Business Development Overview

Business Development Overview#

Business Development is critical to 2i2c and is responsible for:

  • Interfacing with customers (future and existing) to understand their challenges

  • Developing our business through sales (securing contracts, grants and renewals) and marketing

  • Providing product guidance to the Product and Services Team (P&S) based on market insights

  • Providing thought leadership to industry stakeholders

  • Connecting communities to amplify science (e.g. funding, research opportunities, etc.).

High-level goals of the Business Development Team#

The Business Development team is guided by the following three-pronged strategy:

  1. Maintain base. Make current users happy. Strive for zero churn. Resolve support issues. Empower champions to describe the value 2i2c enables. Make renewals easy.

  2. Growth. System to get more leads (marketing). System to convert leads to customers (new sales). System to get more revenue through renewals (renewal sales).

  3. Capture revenue. Collect membership fees, usage fees, fees for add-on services. Recover cloud costs. Strive for zero losses.

General responsibilities of the Business Development Team#

  • Sales

    • Account Management

    • Growth / Sales strategy

    • Feasibility assessments (i.e. making sure the work we sell is work we can do)

    • Deliverables-based fundraising (grants and projects).

  • Consultative thought-leadership (informed by our Product strategy)

  • Market Research

Capabilities & Capacity Needed#

  1. Iteratively improve 2i2c’s business model

  2. Know science and philanthropy well enough to sell and seek grants

  3. Strategic enough to prioritize and focus on highest value sales

  4. Uses & improves systems to triage & manage work

  5. Builds “executive” client relationships with org leaders, program directors

  6. Maintain relationships, escalation point if those people aren’t happy

  7. Comfort with selling / asking for money

  8. Capability to report on value delivery to purchasers

The Business Development Slack channel#

Key Roles#

Sources of Truth (where we store information)#

Business development stores information across different software platforms.

Project management#

The BD Team Board Github project board is used to track tasks and activities that pertain to:

  • Operationalizing BD’s strategy

  • Creating content supporting content (e.g. sales or marketing assets)

  • Improving the effectiveness of the team’s processes.

Additionally, BD related initiatives will be found on this board. Occasionally, some tasks are replicated on Delivery Enablement/Operations board because a member of that team is tasked with operationalizing the work.

Deal and CRM information#

We currently use Hubspot for managing our Sales/Deals pipeline. We previously used a custom built Airtable solution and are pivoting to Hubspot. All new Deals and sales opportunities should be stored in Hubspot with links back out to Airtable.

Engagement project management#

We use Airtable to manage Engagements. The primary interface is the Engagement interface. The Engagement management section goes into greater details about this delivery stage.

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