. There is a danger that by attempting to execute too many different strategies you will never completely implement any of them.

Good intentions, no matter how ambitious, are of little real business development value. Under-investment, lack of follow through and inconsistent effort are the bane of effective business development.

It is far more effective to fully implement a simple strategy than to dabble in a complex one. Fewer elements, competently implemented, produce better results.

Next, we turn our attention to the tactics used to implement a high-level strategy. But first there is a bit of confusion to clear up.

Business Development Strategy Vs. Tactics

The line between strategy and tactics is not always clear. For example, you can think of networking as an overall business development strategy or as a tactic to enhance the impact of a thought leadership strategy. Confusing to be sure.

From our perspective, the distinction is around focus and intent. If networking is your business development strategy all your focus should be on making the networking more effective and efficient. You will select tactics that are aimed at making networking more powerful or easier. You may try out another marketing technique and drop it if it does not help you implement your networking strategy.

On the other hand, if networking is simply one of many tactics, your decision to use it will depend on whether it supports your larger strategy. Tactics and techniques can be tested and easily changed. Strategy, on the other hand, is a considered choice and does not change from day to day or week to week.

10 Most Effective Business Development Tactics

Which business development tactics are most effective? To find out, we recently conducted a study that looked at over 1000 professional services firms. The research identified those firms that were growing at greater than a 20% compound annual growth rate over a three-year period.

These High Growth firms were compared to firms in the same industry that did not grow over the same time period. We then examined which business development tactics were employed by each group and which provided the most impact.

The result is a list of the ten most impactful tactics employed by the High Growth firms:

  • Outbound sales calls from internal teams
  • Providing assessments and/or consultations
  • Speaking at targeted conferences or events
  • Live product/service demonstrations
  • Presenting in educational webinars
  • Pursuing industry award opportunities
  • Business development materials
  • Email marketing campaigns
  • Conducting and publishing original research
  • Networking at targeted conferences or events

There are a couple of key observations about these growth tactics. First, these techniques can be employed in service of different business development strategies. For example number three on the list, speaking at targeted conferences or events, can easily support a networking or a thought leadership strategy.

The other observation is that the top tactics include a mix of both digital and traditional techniques. As we will see when we develop your plan, having a healthy mix of digital and traditional techniques tends to increase the impact of your strategy.

Business Development Skills

Now that we have identified the key business development strategies and tactics, it is time to consider the business development skills your team will need. Business development skills require a broad range of technical skills but there are some that make a difference.

When the Hinge Research Institute studied marketing and business development skills in our annual High Growth Study , we found that the firms who grow faster have a skill advantage within their marketing and business development teams.

business development project management

Let’s dive into the top three skills from this list. 

The number one business development skill high growth firms enjoy are strong project management skills. And for experienced business development specialists, this makes good sense. Staying organized, accurately tracking business development activity, and managing accounts are essential for building and maintaining strong business relationships. Activities like the proposal development see business development team resources manage and produce a strong proposal quickly, including the right stakeholders, and without sacrificing quality.

The next most important skill is simplifying complex concepts. In business development conversations, it is vital that team members are strong communicators of your firm’s service offerings and capabilities. Those who are able to take a comlex scope of work and communicate it in a way that a potential buyer can understand. Speaking in industry jargon or overly complicated charts is a fast way to see a business lead become unresponsive. Therefore, it is no surprise to see that the fastest growing professional services firms have an advantage in communicating complex information in a way that buyers understand.

The third most important business development skill is face-to-face networking. Despite the hiatus of many in-person events, high growth firms still reported that strong networking skills are a top skill enjoyed by their firms. Strong face-to-face networking skills are as much of an art as it is a science. While some can be more charismatic than others, everyone can prepare their teams with the resources and plan they need to succeed in a networking environment.

Review the other business development and marketing skills in the figure above and determine which skills your team should aim to develop. Strategy development for planning your business development plan, research for understanding the competitive landscape and industry trends, and social media prowess all play an important role in business development, too. Developing these skills should be a key priority of your business development team.

How to Create Your Strategic Business Development Plan

A Business Development Plan is a document that outlines how you implement your business development strategy. It can be a plan for an individual, a practice or the firm as a whole. Its scope covers both the marketing and sales functions, as they are so intertwined in most professional services firms.

Here are the key steps to develop and document your plan.

Define your target audience

Who are you trying to attract as new clients? Focus on your “best-fit” clients, not all possible prospects. It is most effective to focus on a narrow target audience. But don’t go so narrow that you can’t achieve your business goals.

Research their issues, buying behavior and your competitors

The more you know about your target audience the better equipped you will be to attract their attention and communicate how you can help them. What are their key business issues? Is your expertise relevant to those issues? Where do they look for advice and inspiration? What is the competitive environment like? How do you stack up?

Identify your competitive advantage

What makes you different? Why is that better for your target client? Are you the most cost-effective alternative, or the industry’s leading expert? This “positioning” as it is often called, needs to be true, provable and relevant to the prospect at the time they are choosing which firm to work with. Be sure to document this positioning, as you will use it over and over again as you develop your messages and marketing tools.

Choose your overall business development strategy

Pick the broad strategy or strategies to reach, engage and convert your prospects. You can start with the list of top strategies provided above. Which strategy fits with the needs and preferences of your target audiences? Which ones best convey your competitive advantage? For example, if you are competing because you have superior industry expertise, a thought leadership/content marketing strategy will likely serve you well.

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Choose your business development tactics

A great place to start is the list of the most effective tactics we provided above. Make sure that each technique you select fits your target audience and strategy. Remember, it’s not about your personal preferences or familiarity with a tactic. It’s about what works with the audience.

Also, you will need to balance your choices in two important ways: First, you will need tactics that address each stage of the business development pipeline shown in Figure 1. Some techniques work great for gaining visibility but do not address longer-term nurturing. You need to cover the full funnel.

Second, you need a good balance between digital and traditional techniques (Figure 2). Your research should inform this choice. Be careful about assumptions. Just because you don’t use social media doesn’t mean that a portion of your prospects don’t use it to check you out.

Online and Traditional Marketing

Figure 2. Online and offline marketing techniques

When, how often, which conferences, what topics? Now is the time to settle on the details that turn a broad strategy into a specific plan. Many plans include a content or marketing calendar that lays out the specifics, week by week. If that is too much detail for you, at least document what you will be doing and how often. You will need these details to monitor the implementation of your plan.

Specify how you will monitor implementation and impact

Often overlooked, these important considerations often spell the difference between success and failure. Unimplemented strategies don’t work. Keep track of what you do, and when. This will both motivate action and provide a great starting place as you troubleshoot your strategy. Also monitor and record the impacts you see. The most obvious affect will be how much new business you closed. But you should also monitor new leads or new contacts, at the bare minimum. Finally, don’t neglect important process outcomes such as referrals, new names added to your list and downloads of content that expose prospects and referral sources to your expertise.

If you follow these steps you will end up with a documented business development strategy and a concrete plan to implement and optimize it.

business development project management

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The Ultimate Guide to Business Development and How It Can Help Your Company Grow

Discover the importance of business development and how the process can help your business grow better.

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Outline your company's sales strategy in one simple, coherent plan.

business development

Updated: 08/19/22

Published: 08/17/21

Imagine working for a company without any employees dedicated to growing and developing the business.

Nobody to challenge you to improve or tell you about new business opportunities, changes in the market, what your competition is up to, or how you can attract your target audience more effectively.

This would make it pretty hard to succeed, don’t you think?

Free Download: Sales Plan Template

Business Development

Business Development Reps

BDR Responsibilities

Business Development Ideas

Business development process, business development plan.

Business development is the process of implementing strategies and opportunities across your organization to promote growth and boost revenue.

It involves pursuing opportunities to help your business grow, identifying new prospects, and converting more leads into customers. Business development is closely tied to sales — business development teams and representatives are almost always a part of the greater sales org.

Although business development is closely related to sales, it’s important to note what makes them different.

business development project management

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  • Target Market
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Business Development vs. Sales

As mentioned, business development lives on the greater sales team yet it serves a different function than typical sales work and responsibilities.

Business development is a process that helps your company establish and maintain relationships with prospects, learn about your buyer’s personas, increase brand awareness, and seek new opportunities to promote growth.

In contrast, sales teams sell your product or service to customers and work to convert leads into customers. Business development-related work simplifies the work of a salesperson or sales manager.

Let’s take a closer look at what business development representatives — the people responsible for carrying out the various business development tasks — do next.

Business Development Representative

Business development representatives (BDRs) seek out and establish new strategies, tactics, targets, employees, and prospects for your business. The goal of all BDRs is to find ways to grow and provide long-term value for the business.

Possessing the necessary business development skills and experience will help your BDRs achieve all of their day-to-day tasks and responsibilities.

Business Development Representative Responsibilities

Although some BDR responsibilities may change over time and as your business grows, the following list will provide you with a solid understanding of typical BDR tasks.

1. Qualify leads.

BDRs must qualify leads and pinpoint ideal prospects to determine who they'll sell to. Typically, leads are qualified through calls, emails, web forms, and social media.

The key to qualifying leads (leads who are assigned to the BDRs as well as leads BDRs identify themselves) is to consider their needs and then determine whether or not your product or software could be a solution for them.

2. Identify and communicate with prospects.

By qualifying leads and searching for people who fit your buyer personas, BDRs will identify ideal prospects. They can communicate with those prospects directly to learn more about their needs and pain points.

This way, BDRs can determine whether or not the prospect will really benefit from your product or service by becoming a customer. This is important because it increases the potential of improved customer loyalty and retention.

Once the BDRs have identified ideal prospects, those prospects can be passed along to a sales rep on the team (or sales manager, if necessary) who can nurture them into making a deal.

3. Proactively seek new business opportunities.

Proactively seeking new opportunities — whether that’s in terms of the product line, markets, prospects, or brand awareness — is an important part of your business’s success. BDRs work to find new business opportunities through networking, researching your competition, and talking to prospects and current customers.

If a new business opportunity is identified, BDRs should schedule marketing assessments and discovery meetings with the sales reps on the team so they can all assess whether or not there’s potential for a deal.

4. Stay up-to-date on competition and new market trends.

It’s important to stay up-to-date on your competition’s strategies, products, and target audience as well as any new market and industry trends.

This will allow you to more effectively identify ideal prospects. It also helps your business prepare for any shifts in the market that could lead to the need for a new approach to qualifying leads and attracting your target audience.

5. Report to salespeople and development managers.

As we reviewed, at most companies, BDRs report to sales reps and sales managers. BDRS must communicate with these higher-ups for multiple reasons such as discussing lead qualification strategies and how to get prospects in touch with sales reps to nurture them into customers.

BDRs also have to report their findings (such as business opportunities and market trends) to sales reps and managers. Relaying this information and collaborating with sales reps and managers to develop and/or update appropriate strategies for your business and audience is critical to your success as an organization.

6. Promote satisfaction and loyalty.

A BDR's interaction with a prospect might be the very first interaction that prospect ever has with your business. So, creating a great first impression right off the bat is crucial to promote interest early on.

Whether a BDR is working to qualify the lead, learn more about the prospect and their needs, or find the right sales rep to work on a deal with them, their interactions with all of your prospects matter.

Once a BDR researches the prospect or begins interacting with them, ensure they tailor all communication towards the prospect. Customizing all content sent their way shows them they’re being listened to and cared for. These actions are professional and leave a strong impression.

In addition to understanding how BDRs help you grow, business development ideas are another powerful way to engage prospects and identify new business opportunities. Let’s take a look.

  • Innovate the way you network.
  • Offer consultations.
  • Provide sales demos for prospects and leads.
  • Nurture prospects.
  • Provide prospects with several types of content.
  • Communicate with marketing.
  • Invest in your website.
  • Push your employees to expand and refine their skills.

Business development ideas are tactics you can implement to positively impact your company in a multitude of different ways. They can help you identify ideal prospects, network more effectively, improve brand awareness, and uncover new opportunities.

The following tactics are here to get you started — every business and team is different, meaning these ideas may or may not be suited for your specific situation. (So, feel free to modify the list!)

1. Innovate the way you network.

It’s no secret cold calls are less effective than they once were. Instead, innovate the way you network by establishing strong relationships with your prospects. You can do this by meeting with them in person at conferences, trade shows, or events related to your industry.

Browse your online networks including LinkedIn and other social sites for potential customers, too. Reach out to the people who sign up for your email subscription or complete other forms on your site.

2. Offer consultations.

Offer consultations and assessments for prospects. Talking about the ways your product or service applies to their needs will help prospects decide whether or not they’ll convert.

In contrast, consultations and assessments may also bring to light the ways a prospect is not an ideal fit for your product (which is equally as valuable since it prevents you from wasting any time nurturing them or having to deal with an unsatisfied customer down the road).

3. Provide sales demos for prospects and leads.

Provide your prospects and leads with sales demos so they can see how your product or service works in action. Ensure these demos are customized to show a prospect or lead how your product solves their challenge. You can share these demos in person, over email, on your website, or via video chat.

4. Nurture prospects.

Remember to nurture your prospects, whether it’s by phone call, email, meeting, or another mode of communication. The point of lead nurturing is to provide any information needed about your product or service so your prospects can decide whether or not they want to make a purchase.

By nurturing your leads , you’ll be able to tailor the content regarding your brand and product so your leads can better understand how your product will solve their specific pain points. You’ll also be able to show your support for the prospect and ensure they feel heard and understood by your company.

5. Provide prospects with several types of content.

Provide your prospects with different content types such as blogs, videos, and social media posts so they can learn more about your brand and product or service.

It’s best to meet your prospects where they are and provide the content they prefer to read or watch. Ensure all of this content is downloadable and/or shareable so prospects can send it to their team members to show them why your solution is their best option.

6. Communicate with marketing.

Although business development lives in the sales department, that doesn’t mean internal business development work only involves other members of the sales team. Host regular meetings and maintain open lines of communication with the departments at your company that impact your ability to succeed such as marketing and product development.

Think about it this way: Marketing creates content and campaigns for your target audience about how your product or service resolves their challenges. So, why wouldn’t you want to talk to them about the blogs, campaigns, social media posts, and website content they’re creating for the people you’re selling to?

Your reps and BDRs can share any content the marketing team creates directly with prospects to help them convert, as well as inform the marketing team of any content they feel is missing for prospects. If there are projects or campaigns out of your scope, you can opt to hire a marketing agency to help fill the void. But, like your marketing team, they'll need to understand your product and how to connect with your target audience.

7. Invest in your website.

You never get a second chance at a first impression, and in many cases, your website is exactly that — your prospects' first impression of your brand. So, it serves you to make it as accessible, navigable, visible, and helpful as possible.

Taking strides like making your site visually engaging, connecting your social media profiles, optimizing your site for search engines, linking to collateral like sales content , and maintaining an active blog can go a long way when conducting business development.

8. Push your employees to expand and refine their skills and knowledge.

Business development is never stagnant. Strategy, technology, and market conditions are all constantly evolving — so you're best off having your employees stay abreast of these trends.

Anyone involved in your business development should be liable to develop new skills as needed. If your organization adopts any sort of new technology, thoroughly train anyone the change touches on how to use it.

Encourage your employees to learn more about both the nuances of their field and the industries they serve. Is artificial intelligence starting to shift the dynamics of a specific industry? If so, make the BDRs who serve that market learn all they can about how it might change the nature of the companies they interact with.

A business development process is the combination of steps your business takes to grow effectively, boost revenue, improve relationships with leads, and more. These steps are what your business development team will work on every day. It includes everything related to delighting customers along each part of the buyer's journey.

By working through your business development process, your team will have a strong understanding of your organization-wide goals, sales targets, current business situation, who your target audience members are, and more.

How to Do Business Development

  • Conduct extensive market research.
  • Raise visibility and awareness.
  • Promote thought leadership.
  • Conduct outreach.
  • Qualify leads to pass off to sales.
  • Provide exemplary customer service.
  • Develop sales content from success stories.

1. Conduct extensive market research.

Successful business development rests, in large part, on you understanding your market and target personas. If you have no idea who you're trying to sell to and the state of the market they comprise, you can't successfully implement any other point on this list.

Study and survey your current customers to see who tends to buy from you. Look into your competition to get a feel for where you fit into your broader market. And take any other strides to get a better feel for the "who" behind your successful sales — without that intel, you'll never be able to shape the "how" side of your business development.

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Free Market Research Kit

5 Research and Planning Templates + a Free Guide on How to Use Them in Your Market Research

  • SWOT Analysis Template
  • Survey Template
  • Focus Group Template

2. Raise visibility and awareness.

Business development, as a broader practice, extends beyond your sales org — your marketing department can also play a central role in the process. You can't source a base of potential customers if no one knows who you are.

Actions like constructing an effective website, investing in paid advertising, leveraging social profiles, participating in co-marketing partnerships with industry peers, and maintaining an active blog can all go a long way in supporting successful business development.

3. Promote thought leadership.

This point is sort of an extension of the one above. Establishing credibility is one of the more important steps you can take when doing business development. You can't just stop with prospects knowing who you are — they need to trust you if you're ever going to earn their business.

Publishing in-depth, industry-specific blog content is one way to get there — if you can show that you have a firm grasp on every aspect of your field, you can frame yourself as a reliable, knowledgeable resource for your customers. That kind of trust often translates to sales, down the line. Other media like webinars, white papers, and video content can also help your case.

4. Conduct outreach.

Actively reaching out to prospects is one of the most crucial, traditional elements of business development. You need to touch base with prospects if you're going to vet them and ultimately convert them to qualified leads.

This step is typically supported by extensive research on individual prospects, paired with contacting warm and cold leads proactively but not aggressively. BDRs typically shoulder this responsibility — and for many people, it's the aspect of the process most closely associated with the term "business development."

5. Qualify leads.

Once your BDRs have connected with leads, they need to qualify them to determine their viability and understand whether they're worth the sales org's time and effort. That generally entails having conversations with leads and asking the right qualifying questions to reveal their fit for your product or service.

This is one of the most pivotal moments in the business development process — in some respects, it could be considered its last step. Successfully executing this point typically means the process, as a whole, has worked.

6. Provide exemplary customer service.

Business development is an ongoing process that involves virtually every side of your business in some capacity — and customer service is no exception. Your service org needs to keep current customers happy to generate positive word of mouth and bolster your company's reputation. That kind of effort offers you credibility and can generate referrals, making business development more straightforward and effective.

7. Develop sales content from success stories.

Another part of business development is translating customer satisfaction into actionable, promotable sales content — pointed, product-specific content that's used to generate sales. While marketing content is used for thought leadership and garnering general interest, sales content is used to appeal to potential buyers, looking into your company specifically.

Sales content can come in a variety of forms, including case studies and testimonials — two mediums that lean heavily on your current customer base. When you use customers' experiences to generate interest in your business, your business development efforts essentially come full circle.

Visual of the 7 business development process/strategy stages

By compiling these elements of business development and sharing them among your team, you create an actionable business development strategy or plan that encourages and promotes success and growth. Let's review the different steps involved in creating your business development plan next.

A business development plan is a strategy your team can refer to while working to achieve growth-related goals. Sales managers typically create the business development plan for BDRs to work on.

The purpose of a business development plan (or strategy) is to set realistic goals and targets that allow your reps to grow the business, close more deals, identify prospects, align members of the sales team (and other teams, company-wide), and convert more leads.

1. Craft an elevator pitch.

You can simplify any initial communication with prospects by having an elevator pitch ready to go. This elevator pitch should explain your company’s mission and how your product or service can solve the needs of your target audience. Your elevator pitch should grab the attention of prospects and leads — and get them excited to learn more about what you offer.

Additionally, you can help your team determine which elevator pitches used by both BDRs and reps are most successful in converting leads and then document it in your greater strategy so everyone has access to it.

2. Set SMART goals.

Set SMART goals for your strategy — meaning, make sure your targets are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. By creating SMART goals for your business development plan, you’ll be able to ensure these goals are aligned with those of your entire company.

For example, if one of your goals is to increase your number of identified qualified leads this quarter by 5% , make the goal specific by determining the type of prospects you’ll focus on and how you’ll identify them.

Then, decide how you’ll measure your success — perhaps by measuring the number of these prospects who then go on to talk with a sales rep to learn more about the product or service.

You determine this goal is attainable due to the fact you increased your number of qualified leads last quarter by 3%. 5% isn’t too much of a leap.

Your goal is relevant because you know it’ll help your business grow — it pushes you to make a greater impact on your team by contributing to the sales team’s ability to close more deals and boost revenue. Lastly, it’s timely because you’ve set this goal for the quarter.

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Free SMART Goal Template

A free template to help you create S.M.A.R.T. goals for marketing campaign success.

  • Set your goals
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3. Conduct a SWOT analysis.

As mentioned above, part of any role in business development is to stay up-to-date on market and industry trends and understand your competition. This is where SWOT analysis comes in handy — SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats . The key to using SWOT analysis correctly is to have a clear goal in mind first.

For example, if your goal is to determine the best way to handle outreach with prospects , you can begin talking to your BDRs, sales reps, sales managers, and current customers about what works best for them.

Next, think about your strengths — what does your business do well? Maybe you have a large support team that provides helpful onboarding for new customers. Or you have several remote reps who can meet face-to-face with prospects in their desired location.

(You might have multiple strengths that make you stand out, so don’t be afraid to list them all and which ones have the greatest impact on your customers.)

Now, think about your weaknesses . Are your product’s limited offerings requiring some leads to consider your competition’s product in addition to yours? Is the need for your product growing faster than your production, or faster than you’re able to establish a large customer support team to assist your customers?

Onto your business opportunities . Think about where you’re going as a business and what you know you can accomplish. For example, maybe your business has recently partnered with another company that can help you boost brand awareness and attract a much broader base of leads and customers.

Lastly, who are your threats ? Think about your current competition — who’s producing a product or service like yours and is attracting a similar target audience? Who could become your competition in the future — is there a market gap that another company (new or established) could identify the need for and begin selling?

SWOT analysis allows you to identify the ways your company can create opportunities to grow and expand. It also helps how you establish new processes to address any weaknesses or threats such as identifying more qualified leads, efficiently converting prospects into customers, and shortening the sales cycle.

4. Determine how you’ll measure success.

Depending on the SMART goals you created and the SWOT analysis you performed, you’ll also need to decide how you’re going to measure your business development success.

Here are some examples of common business development KPIs that can help you analyze your efforts:

  • Company growth
  • Changes in revenue
  • Lead conversion rate
  • Leads generated per month/ quarter/ predetermined time
  • Prospect and customer satisfaction
  • Pipeline value

5. Set a budget.

Depending on the type of business development goals you set for the team, you may determine you need to set a budget. Consider your resources, the cost of any previous business development strategies you’ve developed, and other important operational line items (what you need, who’s involved, etc.).

Collaborate with the greater team to determine the amount you’re willing to, and need to, spend on business development to get the process started at your company.

6. Always keep your target audience in mind.

Whatever it is you’re working towards, keep your target audience and ideal prospects in mind. Assess their needs and understand exactly how your business and product or service will meet their pain points.

After all, this audience is the group who is most likely to buy your product. Make sure your plan addresses them and their needs so your team can convert more of them and grow your business.

7. Choose an outreach strategy.

As we’ve reviewed above, a major component of business development is finding new prospects and potential customers. To find new prospects, you’ll need to decide how you’ll perform outreach, or connect with these potential customers. Here are some ideas:

  • Use referrals
  • Upsell and cross-sell
  • Sponsorship and advertisement

Also, review any expectations or guardrails related to outreach reps are held to so your business has only professional and on-brand interactions with prospects.

Congrats! You’ve just completed your business development plan — with your strategy and ideas, your business will be growing in no time.

Business Development Resources

1. hubspot sales hub.

Business Development Resources Hubspot

Best for Businesses Interested in a Wide-Reaching, One-Stop Solution

HubSpot Sales Hub includes a suite of resources that enable more focused, effective business development. Features like email templates and email tracking lend themselves to well-targeted, productive prospecting.

Its conversational intelligence capabilities can provide invaluable insight into the "why" behind your BDRs' overall performance — letting you pinpoint the strengths and flaws in key business development elements like your messaging and pain point assessments.

Sales Hub is a dynamic solution that covers a lot of bases for your sales org — including several beyond business development. But that wide range of applications doesn't undermine its utility for BDRs and their managers. If you're looking for a solution that addresses almost every component of successful business development, consider investing in HubSpot Sales Hub.

2. Bloobirds

image_Playbook_Builder

Best for Businesses Interested in Keeping BDRs and Top-of-Funnel Activities on Track

Bloobirds is a sales engagement and playbook platform that guides SDRs and closing reps to convert more prospects into customers. It partners with your existing CRM — sitting on top of it to make it more functional for the sales team.

It eliminates admin tasks, makes selling more intuitive, and makes sure reps follow best plays with the in-app playbook's help. Bloobirds helps sales teams flow through their pipeline — it also collects crucial data and creates competitive insights.

3. Leadfeeder

Business Development Resources leadfeeder

Best for Businesses Struggling to Generate High-Potential Leads

Leadfeeder is a powerful resource for enhancing a central element of any business development efforts — lead generation The platform helps you identify high-potential leads by automatically analyzing your website traffic.

The software removes ISP traffic to pin down visitors' companies and gauge interest. It also lets you create behavioral and demographic filters for better-informed, more productive lead segmentation.

Successful business development often leans, in large part, on your ability to generate high-quality leads — so if you're interested in effectively sourcing those contacts, you'll need to invest in some sort of lead generation software. Leadfeeder is as good a place as any to start.

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How To Use LinkedIn For Business And Marketing

Take control of your LinkedIn strategy with this free guide. You'll learn about...

  • LinkedIn Company Pages
  • Optimizing for Search.
  • LinkedIn Analytics.

4. LinkedIn

Business Development Resources LinkedIn

Best for Businesses Looking for a Free Way to Source Leads

LinkedIn is one of the most prominent, practical, effective resources for certain key elements of the business development process — namely, prospecting. The value behind leveraging social media for top-of-funnel sales activities isn't exactly some well-kept secret.

Plenty of business development professionals already use channels like LinkedIn to source, screen, and connect with potential leads. Strides like scrolling through skill endorsements, using alumni searches, and engaging with users who have looked at your posts are all excellent ways to find interested prospects and enhance your business development efforts.

Business Development Helps You Grow Better

Business development is a crucial part of any successful company. It’s how you determine the best ways to boost revenue, identify your ideal prospects, generate more leads, and close more deals.

Think about how you can make a strong business development plan and ensure you have the right group of business development reps so you can begin growing your business today.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in July, 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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Project Manager

When project management meets business development

Historically for PMOs and project managers, and still all too often, new projects seemed to appear almost magically out of thin air. The reality is this is rarely the case, and a lot of discussion had taken place without any visibility by those involved in project delivery. Given this, how should a project/PMO manager deal with the process and people in business development? In particular, how can they ensure that what is put forward at a tendering/proposal stage is what the project team is capable of delivering?

Businesses and organisations—both public and private—operate in an uncertain and changing economic environment. Over the last two years alone Australian organisations have felt the impact of the global financial crisis, combined with a continuing resources boom and domestic elections.

Organisations have long recognised the need to develop or adapt operations to meet evolving environment and objectives, requiring them to look at implementing business development or improvement activities. In the past, this might have occurred in an unstructured way, with managers initiating projects without considering impact on other parts of business, leading to duplication of effort, overlapping schedules, conflicting demands for resources and even changes that are redundant before full benefits can be realised.

In addition, new projects were often not started until the desired delivery dates were already difficult to achieve, sometimes because the business sponsors did not appreciate the time and effort required to establish projects, at other times because they delayed making the decision too long due to a fear of uncertain outcomes.

Where senior management understanding of project delivery process was lacking, there was a tendency to focus on outputs, rather that the development of capability or capacity to use outputs. Upgrading to a new version of a software package, for example, might be a technically simple project and have the benefit of reducing IT costs, but sometimes the differences with earlier versions required considerable effort to educate users on new features and the organisation needs to establish support for resolving user issues, which leads to an underestimation of effort required and insufficient change management planning.

According to the contract

Other issues include where contractual differences arise, with disputes from lack of communication or understanding of the requirements, or even an expectation that the original budget is just a starting point rather than being fixed is another problem faced in delivery. Take the UK’s NHS Connecting for Health, which became the National Programme for IT, which was originally expected to cost £2.3 billion when it began in 2002. When it was killed in September 2010, estimated costs had risen to £12.7 billion.

One approach to these issues has been to introduce greater standardisation of procurement processes, especially in government, as a means to reduce delivery risk. Today, many projects, especially in construction and the public sector, require complex and lengthy tendering processes. This can be frustrating to those looking to deliver a project but this upfront planning and clarification is essential to improving successful delivery.

However, delays in moving from requirements definition and contract negotiation without the end date moving can still compromise the project delivery methodology—this can be identified by symptoms such as initiation and requirements documents not being signed off until project is well under way. Many of these problems can be avoided by a PMO educating business management on the processes to explore, prioritise and establish projects, as well as provide support for the mobilisation of projects.

Today, business change initiatives are generally better controlled and managed as programs or projects, increasingly managed through a PMO or other coordinating group, although the approaches used vary by business and industry. In addition, portfolio management, or another means for maintaining a holistic view of activities across an organisation, prevent projects emerging from business units in response to local issues without consideration of the wider impact.

At the simplest level, projects emerge at the end of a process, starting with an idea that develops into a mandate. This mandate forms the basis of a project setup and initiation. The variation in how projects start and how project managers become involved means the standard methodologies cannot cover everything in detail, leaving the practicalities to experienced professionals. This need for experienced professionals is accepted by most organisations as they recognise the delivery of projects requires specific skills that are either missing or in short supply internally. Although sometimes caused by financial constraints, this lack of capability is often intentional, as maintaining a project delivery capability is expensive, especially in stable industries with little need for significant business change and where most change can be managed through quality improvement programs in business as usual.

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Meet any target: business development plan template

business development project management

A company’s goals are an integral part of its productivity. When your team understands what targets they need to hit, they have something clear to strive for and feel a sense of pride when they succeed. Setting intentions about where your business is going and how to get there is an important part of the building process.

Gain clarity about what your company’s objectives are with the help of a free business development plan template. We’ll share a fully customizable template with you that you can use on monday.com. But before that, this article looks at the benefits of using such templates and what you should include in a business development plan.

Get the template

What is a business development plan template?

business development project management

A business development plan template is a customizable document that outlines the objectives of your business and actionable steps to meet them. These can be your company’s long or short-term goals, amounts needed for start-up costs, or specific milestones, such as hitting a specific monthly sales target, or getting your first repeat client. The plan outlines steps to take to get to those goals and assigns specific tasks to individuals to hold them accountable for meeting the deadlines.

A business development plan template is a pre-formatted tool that describes your business objectives and how you’ll achieve them.

Although you can always write these plans down in a regular, static document, many businesses opt to use a customizable pre-built format to get off to a strong start.

Why use a business development plan template?

As a business owner, creating a custom, agile business development plan helps you gain clarity regarding decision-making on areas, such as investments, resources, and budgeting. Unlike with pen and paper, or even a word doc, a template is dynamic. You can move initiatives around, assign ownership, store all relevant information on the template itself, and customize any aspect of the template from labels, template structure and appearance, automations, and more.

Of course, there are a lot of things to consider when it comes to creating a well-thought-out document. Below, we’ll discuss some of the things you may want to consider and include in your business development plan.

What to include in a business development plan

A business development plan comes into play during the growth stage of your business. By specifying your targets and plans of action, the business development plan becomes a roadmap for achieving growth and success. To ensure you have a strong plan, consider including the elements summarized below.

Financial goals

A business’s growth is largely based on its financial success, so it’s critical to assess your current financial position to set targets for the future. Start by:

  • Looking to your past and current revenue as a baseline for what your business brings in
  • Assessing your overhead costs versus your profits
  • Setting goals for bringing in higher profits and revenue in the coming months and years
  • Getting specific about your timeline, so you can reassess your financial position when you hit those dates

Funding plan

Meeting your financial goals and achieving financial growth requires funding. Use this section of the business development plan to determine the amount of business capital you currently have and what steps you can take to secure more funding in the future within your target market segment.

Opportunities for growth

Look at your business to identify where you have room to grow. This will vary depending on what industry and business you work in. For some, this might mean developing a new line of products or adding additional services that can attract new clients and boost revenue.

Operational needs

Examine operational needs and take a practical look at what needs to change in the daily function of your business to support expansion and further development. This could mean investing in new equipment or hiring additional personnel to oversee specific departments or projects.

Sales and marketing plans

An important part of business growth is how you promote your company to consumers. Determine a marketing strategy to get customers excited about your new products and services or to inform consumers of investments you’re making in equipment upgrades. Your marketing plans are how you’ll communicate your investments and improvements to drive growth through customer interest.

Understand strengths and weaknesses 

Creating a business development plan requires a firm understanding of your company’s strengths and weaknesses. To identify these, consider performing a SWOT analysis . You can use the resulting information to develop a strategic plan to leverage strengths and improve on weak areas across all aspects of your business.

Building your team

For a business to grow successfully, you must also expand your workforce. This means hiring new team members and learning to delegate tasks with a lower priority or difficulty level, so you can focus on matters of high-level priority. Use this part of your plan to assess what tasks you can assign to someone else and how many people you might need to hire to meet the demands of your growing business.

Having a plan to develop your business is a great foundation. But you also need tools to put that plan into action. Starting with a solution that lets you bring people together, communicate priorities, and manage tasks can increase your chances of success.

monday.com supports business development and planning

Your business development plan template is the starting point for your company’s expansion. As you move toward creating targets and future plans for your business, you can make use of the many other features and templates on monday.com to understand where you’re at with your business and what areas are ready to support growth.

monday.com lets you create workflows to plan and track projects and day-to-day processes. Connect off-platform tools necessary for collaboration and communication with team members from around the world, and leverage no-code automation opportunities to streamline repetitive tasks.

You can start with our Business Development Plan Template, customizing the columns to meet your specific needs.  Take notes, mention team members on tasks to get their feedback, or color-code your business development plan to create a visual that’s easy to digest at a glance.

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Once you’re ready to put your business development plan into action, turn to our Template Center for plenty of other tools to help you get started on various tasks.

Related templates 

A business development plan template isn’t the only useful tool for growing your business. Consider some of these other options to help your teams increase efficiency and promote growth.

One-page business plan template

Our easy-to-use One-page Business Plan Template is meant to provide an overview of your objectives and deadlines at a glance. Completing the one-page business plan template creates a reference point for the scope of your business objectives that you can easily return to at any time.

Business executive summary template

Our Business Executive Summary Template is an ideal tool when you’re preparing to pitch your company to investors. It offers a guide for emphasizing the core of your business plan in a way that appeals to the interests of your target audience. You can include sales/marketing plans, staff expenses, and long-term goals to provide prospective stakeholders with a clear picture of where your business stands and where it’s going.

Writing business plans is easier when you start with a template. But knowing what to include and what might be most important can help you make the most of such documents. Check the FAQs below for some more tips.

FAQs about business development plan templates

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What are the main parts of a business plan?

A solid business plan should have four key components. The main parts of a business plan include:

  • An executive summary
  • A marketing plan
  • Key management bios
  • A financial plan that includes cost and pricing information

What is the most important part of a business plan?

The executive summary is the most important part of any business plan. The executive summary acts as the preface to the overall business plan and the hook that gets readers excited about the possibility of investing in your company. The goal of the executive summary is to entice the investor to read the rest of your plan, so aim for the most polished version possible.

Build your company’s future with a business development plan template from monday.com 

Your business development strategy is critical to growing your company and meeting future goals. Using templates from monday.com can help you build your business development plan to drive success.

Having a business plan creates a 30% higher chance of growth for your business compared to businesses that don’t start with written action plans. A customizable, user-friendly business development plan template provides a starting point to realizing your objectives.

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  • Project manager

What is a project manager? Responsibilities and best practices explained

Browse topics.

A project manager, or PM, coordinates the elements of a project, aiming for timely completion within budget and with high standards. They're the central figure connecting project goals with the collective efforts of their team and help navigate obstacles to guide projects to their goals. 

This guide explores the role of PMs, highlighting their critical responsibilities, key skills, and best strategies. It also examines how platforms like Confluence can help PMs enhance team collaboration and communication across the project life cycle .

What is a project manager?

A PM is a leader who guides projects from the drawing board to the finish line. They make sure everything runs smoothly and stays on schedule. They gather necessary resources, unite team members, and work on continuous improvement .

PMs connect the day-to-day work with the bigger picture. They support the broader objectives of the company and satisfy stakeholder needs.

Project manager responsibilities

PMs juggle a variety of core responsibilities to lead a project through hurdles and changes. Mastery in each of these areas contributes to a smoother experience from the perspective of both team members and stakeholders: 

  • Project planning : PMs initiate the planning process, clearly defining the project's scope, goals, and objectives. They develop detailed plans outlining tasks, resources, timelines, and deliverables, creating a solid foundation for project execution.
  • Team coordination : Project managers assemble and direct project teams, assigning tasks based on members' skills and experience. PMs focus and unify team efforts by promoting collaboration, resolving conflicts, and leading effective team meetings . 
  • Risk management : PMs identify potential risks early, analyze their possible impact, and develop mitigation strategies. This proactive approach minimizes disruptions to the project’s schedule, quality, and budget.
  • Budget oversight : PMs estimate costs, establish budgets, track spending, and adjust as necessary to keep the project within financial boundaries while achieving fiscal efficiency.
  • Client communication : They maintain open and transparent communication with clients and stakeholders. PMs provide updates, respond to inquiries, and use feedback to adapt project scope to meet or exceed client expectations.
  • Maintaining quality standards : PMs implement quality control processes to ensure deliverables meet agreed-upon standards and satisfy client requirements. This helps maintain project integrity.

Project manager skills

The success of any project depends heavily on the unique blend of soft and hard skills possessed by the PM. Here are some of the critical soft skills that PMs need to excel in their role:

  • Communication : PMs must master verbal and written communication to convey project objectives, updates, and feedback to all stakeholders. This fosters alignment and collaboration throughout the project life cycle.
  • Adaptability : PMs need to respond to project shifts and unforeseen challenges with flexibility. They must be able to adjust strategies and plans to keep projects moving forward.
  • Problem-solving : PMs must approach issues decisively. They use critical thinking to analyze problems, devise solutions, and apply them effectively. This minimizes the impact on project progress and outcomes.
  • Leadership : PMs provide team leadership to inspire and motivate. They guide team members, support their development, and cultivate a collaborative environment.
  • Organizational skills : Exceptional organizational abilities allow PMs to balance multiple tasks and priorities. They skillfully map out schedules, allocate resources, and monitor project timelines to guide their team toward success.

Best practices for project managers

Great PMs commit to applying best practices consistently across projects. They understand that good project management comes from a blend of skill, strategy, and continuous refinement. Here are some key best practices:

Prioritize clear communication

Clear communication keeps everyone moving in the same direction and places transparency and efficiency at the heart of the team's workflow . Encouraging open exchanges of ideas, progress updates, and concerns helps the team tackle obstacles head-on and propels the project forward. 

Create effective project plans

Well-structured project plans contain the following key elements:

  • Scope : Define the project scope clearly. This helps prevent scope creep and ensures everyone understands the project boundaries.
  • Goals and objectives : Establish what the project aims to achieve. Objectives should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
  • Milestones and timeline : Identify crucial milestones and create a timeline that outlines when each project phase should be completed.
  • Resources : Detail necessary resources (people, budget, technology) and allocate them effectively. This includes identifying roles and responsibilities.
  • Risk management : Anticipate potential risks and strategize how to address them. This fosters a proactive approach to uncertainty management.
  • Communication plan: Outline how you will handle communication within the project team and with stakeholders. This includes frequency, methods, and key points.

Use project management tools

Using specialized project management software empowers PMs to excel in their roles. 

Project manager software is a centralized hub for everything project-related, including plans, tasks, and resources. This simplifies outlining projects, distributing tasks, and tracking deadlines. Everyone stays in the loop, reducing mix-ups and enhancing teamwork .

Project management software also improves how teams communicate. Tools facilitate smoother updates, collaborative problem-solving, and efficient coordination. This includes commenting, file sharing, and simultaneous editing.

Confluence is the premier project management solution for PMs seeking to overcome the common PgM challenge of fragmented communication and scattered data and documents. The platform serves as a central repository for all project-related documents and knowledge. Information is readily accessible to anyone who needs it, allowing PMs more time to focus on strategic tasks.

Empower your team

An inspired and empowered team not only boosts productivity but also becomes a driving force behind project success. Effective PMs cultivate a positive work environment through various team management strategies , such as:

  • Ensure each team member knows their role, expectations, and how their work contributes to the project's success.
  • Give team members the freedom to make decisions about their work. This builds trust and encourages innovation.
  • Provide opportunities for team members to develop their skills and grow professionally. This can include training, workshops, or taking on new challenges within the project.
  • Regularly acknowledge and celebrate achievements, both individually and as a team. 
  • Create an environment where team members feel comfortable sharing their ideas, concerns, and feedback.

Effective project management with Confluence

Confluence transforms project management through centralized collaboration and efficiency. It serves as a dynamic platform where teams unite. They can share and update project plans in real-time, keeping everyone aligned and informed. Confluence offers many features for effective project management, including:

  • Simultaneous editing : Say goodbye to endless email chains. Edit documents together.
  • Ready-made templates : Jumpstart your projects with templates for everything from meeting notes to project plans .
  • Task management : Assign and track tasks right in your documents, keeping everyone accountable.
  • Effortless organization : With powerful search and sorting capabilities, finding what you need is a breeze.
  • Seamless integration : Jira works with other third-party apps, putting all your tools in one place.

Confluence is more than a tool—it's a game-changer for teams dedicated to improving how they manage projects and collaborate. It also supports versatile content types – think pages for detailed documentation, whiteboards for brainstorming, Loom videos for walkthroughs, and databases for structured information. AI capabilities further expand Confluence’s feature set by summarizing text, highlighting action items, and even adjusting the tone of specific communication.

Try Confluence today and experience a unified workspace that propels projects forward.

Project manager: Frequently asked questions

What does a project manager do on a daily basis.

PMs juggle various tasks daily, including monitoring project progress, talking things through with stakeholders, tackling issues that arise, and tweaking plans to keep everything on track with the project's goals.

What are project management methodologies?

Project management methodologies act as blueprints for navigating a project's life cycle. Agile and Scrum are great for fast-paced, iterative projects. Waterfall and Lean work better for projects with a defined sequence or a focus on minimizing waste.

Why is a project manager important?

A project manager is vital because they act as the bridge between a project's plan and its execution. A PM's core role is to ensure that projects meet deadlines, stay within budget, and adhere to quality standards. Their expertise in managing timelines and resources prevents miscommunication and scope creep. 

What is the difference between a program manager and a project manager?

A program manager oversees a group of related projects, focusing on long-term objectives and the overall impact on the company's goals. A project manager is responsible for the daily operations of a single project. They concentrate on meeting specific deadlines, budgets, and scope. 

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PM Need to Know: What is Business Development?

David Burstein, P.E.

Some do, but too many project managers don’t know enough about marketing, sales, or client management. As a result, they miss opportunities to grow their firms and themselves.

In the A/E industry, terms like marketing, sales, and business development get thrown around casually, often meaning different things to different people. Here are PSMJ’s definitions:

Marketing – All the activities involved in finding a client with a project and deciding to pursue that project.

Sales – All the activities from the time a “go” decision is made to pursue a project until the firm is selected and the contract is signed. 

Client Management – All the activities for existing clients whose goal is to find new leads, either with that client or from a referral from that client.

Business Development – The umbrella that covers marketing, sales, and client management.

As firms create a firm's Business Development Plan, it's important to treat each “leg” of the triangle separately—they each require a different approach. For example:

Marketing – What characteristics are you looking for in a quality client? Where can you find such clients? How do you create an environment where they seek you out?

Sales – What is your hit rate on competitive proposals? How can you raise it?

Client management – Who are your existing quality clients? Are you getting all the work you can from them? If not, what else can you get, how can you get it and who is responsible for getting it?

Project managers are the gatekeepers to the firm's profits and long-term health. With a better understanding of business development,  project managers can become more effective seller-doers, feel more comfortable in the business development role, and increase value in their firms.

About the Author: D avid Burstein P.E. is Director of Client Services for PSMJ Resources, Inc., the nation’s largest provider of management information to the engineering/architectural professions. As part of his responsibilities, he provides consulting and training services on the subjects of strategic planning, marketing, project management, human resources, quality, finance and ownership transition. He is lead instructor and developer of PSMJ's  A/E/C Project Management Bootcamp .

A/E/C Project Management Bootcamp

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  • How Project Managers Can Wear a Business Development Hat

business development project management

Ryan Schaefer , Former Senior Project Manager

Article Categories: #Strategy , #Process , #Project Management

Posted on March 12, 2019

Project Managers are typically overseeing work, keeping up a steady stream of communication, and working to build a relationship with clients. That’s a natural entry point for pitching and closing future business.

P r o j e c t M a n a g e r s a r e t y p i c a l l y o v e r s e e i n g w o r k , k e e p i n g u p a s t e a d y s t r e a m o f c o m m u n i c a t i o n , a n d w o r k i n g t o b u i l d a r e l a t i o n s h i p w i t h c l i e n t s . T h a t ’ s a n a t u r a l e n t r y p o i n t f o r p i t c h i n g a n d c l o s i n g f u t u r e b u s i n e s s .

If you’ve been immersed in agency life your whole career like I have, you know there is a lot of pressure on business development and account management teams to keep money coming in to weather the natural ebbs and flows of client-based business models. For any company, particularly a growing one, a significant portion of your work can come from expanding existing engagements with current clients and by word of mouth. The first step for this tried-and-true system is to knock your current projects out of the park to build trust and bolster your reputation.

As a Project Manager, your main job consists of doing exactly that . It’s time consuming and requires you to be nimble, personable, diligent, and organized (among other things). But it’s also important to be comfortable with the fact that you’re a de facto mouthpiece for your company. You’re the one overseeing the work, keeping up a steady stream of communication, and ultimately, working to build a relationship with your clients. That’s a natural entry point to facilitating, pitching, and closing future business. And you can provide a unique perspective on it since you’ve been living and breathing the work.

While business development relies on good project management in most agencies, there are a few things PMs need to do to shift their mindsets to be even more forward-thinking. Below are some considerations if you’re looking to play in the business development game.

Make inroads with the right client-side contacts.

Often, your main point person on the client side isn’t the decision maker for hiring or re-hiring vendors. You’ll probably see them in stakeholder meetings and hear their thoughts or feedback filtered down through your primary client contact. But it’s often not an organic process to build a relationship with these decision makers, given their somewhat limited presence. You have to be proactive and strategic.

This can take a couple different forms: either you can have the BD person or Account Manager maintain that relationship by regularly checking with the stakeholder on project progress, how the team is feeling on pacing and communication, and evaluating what everyone is doing well and could be doing better. Simultaneously, the PM should work behind-the-scenes to provide all the necessary information to enable these ongoing discussions. That way, there’s a dedicated channel to bring up expansion of work and it won’t seem forced or unnatural.

Or, the PM can look for opportunities to get in front of this person regularly. Whether that takes the form of design reviews, demos, research findings, or presentations for any other deliverables, it’s helpful for them to see these first hand and in context, rather than it filtering up internally in a less formal way. This can be a double-edged sword; sometimes, a higher-level executive can have stronger opinions or not have quite as much domain knowledge about the project to be able to provide actionable feedback. That’s okay—the important part is they get to see the great work your team is doing.

Go in person.

During kickoffs, mid-project milestones, handoffs, or something in between, look for opportunities to bring your team to meet the client in person. It’s much easier to feel a connection with someone if you can speak face-to-face, rather than just interacting with a floating head on a webcam. When you’re there, dress smart, sit up straight, and speak confidently. All those old adages still apply, even though you’re not at the risk of being grounded anymore.

If your agency provides end-to-end services, let the client know.

It’s better to be sure here than to assume your client knows you offer a suite of other services. This requires a subtle touch; you can’t just blurt out all the impressive things you could do if you had more budget. Instead, look for ways to position your work in a holistic way. This could mean you understand that product work should align perfectly with branding work, you know that user testing is vital to IA mapping and user flows, you only recommend making data-informed decisions, or something similar.

Being able to speak to these things in an educated way achieves the same results, but with a little more tact.

Overcommunicate.

One of the most reassuring things for clients is feeling like they’re aware of everything at every stage of the project. At the end of the day, every person you’re in contact with has a boss, and they have to be prepared to answer questions from them about how the project is going, show off documentation or designs, or answer any questions associated with budget and timeline. Make sure they feel like they can do all that.

Additionally, it’s very useful if you can position your team as an extension of the client team. After all, everyone is working toward the same goal: a great end product. You’re better served to turn that “vendor” role into a “partnership” if you’re collaborating openly and maintaining transparency with your client team.

Lean into what is most important for the client.

If you’re coming into the project prepared with research or data (or even just answers to a quick client survey), you’ll have a good idea of what their most important areas of focus are, both as a business and for visitors on their website, app, or product. Are they looking to increase newsletter signups? Donations? Purchases? Know what the goals of their digital properties are and how that fits into their business model. If you do this thoroughly, you’ll be well-positioned to make recommendations that serve this purpose, which will let the client know they’re being heard and understood. That goes a long way.

This isn’t all you can do to augment your PM role with a business development mindset. This process will become easier the longer you work in digital, the more comfortable you become speaking for your agency, the more time you spend in the weeds of projects, and the more you start to build a name for yourself. It’s not easy, but these are some very real skills you need to adopt and hone. Project Managers are well-suited to excel here; so relax, enjoy it, and go bring in some business.

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  • Software Development Project Management: Beginner’s Guide 2024

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Software Development Project Management Guide

This software development project management guide is going to give you the full rundown on the topic. We'll cover what goes into successful software project management and share some of the best project management software to help you do the job.

Dan Ginn

Last Updated: 21 Feb'24 2024-02-21T17:43:46+00:00

All our content is written fully by humans; we do not publish AI writing. Learn more here.

  • Jira — The best project management tool specifically made for software developers.
  • monday.com — The best overall project management tool
  • ClickUp — An affordable and flexible project management tool

Facts & Expert Analysis

  • Management: Managing a software project requires a high level of adaptability, especially when reacting to customer feedback.
  • Development: The software development lifecycle will be the foundation of your whole project.
  • The Right Tools: Having the best project management tools will make it much easier to achieve your goals.

Approaching software development project management correctly is essential to ensure that you get a product ready as smoothly as possible. If you’re a project manager who’s new to software development projects, here’s a crash course on what software project management is and how to nail it each and every time.

The best project management software can assist you with your goals. However, there’s no point in having the right tools for the job if you don’t know how to use them. Although this article isn’t a tutorial on using software, once you better understand the intricacies of software project management, you’ll be able to use these tools to maximize your success.

In this article, we’ll touch on the different software development types, the processes involved and some of the core responsibilities of project managers working in this field. Buckle up, as we’re about to take you from being a novice to having the confidence to successfully implement strong software project management.  

What Is Software Development Project Management?

When a client or internal stakeholder needs a software product, their first point of call will be to work with software development teams — aka experts who know how to build the software. As straightforward as that sounds, building a product involves several stages, and the path to the final goal is often complex.

This is where people use software development project management. It involves creating an environment where software project managers can plan, develop deadlines, communicate, perform resource and time management duties, and visualize how the team can meet its goal. 

A term you’ll often hear in this type of project management process is Agile development. It consists of several frameworks designed to help a project manager and the development team fulfill their project. We’ll touch on this more later, but for now, we encourage you to take a look at the best tools for Agile project management . 

Software Development Types

There are several types of software projects. Some are extremely long and complex, while others involve simple updates to existing software. If you’re entering the world of software project management, below are some common areas worth knowing about.

  • Embedded systems development — This is the process of writing code and developing software that can run on a specific piece of hardware. 
  • SaaS products — These involve software solutions that are offered as a continuous service rather than a one-time purchase, like cloud storage or Scrum management software.
  • Mobile apps — All your favorite smartphone apps began as software projects that were driven by a software project manager.
  • Desktop apps — Think Excel and Google Docs; these simple everyday tools all require a software development team.
  • Updates — These involve new iterations and patch fixes of already existing software. 

Benefits of Software Development Project Management

Although all of this sounds legit, you may wonder how understanding and implementing certain project management methodologies can be beneficial, specifically for software development. We’ll break those benefits down.

Provides a Catalyst for Organization 

Due to the ever-changing nature of software development, it’s easy for things to get derailed. Agile project management practices let you implement project planning and pathways, enabling you to adjust as the project progresses. Project managers can use frameworks like Scrum, Kanban and XP to organize a software development project, leading to a smooth workflow.

Increases Productivity

Having no rhyme or reason for software development will result in a decrease in productivity. Establishing clear goals, implementing effective resource management and using the right software project management tools will allow your team to work more effectively. Less confusion and clear project objectives lead to better project performance and productivity. 

jira simple

Improves Communication

Project managers ensure there’s cross-departmental communication. In Agile project management, specifically Scrum, they link the Scrum Master with stakeholders and the product owner with the development team. Effective communication ensures that nothing gets lost in the pipeline and that everyone understands the project’s direction and the end product.  

Helps Prevent Issues Before They Arise

By performing risk management before a project starts, project managers can identify potential problems and establish plans to deal with any issues that arise. Also, when developers track and log issues throughout a project, managers can react quickly as they pop up. Overall, risk management helps keep a project running smoothly.  

Helps You Stick To Deadlines

Arguably the most important element of project management is ensuring you deliver a working product to the end user at the agreed-upon time. Unless you’re lucky, just winging it won’t get you where you want to be when you need to be there. That’s why project management strategies and the right tools for software development projects are essential to your success.

Challenges of Project Management in Software Development

Due to its complexity, there are many challenges that arise during the project management process. Below are some key hurdles that managers should be mindful of when working on a project.

Changes in Demands

It’s common for clients to reconsider what they want from a product. Some changes will be minor, and some will be more complex. This means a project can take a swift change in direction that requires you to restructure the plan. That’s why Agile is useful, as it helps you be adaptable at every stage of the project.

Bugs and Errors

Just when you think a product is where it needs to be, the dev team realizes there are bugs and errors that need fixing. Not only does this take time, but it can also slow down the project — not ideal when you have deadlines. This is why constant testing and quality assurance are essential parts of project monitoring.

Communication Barriers

A software project involves lots of communication with many different people and departments. Whether it’s a confused software dev or an uncooperative stakeholder, a breakdown in effective communication can escalate into a world of issues. Having experienced project managers and product owners is necessary for communication between all users.

clickup collaboration

Software projects often cost a lot of money. As the product evolves, it’s usually necessary to invest more money into adapting it to meet the latest requirements. Work that takes longer than expected will also hike up a project’s expenditure. That’s why strong budget planning at the start is important because it can help you avoid the pitfalls of scope creep . 

Software Development Lifecycle Phases

A common term you’ll hear in this field is software development lifecycle phases (SDLP). It consists of seven different stages and serves as the anchor for the full project timeline. Without it, software devs couldn’t build and deliver the product that’s required of them. Let’s take a look at each stage. 

  • Gather the business requirements
  • Assess if the request is possible to build
  • Complete the initial task prioritization
  • Translate the plan into requirements for the dev team
  • Create a use case document
  • Share the “requirement traceability matrix” document
  • Create the system design
  • Select a programming language
  • Agree on a platform to build on
  • Ask what security measures are necessary for the product
  • Divide the project into modules
  • Turn requirements into code
  • Set goals and milestones for the dev team
  • Performance testing looks at the speed and reliability of the product
  • Functionality testing assesses if the product matches the requirements
  • Security testing helps ensure that the product is secure
  • Usability testing looks at the user interface and assesses the user experience
  • Acceptance testing is the final testing stage before the product goes to the end user
  • The completed product is ready to go to the end user
  • Make improvements to the final product
  • Fix any bugs that were missed in the development cycle
  • Adapt the product where necessary

It’s worth noting there isn’t just one SDLC model. In fact, there are five in total: Agile, Waterfall, Iterative, Spiral and the Big Bang model. Agile suits flexible projects, Waterfall is for clearly defined projects, Iterative works for projects that require high flexibility, Spiral is best for complex projects, and finally, Big Bang is great for academic projects with small dev teams. 

The Software Development Process Explained

Software project management requires a clear process. It’s similar to the software development lifecycle, but it’s more condensed and defined. Usually, the software project manager is responsible for creating this process. Below, we’ll go through the five stages involved.

project lifecycle

1. Initiation

The initiation stage is where the software project manager learns about the request. It could be a brand-new system or an update to an established system. They’ll also learn what type of platform the end user needs the software for, such as mobile or desktop. During the initiation stage, the manager must create a project charter and identify key project stakeholders.

2. Planning

The project planning phase is where you start to create and assign tasks. The project manager will input specific project milestones, establish key performance indicators and separate groups of tasks into lists. It’s also a key stage for liaising with different departments (development, marketing, finance) so you can ensure everyone is on the same page as you begin the project.

3. Execution

In simple terms, execution means doing the work. This includes designing and building the product, as well as testing and performing quality assurance. It’s critical that project managers keep a high level of communication during this stage, as it’s likely the most sensitive and unpredictable part of the full process. 

4. Monitoring

The monitoring phase of a project is where the project manager pays close attention to what their team is working on. It’s here that they will monitor output and assess workloads. They’ll also use this stage to respond to and resolve any issues that may arise. 

At closing, the project managers ensure that all the tasks are complete. Once this is done, the software will be handed to the client. It’s a good opportunity to assess what parts of the project were most successful and which areas could be improved in the future. In Agile project management practices, it’s common to refer to this stage as “retrospectives.”

What Is Agile Project Management?

We wrote a detailed article answering what Agile project management is . However, for those who prefer the TL;DR version, we’ll briefly explain Agile project management here.

Agile is essentially a customer-focused approach to project management. This means working within a set of core values to meet customer needs and expectations. As per the Agile Manifesto , these values include focusing on individuals and interactions, prioritizing working software over documentation, responding to change and facilitating customer collaboration. 

It’s very much a reactionary approach to project management, which is also built on calculated anticipation of potential issues. The planning system may not be rigid, but having an adaptable mindset while developing software leads to better structure when using Agile project management and its frameworks, like Kanban , Scrum and Lean.  

What Are a Project Manager’s Responsibilities?

Project managers are responsible for ensuring project success. They’re the glue that keeps everyone together and the captain of the project’s ship. Responsibilities will vary depending on the project and your client, but below is a rundown of the kinds of responsibilities you can expect to have.

  • Leading and planning the journey of the project
  • Building different teams for specific parts of the project
  • Creating and assigning tasks to team members
  • Being a point of contact for external stakeholders and clients
  • Tracking and managing budgets (usually with a financial officer)
  • Ensuring each stage of the project is complete before delivering the product to the client

Simply put, the project manager is largely responsible for the project’s success (or lack thereof). That’s why reading guides like this and making sure you use the best project management platform will be essential to your performance.

Important Metrics for Software Development Project Management

Your project will consist of many individual goals and targets spread across multiple departments. You can use the following metrics to help you analyze how well a project went and determine what improvements you can make in future projects.

Stakeholder Satisfaction

Were your clients happy with the project’s execution and the software they received? Through a client survey, you can gather information to understand their level of satisfaction. 

This metric allows you to assess what percentage of tasks stayed on schedule. It also lets you understand how successful your team is at delivering products at the agreed deadline.

Your financial officer’s favorite metric tells you if you were able to stick to the budget throughout your project. Here you can confirm which areas led to overspending and plan how you can stay within budget for future projects.

Defects are your chance to monitor how many bugs and issues came up throughout the product creation process. You can also see the amount of issues that the software developers were able to repair. 

The Best Software Development Project Management Software

It’s time to look at some of the best tools for the trade. Below are three of the best project management software platforms for software development teams. 

Jira sign up

  • Made for software devs
  • Solid pricing structure
  • Very easy to use
  • Not the most versatile

Software development teams will love Jira. From kanban to Scrum , it supports frameworks that will appeal to software development teams. Tools for your software project — such as version tracking, backlog refinement and sprint planning — are all available, as is the ability to add story points so the team can assess the depth of work that’s required.

If you’re familiar with the terminology used for software-related objectives, then you’ll have no issues using Jira. Epics, stories, and issues are all embedded into the solutions’ lingo. Both the kanban and Scrum boards come with a great design, and moving cards between each project stage is smooth. Jira is fairly priced too. Take a look at our Jira review to learn more. 

  • Max. 10 users. unlimited boards, reports and insights; backlog; basic roadmaps; 2GB of storage; community support
  • Annual price is for 10 users; with more than 10, annual pricing changes based on the number of users. Monthly pricing changes with teams over 100.

2. monday.com 

monday.com

  • Beautifully designed
  • Free & basic plans are weak

monday.com is a project management tool that has all the features that a software development project manager needs. You can create a backlog, organize sprints, track bugs and develop a release plan. Project managers can also create roadmaps, add timelines, set priorities and add epics.

One thing we really like about monday.com is that it offers several visual customizations. You can color-code your data and the fonts you use. This functionality is embedded into a beautiful user interface, which helps users digest complex project data. Furthermore, it has excellent value on select plans . You can learn more by reading our monday.com review . 

  • Maximum users: 2
  • Minimum users: 3
  • Enterprise-level features.

Clickup sign up

  • Good for collaboration 
  • Highly customizable
  • Excellent value
  • Navigation can be long-winded

ClickUp may not seem ready-made for software development teams. However, once you see the level of customizations available, you’ll soon realize it can do everything you need. The platform is also packed with a range of project templates, and there are several options that suit the software development process, including an Agile sprint planning template.

Beyond its project and task management tools, ClickUp is built for effective communication, a critical part of software development. The real-time chat tool is one of the best around. You can have group and private conversations alongside relevant tasks and projects. It’s also possible to embed videos and format messages into lists for more effective communication. 

ClickUp is affordable too, making it perfect for all budget types . You can learn more about the app and why it’s suitable for software and Agile teams by reading our ClickUp review .

  • Basic functionality with some limitations
  • All prices per user

Final Thoughts

Well, that’s it — your complete beginner’s guide to managing a software project. It’s a good idea to add this to your bookmarks for reference if you need to scrub up on some project management methodologies. Remember, if you need project management software, the three that we mentioned above are the best options.

Did you find this guide helpful? What are your favorite project management tools for software projects? Is there a project management platform you would like us to review? Let us know in the comments. Thanks for reading.

FAQ: Software Development Project Management Tools

This simply refers to how you manage the time and workload involved in developing a piece of software. Traditionally, Agile frameworks are used to manage software development projects.

PMP stands for Project Management Professional certification, which you can obtain through the Project Management Institute. It’s essentially an accreditation that says you understand project management and can implement it in software development. It’s not essential for project managers to have it, but some employers may prefer that you do.

Program development means designing and building software applications that meet specific needs. Project management is how you plan and manage the successful build of the software product.

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What is Project Baseline in Project Management?

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In project management, a project baseline is like a starting point or a reference that helps you track the progress of your project. It’s a snapshot of your project’s scope, schedule, and cost at the beginning, against which you can compare as the project moves forward. It helps you stay on track by showing you where you planned to go and where you actually are. In this blog post, we’ll break down what Project Baseline means and why it’s vital for successful project management.

What is a Project Baseline in Project Management

A project baseline in project management refers to a set of original project plans and data that serve as a reference point for comparison throughout the project’s life cycle . It typically includes key elements such as the initial schedule, budget, scope, and other essential parameters agreed upon at the project’s beginning.

The project baseline acts like a standard against which project progress and performance can be measured. Deviations from the baseline can alert project managers to potential issues, helping them make informed decisions and adjust to stay on track. Essentially, a project baseline is a foundation document that helps monitor, control, and evaluate the project’s success.

Project Baseline Templates

While specific templates may vary based on the project management methodology and tools used, here are some common elements you might include in your project baseline templates.

Project charter template to set project baseline

Includes the original project scope, schedule, and cost, etc.. It serves as the primary reference for comparing actual project performance.

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Project scope statement template to set scope baseline

Focuses specifically on the project scope, outlining the detailed project requirements, deliverables, and acceptance criteria.

Project timeline template to set schedule baseline

Concentrates on the project timeline , highlighting the planned start and end dates, milestones, and key project phases.

Cost management plan to set cost baseline

Centers on the project budget, detailing the initial cost estimates, resource allocations, and overall project expenditures.

Risk register to set risk baseline

Identifies potential risks, uncertainties, and their associated mitigation strategies and contingency plans.

Communication plan to set communication baseline

Defines the communication strategy, including stakeholders, frequency, and methods of communication.

Resource breakdown template to set resource baseline

Details the allocation of resources, both human and non-human, required for each project activity.

Key Elements of a Project Baseline

The key elements of a project baseline in project management include:

How to Set a Project Baseline

Creating a project baseline is like making a detailed plan for your project and it involves the following steps.

  • Define the project : Clearly understand what the project is supposed to achieve and what needs to be done.
  • Break it down : Divide the project into smaller tasks or activities. This helps in managing and tracking progress more effectively.
  • Estimate time and cost : Figure out how long each task will take and how much it will cost. This helps in planning the project timeline and budget.
  • Identify risks : Think about potential problems that might come up during the project and come up with ways to handle them.

Get everyone’s input : Talk to your team, sponsors, and experts. Consider their thoughts and ideas when creating the plan.

Document everything : Write down all the details of your plan. This includes the project scope, schedule, costs, and how you’ll deal with risks.

Get approval : Share your plan with key people, like sponsors or stakeholders, and get their approval. This ensures everyone is on the same page.

Stick to the plan : Once approved, use this plan as your project baseline. Stick to it as much as possible, but be ready to adjust if needed.

Different Types of Baseline in Project Management

There are different types of baselines that serve as reference points for monitoring and controlling various aspects of a project. Here are some common types of baselines:

  • Scope baseline : Focuses specifically on the project scope, outlining the detailed project requirements, deliverables, and acceptance criteria.
  • Schedule baseline : Concentrates on the project timeline, highlighting the planned start and end dates, milestones, and key project phases.
  • Cost baseline : Centers on the project budget, detailing the initial cost estimates, resource allocations, and overall project expenditures.
  • Performance baseline : Includes key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics used to measure and evaluate project performance.
  • Quality baseline : Outlines the quality standards, criteria, and processes to make sure that project deliverables meet the specified quality requirements.

Why is a Project Baseline Important

A project baseline is like a roadmap that helps project managers stay on course, make informed decisions, and ensure the project’s success by providing a clear and agreed-upon plan to follow. Benefits of a project baseline includes;

  • It provides a starting point or reference for what was initially planned in terms of scope, schedule, and cost.
  • It acts as a yardstick to measure how the project is progressing by comparing actual performance against the original plan.
  • Helps in managing changes by providing a basis for evaluating the impact of any alterations to the project scope, schedule, or budget.
  • Assists in identifying and managing risks by offering a baseline for comparison when unexpected issues arise.
  • Guides decision-making by offering insights into deviations from the plan, allowing for informed adjustments.
  • Facilitates the evaluation of project performance against predetermined criteria and objectives.
  • Makes the project more understandable for everyone involved by establishing a shared understanding of the initial goals and constraints.

Who is Responsible for Setting the Project Baseline

The responsibility for setting the project baseline primarily falls on the project manager. As the leader of the project, the project manager collaborates with the project team, communicates with stakeholders, and incorporates input from experts to define the project scope, schedule, and costs. Project manager makes sure that the baseline reflects the agreed-upon plan and aligns with organizational goals.

Challenges of Developing a Project Baseline

It’s important to recognize and address the challenges associated with setting a baseline for your project. Some common challenges include:

Uncertain requirements

Sometimes, it’s tricky to pin down exactly what needs to be done. Things might be a bit unclear or change often, making it hard to set a solid plan. Talk to everyone involved early on, understand what needs to be done, and be ready to adjust the plan as things become clearer.

Limited data accuracy

If the information you have isn’t accurate or enough, it can make your plan less reliable. Having wrong or incomplete data can cause problems later on. Use the best information available, involve experts to double-check, and make sure your plan is based on solid and accurate data.

Scope creep

Imagine you plan to build a small house, but suddenly people want extra rooms. That’s scope creep, and it can mess with your initial plan. Have clear rules for making changes, communicate any adjustments clearly, and regularly check if the project is staying on track.

Estimation challenges

Difficulty in accurately estimating time and costs for project activities. Use historical data, involve experts in estimation, and create realistic contingency plans for uncertainties.

Stakeholder alignment

Making sure everyone involved agrees on the plan can be challenging. Different people might have different ideas or expectations. Keep everyone in the loop, make sure everyone’s ideas are considered, and document the plan clearly so that everyone understands what to expect

Manage Your Project Baseline with Creately

Leveraging a visual collaboration platform like Creately from the start can significantly help you plan, communicate, manage resources and track progress against your project’s baseline scope, schedule and resources. An effective visual baseline model becomes a single source of truth to keep your project on track. Here’s how you can use Creately to manage your project baseline.

Built-in visual project management

Visualize project details with work breakdown structures, project charters to project plans, with comprehensive shape libraries for over 70 types of diagrams including icons. Illustrate or make annotations easily with freehand drawing and format text without leaving the keyboard with markdown shortcuts.

Task tracking and assignment

Create, assign, and track tasks right on the canvas. Assign responsibilities, set due dates, and monitor progress with Agile Kanban boards, Gantt charts, timelines and more. Create task cards containing detailed information, descriptions, due dates, and assigned responsibilities.

Notes and attachments

Record additional details and attach documents, files, and screenshots related to your projects with per item integrated notes panel and custom data fields. Or easily embed files and attachments right on the workspace to centralize project information. Work together on project documentation with teammates with full multiplayer text and visual collaboration.

Real-time collaboration

Get any number of participants on the same workspace and track their additions in real-time. Collaborate with others in the project seamlessly with true multi-user collaboration features including synced previews and comments and discussion threads. Use Creately’s Microsoft Teams integration to brainstorm, plan, run projects during meetings.

Pre-made templates

Get a head start with ready-to-use project baseline templates and other project documentation templates available right inside the app. Explore 1000s more templates and examples for various scenarios in the community.

To sum it up, creating a strong project baseline gives your project a clear plan and roadmap for success. It involves documenting key details like what needs to be done, how long it will take, and how much it will cost. This baseline helps project managers make informed decisions, handle changes effectively, and keep the project on track. While challenges may come up, using templates and working together with your team can make the process smoother.

Join over thousands of organizations that use Creately to brainstorm, plan, analyze, and execute their projects successfully.

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Amanda Athuraliya is the communication specialist/content writer at Creately, online diagramming and collaboration tool. She is an avid reader, a budding writer and a passionate researcher who loves to write about all kinds of topics.

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9 best Smartsheet alternatives in 2024

Brynne Conroy

Alana Rudder

Alana Rudder

“Verified by an expert” means that this article has been thoroughly reviewed and evaluated for accuracy.

Published 8:15 a.m. UTC Nov. 22, 2023

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Smartsheet offers a versatile platform for managing your project’s tasks, including the ability to track dependencies, view projects on Gantt and Kanban charts, track project time, implement automations and customize the platform via integrations. However, it is a bit pricey, lacks some security features and has a limited free plan. If you’re looking for an alternative, we’ve compiled a list of nine of the best Smartsheet alternatives based on price, features, customer support and security features.

Featured project management software offers

business development project management

Via Monday.com’s site

Monthly fee

$10 per user, with a minimum of three users

Free version

Yes, for two users

24/7 customer support

Yes, with paid plans

business development project management

Via Clickup’s website

$10 per user

Yes, for unlimited members

9 best Smartsheet alternatives

  • ClickUp : Best for agile project management.
  • Monday.com : Best for managing small business operations.
  • Zoho Projects : Best for software development startups.
  • Notion : Best for customizable workflows and databases.
  • Asana : Best for remote team management.
  • Teamwork : Best for client-facing agencies.
  • Confluence : Best for growing organizations.
  • Trello : Best for small creative teams.
  • Todoist : Best for freelancers and solopreneurs.

Why trust our small business experts

Our team of experts evaluates hundreds of business products and analyzes thousands of data points to help you find the best product for your situation. We use a data-driven methodology to determine each rating. Advertisers do not influence our editorial content. You can read more about our methodology below.

  • 22 companies reviewed.
  • 20 hours of product testing.
  • 689 data points analyzed.

Best for agile project management

ClickUp

What you should know

When you pay for a ClickUp plan, you’ll have access to many of the same features as Smartsheet, including Gannt charts, kanban boards, dependencies and time tracking. If you’re looking at a business-level plan, ClickUp is also half the cost at just $12 per user per month when paying annually compared to Smartsheet’s price point of $25 per user per month when paying annually.

While ClickUp does have two-factor authentication for all accounts, it, too, operates on TLS 1.2 rather than TLS 1.3 for data encryption, which is the same level of security used by banks. ClickUp offers a free version for an unlimited amount of members, while Smartsheet’s free version is only for one user and two editors. However, ClickUp does not offer phone service at any level of subscription, so Enterprise customers may prefer Smartsheet.

Pros and cons

  • Over 15 project management views.
  • Real-time chat.
  • Native time-tracking features.
  • Only Enterprise users can access white-labeling tools.
  • Steeper learning curve than Trello or Todoist.
  • Single sign-on (SSO) doesn’t come with lower plan tiers.

Best for managing small business operations

Monday.com

Monday.com is one of the closest alternatives to Smartsheet, and it comes with better security. It uses TLS 1.3 and has multi-factor authentication for all users. You will need a higher-tier paid subscription to access dependencies and Gantt charts, though. If you want them in a free package, you can get them with Smartsheet, but you’ll only get two of them before you have to pay. You’ll also have to accept the lower security standards of Smartsheet if you really don’t want to pay for access with Monday.com.

That said, Monday.com isn’t terribly expensive when held up to Smartsheet’s plans. There are four paid packages, including an Enterprise plan. You have to contact sales to get a quote on this highest tier, but the rest of the three paid packages start at $8 per user per month when paying annually. The most expensive plan outside of Enterprise is $20 per user per month when paying monthly.

  • Over 200 predesigned templates.
  • Easy to deploy and use.
  • Customizable dashboards and widgets.
  • Paid plans require a minimum of three seats.
  • File storage is more limited than what Smartsheet or Asana offer.
  • Dependency views are locked behind Pro and Enterprise tiers.

Best for software development startups

Zoho projects.

Zoho Projects

Zoho Projects has higher security standards than Smartsheet. It has less than half of the native software integrations, though many of the same platforms can be accessed through Zoho Projects extensions.

In terms of product features, as long as you’re paying for a subscription, you’ll have access to all the same things:

  • Gantt charts
  • Dependencies
  • Time tracking
  • Kanban boards

Just like Smartsheet, some Zoho Projects features can be tricky to navigate if you’re inexperienced with project management software.

  • Most affordable enterprise plan version for DevOps.
  • Project forums for organized discussions.
  • Blueprints for custom workflows.
  • Limited project templates.
  • File storage tops out at 120 GB.
  • Fewer integrations than Smartsheets.

Best for customizable workflows and databases

Notion

Notion is one of the best project management software options if you’re looking at free packages. It provides you with kanban boards, Gantt charts and dependencies just like Smartsheet, and it does have time-tracking capabilities through third-party templates.

If you do pay for a plan, you’ll get unlimited storage. Regardless of which package you select, you’ll have access to two-factor authentication and TLS 1.2. While it doesn’t have as many native integrations as Smartsheet, it does cover many of the big ones like Slack, Google Workspace and Dropbox.

  • Public application programming interface (API).
  • Built-in wikis.
  • Thousands of templates.
  • Limited analytics and reports in small business plans.
  • No time tracking or client billing options.
  • No central inbox.

Best for remote team management

Asana

Asana is easier to use than Smartsheet. While it does come with many of the same capabilities if you have a paid plan, it’s not going to be quite as customizable. It does have over 200 software integrations, though, and two-factor authentication is available. Data encryption is set at the TLS 1.2 level like Smartsheet.

  • Drag-and-drop workflow builder.
  • Unlimited file storage, even with the free version.
  • Centralized inbox and task management.
  • Fewer views than ClickUp.
  • No native client billing tools.
  • No real-time chat support option.

Best for client-facing agencies

Teamwork

Teamwork does have two-factor authentication, but it uses TLS 1.2 just like Smartsheet. That means there are more secure software options out there, but it can still be a step up from Smartsheet if you don’t mind the lower security standards on data encryption.

Outside of security, it provides all the same features as Smartsheet, from kanban boards to Gantt charts. There are fewer native software integrations, but when you include integration through third-party apps, Teamwork starts to look a lot more competitive.

  • Billable time tracking with all plans.
  • Centralized client views in all plans.
  • Team chat and collaboration tools.
  • More limited file storage than Asana.
  • Lacks the issue management tools that Zoho Projects offers.
  • Limited support options.

Best for growing organizations

Confluence is a bit different from the other software options covered today. It’s a space to organize all the data you may have in other project management software systems — primarily Jira. To use certain features like kanban boards and dependencies, you’ll need advanced skills, which may include coding abilities.

While Smartsheet can be complicated to use depending on which template you’re using, it’s still more intuitive than Confluence for basic features. Confluence does come with higher security measures, though, like two-factor authentication and TLS 1.3 capabilities.

  • Unlimited storage with the Premium and Enterprise plans.
  • Over 3,000 integrations.
  • Workforce engagement analytics.
  • Does not support agile or scrum workflows.
  • Lacks client billing and time-tracking tools.
  • No portfolio or resource management features.

Best for small creative teams

Trello

Trello is owned by Atlassian — the same company that owns Confluence. While it provides many of the same features as Smartsheet, it does not do so natively. You’ll find yourself using a lot of third-party apps (called powerups) and templates. However, even the free plan allows unlimited users, cards, storage and power-ups.

The features that are available natively, like dependencies, take a little maneuvering to enable. It does have two-factor authentication, and TLS 1.3 is available, making it a more secure platform than Smartsheet.

  • Intuitive drag-and-drop functionality.
  • Unlimited power-ups and storage.
  • Custom fields for cards.
  • No native time-tracking functionality.
  • Can’t monitor hours for client billing purposes.
  • Lacks live chat.

Best for freelancers and solopreneurs

Todoist

Todoist is relatively simple project management software. The ease of use may be appealing if you’re a novice, but the only way to make it as customizable as Smartsheet is to use third-party apps, extensions and add-ons. And it only offers integration capabilities with 94 applications.

While it does have two-factor authentication, it’s not a great substitute for those looking for a Smartsheet alternative when it comes to security measures. That’s because while it does sometimes use TLS 1.2, it sometimes operates off 1.1 depending on the browser you’re using.

  • Supports workspaces for work, personal and team use.
  • Offers productivity visualization tools.
  • Includes automated project task reminders.
  • No expense or time tracking.
  • Offers fewer integrations than Asana or Confluence.
  • Lacks native support for scrum or agile workflows.

What is Smartsheet?

Smartsheet is a cloud-based project management system that allows you to assign tasks and hold individual team members accountable, all while providing a big-picture view through integrated sheets. This software is extremely versatile. Not only is it used at a wide range of companies, but it can be used across a wide range of departments within the same company. 

Smartsheet includes almost every important feature you could want from project management software, including: 

  • Automations
  • Integrations
  • Document storage

Smartsheet has native integrations for 96 different software applications, including Slack, Adobe, Microsoft 365 Teams, Salesforce, Google WOrkspace and AWS. There are another 49 integrations when you consider partner apps and add-ons. 

If you’re a single user, you’ll be able to continue to use the program for free with limited features. If you have a team or want access to full features, you can pick between three plans, including the:

  • Pro plan: $7 per user per month when you pay annually for up to 10 users, $9 per user per month if you pay monthly.
  • Business plan: $25 per user per month when you pay annually for a minimum of three users, $32 per user per month if you pay monthly.
  • Enterprise plan: Requires a quote from a sales rep, provides enterprise-grade security and controls.

You can get a free, 30-day trial without providing credit card information.

Smartsheet pros and cons

Smartsheet has a lot of positive aspects, but it’s not the right system for everyone. Here are the pros and cons to weigh as you consider the best project management system for your needs.

Methodology

We extensively research the key competitors within an industry to determine the best products and services for your business. Our experts identify the factors that matter most to business owners, including pricing, features and customer support, to ensure that our recommendations offer well-rounded products that will meet the needs of various small businesses.

We collect extensive data to narrow our best list to reputable, easy-to-use products with stand-out features at a reasonable price point. And we look at user reviews to ensure that business owners like you are satisfied with our top picks’ services. We use the same rubric to assess companies within a particular space so you can confidently follow our blueprint to the best project management software .

Choosing the best project management system

You’ll need to be clear about your needs before you can select your ideal project management system. Ask yourself which of these features you need prior to making any final judgment calls: 

  • Ability to onboard multiple team members (and how many).
  • File upload capabilities, given the types of files you’ll need.
  • Guest user or collaboration capabilities.
  • Software integration requirements.
  • The size of the project management template library. 
  • Pre-built reports.
  • Automation capabilities.
  • Ability to add and manage project dependencies.
  • Customer service access.
  • User control permissions. 
  • Integration options. 
  • The types of views you require/prefer.

Different types of project management software

Different projects require different types of software. There are two basic approaches to project management, including traditional and agile. There’s also software with specific capabilities for HR purposes. While some software targets only one type, Smartsheet hits all three as one of the most versatile platforms available.

Traditional or waterfall project management software

Waterfall project management software is so prolific that it’s also known as traditional project management software. You complete each task in order, requiring that you finish one stage before you can move on to the next. Most waterfall project management software includes features like: 

  • Task management, whether it’s automated or not.
  • Dependencies, so you can better manage your team and work flow.
  • Gantt charts, which provide you with a visual timeline. 
  • Drag-and-drop features.

The best traditional project management software also has portfolio management capacities. By allowing for portfolio views, these programs allow you to monitor several projects at once. These four features together make traditional project management ideal for complex projects that don’t have a lot of room for timeline or task-order flexibilities. 

Agile project management software

If you’re working on a volatile project or one that otherwise requires the ability to quickly pivot, you may be more concerned with agile project management features. One of the central features of agile project management software is kanban boards. Kanban boards display visual features on a columned workflow map. These columns can include work-in-progress limits so you can identify any bottlenecks between the commitment point and delivery point. 

Another strategy for agile project management is scrum. Scrum is a project management theory that uses specific philosophies and structures, but can be enabled by a number of project management software tools. You organize the work that needs to be done into a product backlog, which is then addressed by the scrum team in segments called “sprints.” 

Once each sprint segment is complete, the team sits down to evaluate their work and any adjustments that may be needed in an effort to maintain the scrum’s hallmark value of trust among team members. 

Project resource management software

Project resource management software tends to be used more heavily by human resources departments. It allows you to manage employee or contractor hours through time tracking, including time sheets. It also allows you to easily view and assign each person’s available work capacity to ensure you don’t put too much pressure on any one team member.

Why you might choose Smartsheet

Smartsheet has a wide array of project templates and pre-built reports. It also comes with automation options, Gantt charts, kanban boards and sheets for time tracking. Using most templates is relatively easy, though there are some that require intermediate or advanced skills. 

The learning curve may be worth it for the wide range of reports you can generate, and the built-in features that allow you to easily identify bottlenecks and other work flow problems before they spiral out of control. 

Smartsheet also integrates with most business software applications, making data entry and work flow even more manageable. Smartsheet’s 30-day trial is truly risk free, meaning you don’t have to enter a credit card number to try it out. That way, if it’s not a good fit, you won’t need to remember to cancel anything before the free month expires. 

Why you may want an alternative

Even small businesses have partners that require a certain level of security compliance. Yet Smartsheet’s best security features — like multi-factor authentication — are only available to Enterprise users. Smartsheet also uses TLS 1.2, while other project management software applications lean toward the more secure TLS 1.3 for data encryption. If security is important for your business due to regulation or practicality, you may want to explore other options. 

If you’re an individual using Smartsheet’s free plan, you’ll be limited to two sheets. This is a bit restrictive when held up against the best free project management software options on the market. 

Best Smartsheet Alternatives in 2024

If the security deficiencies in lower-tier Smartsheet subscriptions are giving you pause, there are plenty of competitors that have multi-factor authentication and TLS 1.3 capabilities while offering many of the same features. Let’s take a look at the top nine Smartsheet alternatives.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

Smartsheet does have a free option for those who only need one user account, but it’s limited to two sheets. Other free cloud-based project management systems may have unlimited users, but they could also lack some of Smartsheet’s key features, like task reminders and dependencies.

Yes, Microsoft Planner is an alternative to Smartsheet. However, Microsoft Planner can’t handle complex projects the way Smartsheet can. It doesn’t have Gantt charts or dependencies, which makes it a better choice for agile project management rather than waterfall projects. 

Smartsheet does have several Microsoft integrations, including: 

  • Microsoft Flow.
  • Microsoft Teams.
  • Microsoft Cloud App Security.

Microsoft advertises a free Smartsheet trial through Office 365 or Teams, but you don’t need Office 365 to get a free trial. You can just claim a free trial by visiting Smartsheet’s website. Regardless of how you claim your free trial, it will end. 

Unless you use a limited-feature free plan, you will eventually have to pay a per-month fee for Smartsheet’s service — even if you sign up using your Office 365 account.

Smartsheet can be difficult to use, but that tends to be the case when you have a particularly large or complicated project. While the software gives you the option to use highly customizable templates for these situations, there are enough “low complexity” templates that you should be able to navigate things even if you’re not a seasoned expert provided the project itself isn’t too complex.

Blueprint is an independent publisher and comparison service, not an investment advisor. The information provided is for educational purposes only and we encourage you to seek personalized advice from qualified professionals regarding specific financial decisions. Past performance is not indicative of future results.

Blueprint has an advertiser disclosure policy . The opinions, analyses, reviews or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the Blueprint editorial staff alone. Blueprint adheres to strict editorial integrity standards. The information is accurate as of the publish date, but always check the provider’s website for the most current information.

Brynne Conroy

Brynne Conroy has over 12 years of experience writing about money, with a particular focus on women's finances and small business lending and credit products. Her debut book was an Amazon #1 New Release across multiple categories, and she has been awarded a PEN America grant for the body of her work in the field. Find her bylines on LendingTree, Her Agenda, GoBankingRates, and Business Insider, and features on MSN Money, Jean Chatzky's HerMoney, and Yahoo Finance.

Alana is the deputy editor for USA Today Blueprint's small business team. She has served as a technology and marketing SME for countless businesses, from startups to leading tech firms — including Adobe and Workfusion. She has zealously shared her expertise with small businesses — including via Forbes Advisor and Fit Small Business — to help them compete for market share. She covers technologies pertaining to payroll and payment processing, online security, customer relationship management, accounting, human resources, marketing, project management, resource planning, customer data management and how small businesses can use process automation, AI and ML to more easily meet their goals. Alana has an MBA from Excelsior University.

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