Every recruitment agency has the same story. A senior consultant identifies a target company — the right headcount, the right sector, the right hiring signals. They spend 45 minutes researching it, have a genuinely productive first call, get a positive response. Then a retained brief lands, three candidates need to go out, and the BD follow-up gets pushed. Two weeks later the moment has passed. The target has moved on. The momentum is gone. And the consultant moves on too, because that's what the pipeline demands.
The conventional diagnosis is a discipline problem. The actual diagnosis is a systems problem. Manual BD research takes long enough that consultants can only run it on a small number of targets at any given time. When live roles compete for attention — which they always do — BD preparation is the first thing that gets cut. The research doesn't happen, the calls don't get made, and the pipeline stays thin. The fix isn't telling consultants to prioritise better. It's removing the 45-minute research barrier so BD prep becomes something the system does, not something the consultant squeezes in.
The full article will cover exactly how recruitment agencies are restructuring their BD workflows — what good automated pre-call research looks like for a recruitment context (different from SaaS), how to handle the Bullhorn/Vincere CRM layer, and what a realistic implementation timeline looks like from first deployment to compounding BD momentum. If your consultants are good at the job but struggling to keep BD moving, this is the piece to read first.