Guide · 13 July 2026 · 4 min read
Ask partners only for what they uniquely know
BD systems fail in professional firms when they tax fee earners with clerical work. The fix is a strict division of labour.
Partners will not do data entry, and they are right not to. An hour of a partner recording meetings in a CRM is an hour of the most expensive labour in the firm doing its least valuable work. Systems that depend on that hour are designed to fail, and their empty fields then get blamed on culture.
The division of labour
Split every piece of BD information into two kinds. Things only a human relationship can know: what the client is worried about, what was agreed over coffee, how strong a route to a decision-maker really is. And things a system can know: which tenders published, what stage a pursuit is at, when a record was last touched, what the weighted number is. Ask people only for the first kind, and never for the second.
- Capture judgement in one line, not a form: strength, worry, next step
- Derive everything derivable: stages, values, staleness, priorities
- Prefill from public records before asking anyone anything
- Make the ask smaller than the payoff the partner gets back
The payoff must be personal
A partner records the coffee meeting when doing so visibly improves their own Monday: their briefing sharper, their account plan current, their name attached to the relationship they actually own. Reciprocity, not compliance, is the only sustainable enforcement mechanism a partnership has.