Last week I progressed this topic, and culminated with the question about what this internal BDM would/should/could look like in the Australian B2B sales organisation environment.

This function, and therefore the person/people that fill it, is not Telesales, Customer Service, Marketing, or even simple Lead Generation/Qualification. As the name in the heading implies, this is the internal version of the territory based, external BDM. In many mature B2B markets, the external BDMs are either over consumed developing new business with existing customers and/or trying to convert prospect leads supplied to them to have the time or aptitude to be methodically tilling the soil for brand new, to-be qualified leads.

The internal BDM does this for them, and in a sense then continuously pump primes the external BDMs with an on-going stream semi qualified new prospective leads. Due to the long sales cycles in many of these industries, newly discovered leads will often need to be nurtured by the internal BDM until the time is right to mobilise the external BDM to take over. So, whilst this function carries some characteristics similar to those other roles mentioned above, eg desk bound, telephone and email based, list or database endowed, the key differences required to nurture leads, use one name to leap frog to another to flush out relevant influencers, door openers, decision makers in the target organisation, convert lists into comprehensive databases for multi-faceted harvesting , among many more, really differentiate this function from those above.

This function and concept exemplifies the allegory of sub-specialising “hunting” into “sourcing”, “flushing” and “trapping”……….leaving the trapping to the external BDMs.

A good debate to have in your organisation to challenge your current modus operandi?