Hiring a BDM won't fix a process problem. It'll just cost more.

The conversation goes the same way every time.

Revenue's flat or the owner's exhausted from doing sales on top of everything else. So the plan is to hire a BDM. Someone who knows how to sell, who'll go out and bring in work, who'll take it off the owner's plate.

Then I ask one question, and the room changes.

What's the process they'll be following?

Most of the time there isn't one. There's how the owner does it, using a mix of relationships built over fifteen years, instinct about which jobs are worth chasing, and a quoting approach that lives entirely in their head. That's not a process. It's expertise, which is a different thing, and it doesn't transfer by hiring.

What you're actually buying

When you hire a BDM into a business without a defined process, here's the arrangement you've made.

You're paying someone $90K to $130K plus super, plus a car or allowance, plus commission, to spend their first six months working out what already works in your business. They'll try things. Some will work. You won't know which, because there's no baseline to compare against. They'll build their own approach, in their own head, which means you've reproduced the original problem with an extra salary attached.

Then one of two things happens. Either they don't hit the numbers and you let them go at month eight, concluding that BDMs don't work in your industry. Or they do hit the numbers, and now the relationships and the method belong to them, and you're more exposed than you were before, because at least when it was you, you weren't going to resign.

Neither outcome is the hire's fault. You gave someone a job with no defined method and asked them to invent one while being measured on output.

What "a process" actually means

It's less than people think. You don't need a sales playbook or a CRM implementation. You need answers to six questions, written down, that someone else could follow.

Who are we for? Not "small businesses." Specific enough that a new person could look at an enquiry and know whether it's ours. Industry, size, situation, trigger.

Where do they come from? Which channels have actually produced clients in the last two years, based on the numbers, not just the impression.

What happens on first contact? Who calls, how fast, what gets asked. Response time is usually the single biggest lever in a small service business and it's almost never measured.

How do we qualify? What makes us walk away. If there's no defined disqualifier, your new hire will chase everything, and chasing everything is how a good salesperson looks unproductive for a year.

What does the quote or proposal look like? Structure, inclusions, what we don't discount, who approves an exception.

What happens after? This includes follow-up cadence, how long before we stop, what "closed lost" means and where it goes.

That's it. Six answers, a couple of pages. Most owners can produce it in an afternoon, because they already know all of it. It's just never left their head.

Why this matters more than the hire

Write those six things down and three useful things happen straight away, before you spend a dollar on salary.

You'll find gaps you didn't know about. The most common one is response time, as the honest answer is often two or three days, and in a market where the first credible responder wins a large share of the work, that's the whole problem right there. Occasionally the six questions reveal you don't have a sales capability problem at all, and the hire gets cancelled. That's a good outcome and it's cost you an afternoon.

You get something to hire against. Now the interview is different. Instead of "tell me about your sales experience," it's "here's how we work. Where would you strengthen it?" You'll learn more in ten minutes than in three rounds of general questions.

And you get something to manage against. When performance is off, you can see where. Wrong leads, or right leads handled badly, or good conversations that never convert. Without a process, all you can see is that the number is low, and all you can do is apply pressure.

The order that works

Write the six answers down. An afternoon.

Run it yourself for a quarter. You're the one who knows what good looks like, and you'll fix the parts that don't survive contact with reality. This is the step people skip, and skipping it means you're handing over a document rather than a working system.

Get someone else in the business to run part of it. Whoever's closest: an estimator, an office manager, a delivery lead. Not to make them a salesperson, but to prove the process works when it isn't you.

Then hire. Now the role is real, the onboarding is short, and you can tell in eight weeks rather than eight months whether it's working.

Most businesses run this in reverse, hire first and hope the process emerges. It sometimes does. It's an expensive way to find out.

The interim option

There's a middle path worth naming, because for a lot of businesses the full-time hire is premature regardless of process.

You don't have to choose between doing it all yourself and committing to a six-figure salary. Fractional and part-time arrangements exist precisely for the stage where there's enough business development work to matter but not enough to justify a permanent role. The right version of that arrangement builds the process and the capability inside your team, so that when you do hire permanently, you're hiring into something that already works.

The wrong version is someone who just makes calls on your behalf. That's outsourcing the symptom and you'll be back in the same position in a year, minus the fee.

The test is simple: at the end of the engagement, does your business know how to do this without them? If the answer's no, you rented activity. If it's yes, you bought capability, and that's an asset that stays.

Before you post the ad

Answer the six questions. If you can't answer them in an afternoon, that's your finding, and it means the hire would have been guessing on your behalf.

If you can answer them, post the ad. You'll hire better, onboard faster, and know inside two months whether it's working.

Building the process and the internal capability before, or instead of, the permanent hire is what Growth Enablement does. Book a conversation.