Senior Managers have different contacts and networks from the rest of the company. A good business developer must also be organized and good in business planning and strategic management, achieving long-term goals would require careful planning in order to not lose sight or deviate from your original objectives, these plans also serves as a monitoring and evaluation tool in order to assess the success of the used tactics, it also offers the opportunity to reflect on what works and what not, what was achieved so far and how to improve more in the future.
In such instances boutique consultancy firms come in handy to for example support a particular project or give advice on matters related to a specific topic such as law, finance or HR. Larger corporations often make use of larger management consultancy firms to identify existing organizational problems and development of plans for improvement.
Knowing all about your business services and products is essential, knowing everything about your competition will provide you with the leverage you need to surpass them, any respectful business develop will conduct the necessary competitive analysis needed to identify the company current position, and what competitive advantage the company have over them, therefore business developers must be able to collect the data they need in order to prepare an accurate analysis.
Over the past few years, organizations worldwide are beginning to understand the importance of business developers and the value they bring to the organization, although not all companies quit understand what business development managers do exactly.
Another area of cost creep is the issue that was previously discussed above regarding who is actually in charge of the proposal and its resources, On one proposal I witnessed, tasks that the Proposal Manager thought were being accomplished by one or another author were in fact also being done by someone else (reassigned by the Capture Manager) working outside of the proposal team.