Business Development Pipeline & Mandate Conversion
Every business development conversation becomes a tracked opportunity with a qualification, an owner and a next action, so the partner's forecast leaves their head.
- Tier
- Growth
- Build order
- 4th of 7 for executive search
- Shape of it
- 8 steps, 1 decision point
- At launch
- Built against your stages, then proven before it runs alone
The problem this solves
The second largest recoverable pool, and the one partners defend most vigorously, because business development feels like relationship work rather than pipeline work.
But the failure is concrete. A partner has a good conversation. They send a proposal, do a free diagnostic, or advise on a spec. The client is running two other firms, or has no budget approved, or is waiting on a board decision nobody mentioned. Weeks of senior time go in, and there is no mandate.
Worse, nobody else in the firm can see it happening, because the pipeline exists only in the partner's head and in their sent folder. So the firm cannot forecast, cannot allocate research capacity, and cannot tell whether the partner is busy or productive.
How it works, step by step
Every wait, threshold and branch below is a value we set with you during the build, against your stages and your language. None of it is a default we impose.
- What starts it
- It decides something
Step 1Trigger
Every business development conversation that reaches a proposal or a diagnostic becomes a tracked opportunity.
Step 2
Qualification is recorded before senior time is committed: is the role approved and budgeted, who signs, is the search exclusive, are other firms engaged, what is the timeline, and has the client used a retained firm before.
Step 3
Exclusivity and fee basis are qualified explicitly. A client expecting contingency terms is a different conversation and should be identified in week one.
Step 4
Proposals carry a value, an age, an owner and a dated next action, exactly as candidates do in System 3.
Step 5Branch
Follow-up branches on the actual reason: budget approval pending, board timing, comparing firms, internal candidate under consideration, or a hiring freeze.
Step 6
Free diagnostic work is capped and visible. A partner who has given six hours of unpaid market advice to an unqualified opportunity should see that number.
Step 7
Signed mandates carry their commercial terms into the engagement record so System 6 can invoice correctly.
Step 8
Lost opportunities get a reason code, reviewed quarterly against fee levels and positioning.
How it gets built
Built inside what you already run
- Clockwork
- Invenias
- Thrive
- Loxo
- Bullhorn
- Crelate
- PCRecruiter
- or whatever your office already runs on
Nothing to log into and nothing to license. If a system needs a record your platform does not hold, we add the field to your platform rather than starting a second one beside it.
This is the actual build order, in the phases its own steps fall into. It runs in supervised mode first, with you approving what goes out, until you are happy with the tone.
- 1
Agree
Agree the qualification questions with the partners. Expect resistance; frame it as protecting their time rather than measuring it.
The thresholds, the wording and the names are yours. We write them down with you and get the consequential ones signed off.
- 2
Build
Build the opportunity record and make the qualification required before a proposal is issued.
Built inside the software you already run, against your stages and your language.
- 3
Build
Build the follow-up branches.
- 4
Build
Build the unpaid-time visibility, and be careful with it. It is a conversation about capacity, not about performance.
- 5
Build
Connect signed mandates to the engagement record.
- 6
Agree
Agree loss reason codes and diarise the quarterly review.
What changes after it goes live
How it runs today
The second largest recoverable pool, and the one partners defend most vigorously, because business development feels like relationship work rather than pipeline work.
After this one is live
The firm can forecast. Research capacity can be planned against likely mandates rather than hope. Unqualified opportunities get identified before a partner spends a week on them. And the partner keeps their relationships while the firm gains visibility, which is the only framing under which this system survives.
How to measure whether it worked
Your arithmeticRun with your numbers, not ours
Two numbers: partner hours spent on opportunities that never signed, valued at the firm's own loaded senior rate, and proposal-to-mandate conversion, which most boutiques have never measured because the proposals were never counted.
We agree the baseline before anything is built, and we do not take credit for things that were going to happen anyway. There is no figure on this page claiming what we have produced for somebody else, because there is no verified figure to publish.
What we will not do
This is from the same delivery document as everything above it. It is on the page because a supplier who has not thought about it will not tell you, and you would find out later.
This trade carries no clinical or insurance regulation, but it handles personal data about senior individuals who have not applied for anything, which is its own serious exposure.
Candidate data.
- Candidates in a search are almost always passive and confidential. Their current employer must not learn they are in a process. Any automation that could reveal a candidacy, including a misdirected message, an over-broad notification or a shared calendar entry, is a career-level harm to a real person.
- No candidate name, current employer or compensation detail in any demonstration, template or marketing asset. Synthetic data only.
- Reference checks are conducted with the candidate's explicit permission and at the point in the process they agreed to, never automatically.
- Records must support deletion and correction requests. Several US states and most other jurisdictions the firm may work in grant those rights, and a search database is exactly the kind of record they apply to.
Client confidentiality.
- Mandate details, compensation ranges, org structures and the fact of a search existing at all are frequently confidential, sometimes contractually.
- Off-limits agreements are contractual obligations, and a breach is a commercial and reputational event. System 5's automated off-limits check is a compliance control, not a convenience.
Messaging.
- Automated outreach to candidates and clients sits inside the TCPA for calls and texts, and inside CAN-SPAM for email. Classify service and marketing separately, honour opt-outs immediately, and keep suppression synchronised across every system.
- Candidate outreach in particular should default to a human sender, because a senior executive who realises they received an automated approach will not engage, and may tell others.
Nothing here is legal advice. Employment law, data protection law and contract terms with clients can each add requirements, and firms working across borders carry more.
Nothing here is legal advice. Rules in this area have moved more than once recently, and every template that states a commercial term or a guarantee goes to your own counsel before it goes live.
Seven systems forexecutive search.
We build one at a time and prove it moved before starting the next. The tiers are the dependency order, not a price list.
Tier 1Foundational
Nothing arrives late or unowned. These come first because everything above them assumes they are true.
Tier 2Growth
The recoverable money. These work the pools the foundational systems have made visible for the first time.
- 3Client Feedback RecoveryThe largest recoverable pool in the firm.
- 4Business Development Pipeline & Mandate Conversionyou are hereBusiness development visibility, which is the most resisted and should come after trust is established.
Tier 3Flagship
One connected system end to end, plus what the owner reads on a Monday. Only once the pieces are proven individually.
The tiers are the dependency order for executive search, not a price list. Most firms do not start at the first one, because the order is a default and the call is where it gets changed.
A note on sequencing this trade
Sequencing note. Systems 1 and 2 together are the entire pitch for this vertical. A firm that can see which searches are waiting on the client, and that agrees a feedback window at kickoff, has already recovered most of the value in this playbook. Do not lead with the flagship.
Back to the executive search overview for the stage map and where these fit.
Is this the oneyou need first?
Often it is not. On the call we look at what is actually costing you most right now, which is frequently a different system from the one that brought you to this page. If there is nothing worth building yet, we will say so.