Building Your Desk: Practical BD for Consultants in a Competitive Market
Business development remains one of the most important disciplines in recruitment, but the environment in which consultants are doing it has become more demanding. In this TRN World session, sales coach and MILO CEO and Co-Founder Naz Harrison explored how consultants can make BD more consistent, relevant and commercially useful by combining better routines with market intelligence and targeted outreach.
For recruitment leaders, the bigger lesson is that effective BD is not built around occasional bursts of activity. It is a system that should continue operating even when the desk gets busy.
Client concentration is a commercial risk
A strong client relationship can generate a significant proportion of a consultant's revenue. That is valuable, but it can also leave the desk exposed.
If one major client disappeared tomorrow, how quickly could the lost revenue be replaced?
Recruitment desks often develop an 80/20 pattern, with a relatively small number of clients responsible for a large share of billings. Those relationships deserve investment, but dependency becomes dangerous when there is no active pipeline being developed alongside them.
Consistent new business activity is therefore about more than short-term growth. It creates resilience.
The aim is not to eliminate valuable major accounts. It is to make sure the loss or slowdown of one account does not create a disproportionate problem for the consultant or the wider business.
Consistency matters more than occasional intensity
Many consultants intend to do BD but organise it in a way that makes it easy to abandon.
A two-hour or three-hour block looks productive in the diary. In practice, it is vulnerable. A live role becomes urgent, a candidate needs attention or an existing client calls, and the BD session moves.
This is not always a motivation problem. It can simply be poor design.
A more sustainable approach is a smaller daily commitment. Thirty minutes of focused new business activity every day can be more valuable than several hours scheduled irregularly and repeatedly postponed.
The objective is to create a routine that survives a difficult week.
That means selecting a realistic period, putting it in the diary as a recurring commitment and protecting it. The timing should reflect the market being served, but the principle remains the same: BD should happen before the desk becomes quiet enough to force it.
Move from reactive BD to proactive BD
BD often becomes most visible when revenue falls or delivery work slows.
That turns it into a defensive activity.
A stronger desk operates differently. New relationships are developed while existing clients are still busy. Networks continue expanding while consultants are delivering live work. Useful market information is captured while candidate conversations are happening.
This changes business development from a response to a problem into part of normal desk management.
It also creates a more balanced pipeline. Consultants are less reliant on the hope that an existing client will produce another vacancy and better positioned when conditions change.
Lead with something the client can use
The competitive environment has also reduced the effectiveness of generic recruitment conversations.
Clients have their own talent teams, access to job boards and increasingly capable recruitment technology. A consultant who simply asks whether the company is hiring is offering very little differentiation.
The alternative is to start with information.
Recruiters spend every working day speaking with people across their markets. Those conversations reveal how salaries are moving, what candidates expect, where counteroffers are increasing, which companies are hiring and what is influencing candidate decisions.
That knowledge has commercial value.
Instead of opening with a request for vacancies, a consultant can introduce a genuine market observation and ask whether the client is seeing the same pattern.
The conversation immediately changes. The consultant is no longer simply asking for work. They are bringing the client information and inviting them into a relevant discussion.
Make candidate conversations part of the BD engine
Some of the strongest sources of new business intelligence already sit inside normal recruitment activity.
Candidates hear about projects, competitors, team changes and hiring plans. They know which organisations have strong reputations in the market. They can explain why opportunities are being rejected, what salary expectations are changing and where counteroffers are affecting movement.
The key is to capture that information deliberately.
Consultants can begin asking questions that provide both candidate insight and future BD intelligence. For example, asking which organisations a candidate would most like to join can reveal recurring employers of choice.
If the same company keeps being mentioned, that creates a legitimate reason to approach it. The consultant is no longer making a completely cold call. They can explain that the organisation is repeatedly being identified positively by relevant candidates and start a conversation around why.
The desk becomes more commercially productive because candidate activity and client development stop operating as completely separate processes.
Turn every interaction into another potential action
The same principle applies throughout the recruitment process.
A successful placement can create a reason to follow up with related contacts. A candidate rejection can reveal something about the market. A near miss can provide insight that helps another client. A counteroffer can start a discussion about retention and candidate behaviour.
These outcomes should not simply be recorded and forgotten.
Each interaction can create the next BD action.
The stronger the process for capturing and reusing this information, the easier it becomes to find credible reasons to contact prospects without reverting to generic sales messaging.
Technology can support this. Meeting transcription and note-taking tools can help businesses organise information from conversations and surface recurring themes. The commercial benefit comes from using the information, rather than simply storing more of it.
Personalisation matters more as automation increases
Recruitment buyers are exposed to large volumes of outreach.
As AI makes it easier to produce and distribute messages at scale, volume alone becomes an increasingly weak differentiator. Large campaigns can make it harder rather than easier to appear relevant.
A more targeted approach can create greater cut-through.
That might mean contacting fewer companies but researching them properly. It might mean using a mutual connection for an introduction. It could involve referencing a genuine piece of market intelligence, sending a short personal video or writing an email that sounds like a real conversation rather than a template.
The objective is not personalisation for its own sake. It is relevance.
When a prospect can quickly understand why the consultant has contacted them specifically, the interaction has a stronger starting point.
Use LinkedIn as a tool, not the entire strategy
LinkedIn remains valuable for recruitment BD. Posts, comments and direct messages can all contribute to visibility and relationship building.
But it should not become the whole strategy.
The right mix depends on the market. Consultants should understand where their clients spend time and which channels are most likely to generate conversations.
LinkedIn can support a phone approach. A mutual connection can create an introduction. An initial message can make a later email warmer. Different channels should work together rather than compete with one another.
This becomes particularly important when prospects have different communication preferences. Some will answer the phone. Others will prefer email. The approach should adapt without losing the human quality of the communication.
BD rarely comes from a single interaction
There will always be immediate opportunities, and consultants should act on them.
But most sustainable business development is cumulative.
A useful conversation today may not create a vacancy. A second relevant insight might build familiarity. A later introduction or candidate conversation may create the reason to reconnect. Over time, those touchpoints establish credibility.
That is why a repeatable system matters more than a single campaign.
The consultant needs time allocated to the activity, credible reasons to start conversations and a method for selecting the people most worth contacting.
When those elements work together, BD becomes less dependent on finding the perfect cold call and more focused on steadily creating commercial relationships.
Build a simple BD system that can survive a busy desk
The practical starting point does not need to be complicated.
Book a recurring BD slot. Choose one relevant market insight to use in conversations this week. Look back at recent candidate and client interactions and identify one that can generate another commercial action.
Then repeat the process.
The strongest recruitment desks are not necessarily those making the highest volume of approaches. They are the ones that continue creating new conversations, extracting value from the information already passing through the desk and maintaining that activity when delivery work becomes busy.
In a competitive market, that consistency can be the difference between reacting to lost revenue and having the next opportunity already developing.