By the Strategy and Business Development Team, Southern Power Maintenance
A promising opportunity can emerge months before a client is ready to make a decision. We see this particularly with larger technical opportunities, where an initial conversation can happen long before budgets are approved, scopes are agreed, or procurement becomes involved.
There is value in getting into those conversations early. The challenge is knowing how much time to put into them. Site visits, technical input, meetings and proposal work all draw on people inside the business. Before that effort starts to grow, we need some indication that the opportunity itself is moving.
1. The client is still trying to work out what the problem is
Sometimes the first conversation is very broad. Reliability has become a concern. Equipment is ageing. Capacity may need to increase. Management knows something has to be done, but nobody has decided what that should involve.
There is still useful work Business Development can do at this stage, particularly in understanding the requirement and keeping close to the client. It is harder to justify a full pursuit when the client has not yet reached the point of defining what they need.
2. There is interest, but no budget discussion
A project can have plenty of internal support before anyone has worked out how it will be funded. That matters because an idea that people like and a project that an organisation is prepared to pay for are at very different stages.
We would want to understand whether funding is being considered, where it is likely to come from and when those decisions are expected. An exact budget is not always available early on, but there should eventually be some movement towards one.
3. One person is driving the conversation
A strong relationship with one person can open the door, but larger industrial projects rarely depend on one person alone. Engineering may have one view of the requirement, Operations another, while Procurement and Finance have their own part to play before any work can be placed.
If the opportunity has been discussed for some time and remains with a single contact, we would want to understand why. The person may be influential, but they may also be trying to build support internally before the opportunity can go any further.
4. Nobody knows how the work would eventually be bought
The procurement route does not have to be settled at the first meeting. As the opportunity develops, though, there should be a clearer picture of what will happen if the client decides to proceed.
Will there be a tender? Is the work likely to sit under an existing contract? Will suppliers need to go through a qualification process first? If nobody can answer questions like these, the project may still have several internal decisions ahead.
5. You keep meeting, but the opportunity stays in the same place
Technical business development can involve long lead times, so we would never judge an opportunity simply by how many months it has been open. We pay more attention to what changes between conversations.
A new stakeholder joining the discussion is movement. So is receiving technical information, agreeing on a site visit or learning when a budget decision will be made. If six months of meetings have produced exactly the same conversation, that tells us something about how ready the opportunity is.
6. Something else has to happen first
Many opportunities depend on decisions that sit outside the immediate requirement. A plant expansion may still be waiting for capital approval. New electrical infrastructure may depend on another phase of a project going ahead. Maintenance work may form part of a larger asset decision that has not yet been made.
Those dependencies are worth identifying early because they tell us where the real timing sits. We may remain involved and keep the relationship active, while recognising that the opportunity cannot move until another decision has been made.
7. There is no answer to: “What happens next?”
We ask this because it is a simple way of finding out whether an opportunity has somewhere to go. The next step could be small: another person needs to join the discussion, information has to be supplied, a site assessment needs to be arranged, or a budget meeting is due next month.
Where it becomes difficult is when nobody involved can identify any next step at all. The opportunity may still become important later, but there may be little value in treating it as an active pursuit today.
Business Development has to be comfortable with opportunities that take time. Some of the relationships and market positions that matter later are built well before a client is ready to issue work.
That does not mean every early conversation should immediately become a major pursuit. We need to know which opportunities require work now, which ones need to be watched and which ones are better revisited when something has changed on the client’s side. Good business development means knowing when to stay close without trying to force an opportunity to move before it is ready.