A commercial director at a firm we were working with showed us their business development numbers for the previous month with visible pride: several thousand outreach emails sent, hundreds of LinkedIn messages, and a reasonable volume of first meetings booked. The team was clearly working hard, and the data looked impressive at a headline level. But when we dug into what had happened as a result of all that activity, the picture was quite different. Very few of those first meetings had progressed to a second conversation. Almost none had moved to proposal. The pipeline hadn’t grown; it had been churned.
The team was genuinely busy. It just wasn’t genuinely progressing. And the difference between those two things is more significant than it might appear.
Why high activity feels like commercial progress
There’s a real psychological comfort in outreach volume. Every email sent, every connection request accepted, every sequence triggered feels like doing something. In environments where commercial progress is hard to see in real time, activity becomes the proxy for performance because it’s immediate, visible and quantifiable. Leaders can report it. Boards can see it. It looks like effort being applied.
The problem is that activity without conversion isn’t business development. It’s noise with a commercial budget attached to it. And the businesses that get stuck in high-activity, low-progress cycles usually stay there because no one has clearly separated the metrics that describe effort from the metrics that describe results. When the two are conflated, it’s very easy to feel like the commercial function is working when it fundamentally isn’t.
The meetings that go nowhere
Meeting volume is one of the most common vanity metrics in consultancy business development. First conversations booked looks great in a weekly update. Stakeholders see the number going up and assume things are working. But a first conversation that never progresses to a second one isn’t a commercial asset; it’s a sunk cost. You’ve invested preparation time, a senior person’s diary slot and whatever relationship capital was spent to get the meeting, and you’ve produced nothing.
The question that matters isn’t how many first meetings happened. It’s how many of those first meetings progressed to a meaningful next step, and of those, how many moved to a qualified opportunity, and of those, how many produced a proposal. When you trace those numbers through, you typically find that a very small fraction of the top-of-funnel activity is doing the commercial work. The rest, often the vast majority, is attrition.
The most common cause of high attrition at the top of the funnel is targeting that’s too broad. When outreach goes to anyone who might conceivably be relevant rather than specifically the right people at the right organisations in the right circumstances, the conversion from first meeting to anything meaningful will always be low. Volume compensates for poor targeting in the short term, but it doesn’t fix it, and at some point the senior people whose time is being spent on unproductive conversations will either burn out or disengage from the process altogether.
Vanity metrics versus meaningful ones
LinkedIn connections accumulated over time are not a commercial metric. They’re a proxy for network breadth, which has some value, but a connection that has never produced a conversation tells you nothing useful about commercial performance. Email open rates tell you something about subject line quality. Click rates tell you something about content relevance. Neither tells you whether any of it is building commercial relationships.
Meeting volume tells you about top-of-funnel activity; it only becomes commercially meaningful when you track what happens after the meeting. And content published is a brand and credibility investment, not a direct commercial output, until there’s a clear line between it and qualified inbound conversations.
None of these things are bad to track. They’re just insufficient on their own, and the mistake is treating them as evidence of commercial progress rather than as inputs to a process whose outcomes need to be measured separately.
What meaningful commercial metrics look like
The metrics that actually tell you whether business development is working are further down the funnel. Qualified opportunities created each month, which means conversations that have passed a genuine qualification threshold rather than all conversations entered: this tells you whether the outreach is reaching the right people and producing real commercial interest.
Proposal pipeline value, which is the total value of opportunities at proposal stage or close to it: this is a direct short-term revenue predictor. Stage-by-stage conversion rates: if you know where conversion drops off most significantly, you know exactly where to focus improvement effort. Revenue attributed by origination channel: which of your BD activities are actually producing closed work, and is it the same channels that are getting the most investment? And average days from first conversation to close, because this tells you whether deals are moving at a healthy pace or stalling, and where.
What to do with this
Start by separating your activity metrics from your outcome metrics and being honest about which you’re currently using as the primary measure of commercial performance. If the weekly commercial update is dominated by emails sent, connections made and meetings booked with very little on conversion and pipeline progression, that’s the first thing to change.
From there, define what a genuinely qualified opportunity looks like for your firm, so that the number being counted at the top of the funnel reflects real commercial interest rather than anything that resulted in a meeting. Track conversion at each stage between first conversation and close, find out where the biggest drop-off is, and treat that as the priority to address. And look at your revenue data by source to understand which channels are actually producing results, not just activity.
The consultancies that do this well tend to end up doing less outreach overall, not more, because they’ve identified where their effort converts most effectively and they concentrate there. Less noise, better targeting, higher conversion rates, and a commercial team that feels like it’s making progress rather than just being busy.