Commercial BD is on the rise

Every recruiter I speak to is seeing the same trend

Put the specialist BD recruiters in a room and we would argue about plenty. Not this. The briefs on our desks have all changed in the same direction.

Five years ago the typical search was a BD or marketing manager, a capable generalist supporting a practice group. Today it is pursuits, client development, pricing, key accounts or growth. The word commercial is in almost every brief.

Waves of client facing roles are here, and more are coming, because firms are finally ready: the support layer is gradually being filled with AI driven technology. That is where the headcount, the budget and the pay rises are going.

The market is moving. The question is how you can make your role move with it.

Reason one: firms are paying for revenue, not reactivity

Partners have always been measured on origination. Firms now expect the same of the people around them. A BD function that cannot be tied to revenue is a cost line, and cost lines get reviewed.

The managing partners I speak to no longer ask whether the team is busy. They ask what the team won, what it protected and what it is worth. The roles being created answer that question: client directors, pursuit leads, pricing specialists, each close enough to the fee to be measured by it.

Firms increasingly want revenue you influenced pointed to.

Reason two: AI is taking the production work

Much of what filled a BD manager’s week was production: credentials, capability statements, first drafts of proposals, directory submissions, event collateral. AI is taking that work inside some leading firms right now, and not slowly.

Those roles are shrinking, and people feel uncomfortable about it. But the AI infrastructure development version of these roles is growing, for the people who are AI curious: the ones building the prompts, the workflows and the data the rest of the team will run on.

If you cannot use AI in the office, use it every day at home, including weekends. Spend the money on the top models, download the plugins, train your AIs. A $300 to $500 investment, and your spare time, is a critical investment in your future. It is mainly those sitting outside large organisations, without constraints, who see just how powerful it is.

Many people spend that on a weekend of dinner and drinks. Spend your weekends in, learning intensively and fast.

Reason three: clients buy differently, and private capital changed the language

General counsel and CFOs run panels, demand pricing certainty and move work between firms more readily than they did. Procurement sits in the room. The relationship still matters, but it no longer closes on its own.

At the same time the client group the top firms most want to grow is private capital: funds, their portfolio companies and their advisers. Winning that work means speaking the language of deals, returns and timing.

Both shifts create the same need: people who understand how the client makes money and how it buys. Firms are short of them.

Many clients are changing how they buy. Firms are hiring people who understand this.

Reason four: the titles give it away

Watch the job titles. Client development director. Head of pursuits. Pricing and commercial manager. Growth lead. Key account director. These were rare in Australian firms a few years ago. Now they are the senior roles.

On the strategic marketing side, business generation managers are being installed with a marketing and communications remit tied directly to proactive pursuit activity, not business as usual.

The old titles are still there, but they sit lower in the structure and are paid accordingly. The premium has moved to the people whose work can be measured against fees.

If you are a generalist, become as senior as you can by putting your hand up for projects, and operate as a highly data and AI fluent generalist. There is demand there, and it is building.

Commercial specialist or data and AI fluent generalist. Decide which you are, and be seen to be on it.

How to position: learn the numbers the partners watch

Commercial fluency starts with the firm’s own numbers: revenue, margin, utilisation, realisation, lock up, write offs. It is imperative to understand how the firm makes money.

Then look outward at what moves your clients. Bond yields. Capital flows. Right now that means watching US, Japanese and South Korean money into Australia, plus Canadian and Singaporean pension and sovereign funds, Middle East sovereign wealth and UK and European capital, and working out the second, third and fourth order effects downstream before that investment lands in a sector and the work follows it.

Partners are paid to spot that early. Walk in with a map of where the next instructions will come from and you are origination, not support.

Opportunity shows up in the capital flows before it shows up in the pipeline.

How to position: attach yourself to revenue and get in the room

Find one thing in your current role that touches the fee line and own it. A key client plan. A live pursuit. A pricing conversation. A panel bid. It does not need to be big. It needs to be measurable, and it needs a record you keep.

Then get client time. If you have never sat in a pitch, run a client feedback interview or joined a relationship review, you are describing the work second hand. Ask to be in the room. Partners rarely say no to someone who wants to hear what the client thinks.

Over a year the record and the client time become your case for the commercial role, written in outcomes rather than activities.

One client, one pursuit, one number. Build the evidence before you need it.

How to position: self educate intensively

Do not study an MBA. They are high value, but only to those who already hold them. A fresh start MBA is now too slow, and you can learn far more relevant material faster and cheaper.

Study selective modules instead. Short, recognised and cheap: the CFA Investment Foundations certificate or CFA Level I; the CAIA Fundamentals certificate or Level I, which will teach you private capital and private equity, exactly where firms are chasing growth; a graduate certificate in applied finance; a financial modelling course such as the FMVA; a legal pricing or project management certificate; and RG146 if your clients are funds or financial services firms.

Then fill the gaps with audiobooks on finance, markets and deals. Commutes, the gym, weekends. Understanding the client’s world is mostly self taught.

Before you fund a qualification, ask what commercial gap it closes. An MBA rarely closes one.

A final word

I have spent twenty years placing BD and marketing people into Australian law, accounting and engineering firms. I have never seen the market move this clearly in one direction. The firms are not waiting for the profession to catch up. The people who move first will set the pay for everyone else.