So you’ve decided to employ a business development manager to grow your business, that’s awesome! Now… what do they do?

Generating and securing new business is a very complicated task. Business development has many moving parts, and in many agencies BDM’s are an essential part of the team. That being said, just employing a business development manager or business development staff won’t grow your business. To truly achieve lasting success, your business development team will need a framework to operate within and a way to measure progress, such as weekly or monthly Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

Below, we’ve broken down 5 primary examples of business development responsibilities and provided some KPIs that should be monitored. Keep in mind, this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of responsibilities and KPIs.

1. Lead Generation

Generating leads is the core focus of any business development staff. The business developer is tasked with farming leads both from the sales team and from building a profile within the local community. Writing new business involves converting leads coming into the business, or from the agency database, into new managements. This may involve a regimented call campaign as part of the lead nurturing process and/or face to face presentation. Part of this process includes ensuring the business developer has developed a rock solid, listing presentation that the agency supports, and has been well trained and armed with an extensive array of selling tools.
KPI: New investor contacts to the database; New managements into the business

2. Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing involves driving leads into the agency database and setting up a stream of communications with them. More often than not, investors will engage your business and not convert immediately or even the first time around. Nurturing is an important process where the lead is fed information about your business, your differentiations and what you provide. In addition to generating the lead, the business developer is also tasked with developing a communication plan that nurtures these leads through to engagement, resulting in new business.
KPI: Lead conversion rates

3. Marketing

Marketing has some complexities to it. It involves identifying the agency market share and competitor’s weaknesses, and planning a campaign around this in an effort to control market share. This may involve doing a SWOT analysis on your competitors and drafting marketing material directed at your competitors or private landlords, depending on the channel you are targeting. The business developer would then need to coordinate a strategic plan to convey this information to prospective new landlords.
KPI: Frequency of communication to the agency database

4. The Handover

Leasing the property is an extremely important part of the new business process. This is the first time that your new landlord has experienced your agency. Your agency is now on show to deliver what you, or your business developer, has promised to them. Your business developer should be ensuring the property is presentable for the market and professional photography has been organised. Speed is important with new business. Providing consistent feedback during the marketing phase, and ensuring days on market are kept to a minimum, are extremely important.
KPI: Days on market

5. Agency Integration

Agency integration is a relationship-building exercise for the business developer. They should be tasked with making sure there is an open line of communication between the property management team and the sales team. They should be attending sales open homes, fielding investor enquiries, providing CMA’s to both existing and potential new landlords and promoting internal referrals within the business.
KPI: Referral rate from the sales team

It’s important to note that performing all these tasks take time. After conducting our own research, we found that an average a business developer tasked with all these duties writes on average between 10-12 new managements a month.

When setting the expectations of your business developer, you must ensure that you understand the scale of your business, the workload that they are responsible for, and that they are resourced correctly.

In the book ‘Building Blocks’ by Ben White, we promote an organisational chart for the business development team that splits the role into three key areas. Business development manager, business development officer and leasing consultant.

This structure was created to promote an increase in efficiency for the business development manager. An example of how this efficiency translates is by splitting up core roles so each area can champion specific tasks.

An example of how this could work is:

• The business development manager would focus on:

  • Strategic campaigns to reach new investors and to move current known investors further down the pipeline
  • Managing/review the agency’s online reputation
  • Overseeing team actions
  • Leading the team through mentorship and development

• The business development officer would focus on:

  • Supporting the BDM
  • ead capturing through prospecting activities
  • Lead nurturing
  • Supporting the sales team (if applicable)

• The leasing agent would focus on:

  • Taking care of managing all leasing components.
  • Providing quality feedback post inspections to the Business Development Officer looking after the client