About Business Development

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Use Business Development (BD) to help you plan and manage potential new business. With BD:

• It’s all in one centralized location - the Project Command Center - where you can give your staff the level of access that’s right for them.
• You enter all the information you need for a potential project one time, and should you win the work, that information is ready for you to begin working on and billing the project.
• You can easily track the progress of a potential project every step of the way - from the lead to the final disposition.
• Your BD efforts become part of Ajera’s dynamic data engine, where reports and inquiries give you instant access to the analytics you need.

Setting up BD

Setting up a BD project is the first step in a process that tracks your marketing efforts and sets the stage for a billable project.

You determine if and when a project, or even phases of a project, are billable. In this way, you can easily include your BD efforts and billable work for a project in one place, while reporting on and billing its components separately.

You control reporting and billing for a project by assigning the project and its phases the correct status, depending on the state of the project at the time.

To set up BD, do the following:

• Set up security for BD to limit information to those who need it. For example, you may not want employees of a particular security group to see actual cost and rate information.
• Set up marketing stages to identify your unique business development process. You set up marketing stages to reflect the typical steps of the BD process at your firm. For example, you can set up stages to track BD efforts such as RFQ, RFP, Proposal, and so on.
• Set up marketing final dispositions to track the reasons you won, lost, or declined the work. For example, you can set up final dispositions such as Qualifications/Experience, Design Concept, Project Approach/Schedule, and so on.

Managing BD efforts

When you work with BD, you do the following:

• Set up a BD project or template or add a BD phase to an existing project or template.
• Update a BD project to track the status of your BD efforts, including the type and timing of your next actions.
• Use reports and inquires to help you review your BD efforts and plan for the future.