If you’ve searched "business development strategy" online, you probably found a similar list on every page. Set goals. Research the market. Pick your channels. Track your KPIs.
It's good advice. And, at a 30,000 ft view, it works.
But what happens when your reps have to put the strategy into action - in the field?
On a well-known sales forum, a business development manager at a commercial roofing company shared his process. He bought lists of facility managers, property managers, and building owners. Each one got two calls with no voicemail, then two outbound emails.
After that, in his words, "leads seem to go to the lead graveyard and the CRM is a mess."
By his own account, the leads were fine: "Our leads are pretty good, they just seem to be wasted because of our process. The old tasks and tickler system, nobody seems to adhere to."
That’s why we built this guide. It walks you through the full business development strategy, from choosing targets to keeping conversations alive to growing the customers you already have.
Repeat customers and word-of-mouth referrals are the primary drivers of business volume for 65% and 60% of commercial contractors. (ServiceTitan, 2025)
63% of commercial contractors secure more than half their customer base through planned maintenance agreements. (ServiceTitan, 2025)
37% of commercial contractors list growing recurring revenue as a top business priority. (ServiceTitan, 2025)
Only 43% of salespeople hit quota in 2025, down from 52% the year before. (Salesforce, 2025)
What Is a Business Development Strategy (and How Is It Different From a Sales Strategy)?
The two terms get used interchangeably, and that's where a lot of plans go sideways.
A business development strategy decides where growth comes from: which goals, which markets, which companies, and which relationships. Sales takes that strategy and turns it into actions like prospecting and outbound.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce guide starts the same way most do, with identifying your target audience, researching the market, and setting measurable goals.
But since it's written for a broad audience, it misses one key factor. The building.
See, in almost every B2B sales relationship, there are two primary vectors to focus on: the company and the contact. In commercial services like HVAC or janitorial, the third vector, or layer, is the building.
The location, size, use, type, and equipment all need specific targeting, just like a company or contact would. Your market is a set of properties, and your buyers are the people who own, manage, or maintain them. We'll come back to this later.
What does a business development manager actually own?
Who owns what will vary on the size of the team as well as the size of the company.
On many commercial services teams, the BD manager owns new business from first contact through close: the target list, the relationships with property managers, facility managers, and owners, the pipeline, and often the proposal and negotiation.
Some companies hand renewals and expansion to account managers, while others keep service agreement growth with the BD manager.
Business development strategy: A written plan for how a company chooses its growth goals, target markets, relationships, and channels, and how it turns existing customers into new revenue. Sales executes inside that plan.
Acquire, Manage, Grow: A way to organize business development for commercial services into three connected phases: winning the right new accounts, keeping every opportunity moving, and expanding the accounts you already serve.
Planned maintenance agreement (PMA): A recurring service contract that covers scheduled maintenance and priority response. For many commercial customers, it's the first contract they sign.
What Are the Pillars of a Business Development Strategy?
Ask five sources for the pillars of a business development framework and you'll get five different lists - but they all land on the same four jobs: finding new customers, managing relationships and pipeline, growing existing accounts, and building partnerships that open doors.
Pillar | What it looks like in commercial services | The number that proves it |
New customer acquisition | Reaching the right buildings and decision-makers before a competitor does | First appointments booked |
Relationship and pipeline management | Every opportunity has a next step, an owner, and a date | Opportunities advancing a stage each week |
Account growth | More buildings, contacts, and service lines inside current customers | Agreements and revenue added per account |
Strategic partnerships | Property management firms, HOAs, and referral partners that control many buildings | Buildings reached through one relationship |
How do the pillars work as one loop in commercial services?
In a commercial services business development strategy, the first three pillars run as one loop, and partnerships feed all three.
A new account gets managed into a closed deal. The closed deal becomes a relationship that opens the next building, the next contact, or a referral to the property next door.
David Vroblesky, Principal Product Manager at Convex, started his career in HVAC sales. He describes referrals as the engine most contractors already run on, until "there comes a certain point where you can only push against the tide so much."
"It's a lot of work, but that's where you can get those deals and those new relationships that will continue to give you more referrals and keep that flywheel going." - David Vroblesky, Principal Product Manager, Convex
Notice where David puts the outbound work. It feeds the referrals you already count on.
A flywheel still needs a direction, though, and that starts with the goal.
How Do You Set Business Development Goals Your Team Can Act On?
"We're just trying to grow" is one of the most common answers Ben Walters hears when he asks about goals. Ben is a Sales Leader at Convex, and the deals he sees move fastest share two things: a quantified growth goal and a known gap to achieving it.
Taj Shaw, Manager of Customer Success at Convex, hears the same thing from smaller teams. The goal sounds like "I just want to do 3 million more than I did last year." Her follow-up is the question the plan has to answer: "but how are you going to get there?"
Notice what both Ben and Taj did? They named a specific gap to fill.
Vague: Grow service revenue this year.
Measurable: Add $1.2 million in new service agreement revenue by December 31.
Actionable: Add $1.2 million in new service agreement revenue by December 31. We're short because reps call on every building type and win a small share of what they quote.
The third version names the gap, and the gap tells you where the plan starts. About 37% of commercial contractors list growing recurring revenue as a top priority (ServiceTitan, 2025), so agreement revenue is a common place to begin.
In that example, the gap points straight at who the reps are calling.
Which Buildings, Markets, and Buyers Should Your Strategy Target?
When Ben asks prospects in a demo what types of buildings they like to target, he usually hears, "Oh, we kind of do everything."
His next questions: "Okay, well, what's most profitable? Where do you have the highest win rate?" The answer, he says, is "usually no idea."
Those three numbers build the target for your business development strategy. Win rate, profitability, and market size turn into a building profile and a buyer role.
Square footage, property type, and ownership structure on one side. Facility manager, property manager, or owner on the other.Here's a deeper walkthrough on building a property-based ICP.
Skipping this step costs more than it looks.
David describes how one untargeted call takes five minutes, and "the 5 minutes leads to 10 minutes when you call 2, which leads to a whole day, which leads to a whole week, which leads to a whole month" before anyone stops to think about targeting.
Nick Davis, CSO at MSD, a mechanical contractor in Dayton, Ohio, lived that month for years. His reps made 100 cold calls a week, researched prospects at the local library, and usually reached a main line and a gatekeeper. "We were losing time that we weren't going to get back," Nick said.
Today, MSD reps open Convex, filter by square footage, property type, and owner-occupied status, and find the right contact by job title before they dial.
Nick sets the business development strategy for his team, provides them with the tools and training to execute, and asks each rep to run their territory like their own small business. Over the next 18 months, this change in their approach has led to $42 million in sourced pipeline.
Which Channels Should Carry Your Outreach?
Referrals are a great free channel. They come with built-in trust and credibility, they’re profitable, and they close.
But you can’t control the lead flow from referrals.
So a great business development strategy plans for referrals, and trains the team on how to generate them, but adds channels that are within a BD manager's control. For most sales teams, that's a mix of phone and email, in-person visits, and LinkedIn outreach.
The best outreach gives the person on the other end a reason to stay on the phone - and there are four main triggers: buying signals from buildings actively searching for your services, permit activity, a change in ownership or decision-maker, and work you're already doing nearby.
One BDR on Ben's team came over from a commercial roofing company, and his old playbook is a good example. When his crew booked an inspection in an industrial park, he called every building around it and offered a free inspection while the crew was already there.
Same trade as the roofer on the sales forum. Very different first call. Gatekeepers still slowed him down, but naming the person they were working with at the building next door kept people on the phone.
Going after the firms that manage many buildings works the same way, just on a larger scale.
Taj worked with a landscaping customer that stopped calling tenants and went after property management groups and HOAs instead, since tenants rarely know who handles the grounds.
One relationship with a property management firm can put you in front of an entire portfolio.
How Do You Keep Opportunities Moving After the First Conversation?
The roofer from the sales forum stopped at four touches because nothing in his system told anyone to make a fifth - and that’s a trend across B2B sales. Most reps quit after four attempts.
But directors of facilities and property managers don’t spend all day at their desks. They’re walking the property, checking on equipment and systems, and talking to tenants.
Ben puts the realistic number at 8 to 15 touches to book a meeting with a commercial decision-maker, spread across phone, email, LinkedIn, and in-person visits. "I would highly suggest at least 50% over the phone," he says.
He's specific about the voicemails his team leaves, too. “Skip the callback request,” he says. “Mention the email you're about to send, including the subject line, so it lands with context.” And, for your highest-priority accounts, add a personal visit to the cadence.
None of that holds up unless someone is watching it. Matt Koenig, General Manager at Haynes Mechanical Systems in Colorado, needed every rep booking five new meetings a week to hit service targets. He had very little visibility into whether it was happening.
So his team started running leaderboards in team meetings, tracking first appointments booked, buildings tracked, and proposals moving forward. They used Convex to find target buildings with verified contacts that fit their ICP and prospect them.
After two months, first appointment bookings nearly doubled, contributing to nearly 30 active proposals and $400,000 in new pipeline and $370,000 in closed deals.
"Now we can control a leading measure we need to achieve a lagging measure. Convex helps us identify the activities that help us get the meetings." - Matt Koenig, General Manager, Haynes Mechanical Systems
How Do Existing Customers Become Your Next Growth Channel?
"My existing customers are some of the best points of entry for expansion," Ben says. Most teams know it and still leave it out of their business development strategy.
When he asks about how they handle referrals, the answer he gets most often is: "We don't proactively pursue referrals, we only wait for them to come to us."
Stop for a second and look at how many customer accounts are in your CRM. Think about how much access you already have.
About 63% of commercial contractors secure more than half their customer base through planned maintenance agreements (ServiceTitan, 2025). Your team is inside those buildings on a schedule. Every visit is a chance to ask what else the owner has, who else at the firm manages property, and what's next door.
Here are three growth plays worth writing into your business development strategy.
Same owner, more buildings. Find out what else your customer's ownership group owns. Nick White, then a Regional Director of Sales at Pye-Barker Fire & Safety, called a phone number listed in Convex and opened a conversation with one ownership group. "Simply by calling a phone number listed right on the Convex dashboard to open a world of 15 locations we'd end up closing," he said.
Same firm, more contacts. Count how many properties each property management firm in your market controls, then count how many of its managers you actually work with. Ben's opener for the rest of the firm is simple: "we're working with Bob and Cheryl today.”
Same street, more neighbors. Put your customers on a map and look at what's around them. When a franchise owner at Jan-Pro of Northwest Florida lost accounts, sales rep Danielle Ross dropped the owner's remaining addresses into the Convex map and clicked through the buildings nearby. "This new account is literally a half mile down the street from your one account," she told the owner.
The property-first cross-selling framework goes deeper on each play. All three work better when they're hard-coded into your sales workflows - but they have to be written into your business development strategy first.
How Do You Write a Business Development Strategy Plan?
A business development strategy doesn't need to be long. A one page-plan works, as long as every line answers a question your team would otherwise guess at.
If you want the full build-out, here's a guide to building a business development plan line by line, but here’s the breakdown:
Line on the plan | Question it answers | Example |
Goal and gap | What are we growing, and what's in the way? | $1.2M in new agreements. Reps call on every building type. |
Target | Which buildings and buyers? | Owner-occupied buildings over 50,000 sq ft. Facility managers. |
Channels | How do we get the first conversation? | Trigger events, property management groups, monthly referral asks |
Cadence | How many touches, in what order? | 8 to 15 touches, half by phone, a visit for top-tier accounts |
Growth plays | Which existing accounts expand next? | Owners with more buildings, customers without an agreement |
KPIs | How will we know by week six? | First appointments, stage movement, agreements added |
Here's what that page looks like in practice. Let's go back to the roofer from the sales forum, with the same list he already bought.
Monday morning, he narrows his list to the building profile on the plan and picks this week's corridor. Taj coaches reps to start exactly there, asking "what am I doing this week? What's important for me this week?" If his team has Convex Signals, he also checks which buildings searched for roofing services the week before.
Tuesday through Thursday, every lead gets an owner, a next step, and a date. The fifth touch happens because the plan says it does. Friday afternoon goes to existing customers and the buildings next to them.
Same leads. A very different week.
For a small business with two reps, the one page plan works as written. A twenty-rep team adds territory assignments and a weekly pipeline review, and keeps the same strategy.
Keep in mind as you’re building your version of the one pager - “simplicity drives sales, complexity creates confusion.”
Which KPIs show the strategy is working?
Quota attainment tells you how last quarter went - but it’s a lagging indicator.
Only 43% of salespeople hit quota in 2025 (Salesforce, 2025), which is telling. Many companies' business development strategies are well intended, but they don’t actually translate into the field.
Leading indicators show up while there's still time to act: ICP fit buildings targeted, first appointments booked, opportunities moving stages, touches per account, and agreements added to existing customers.
These metrics show the plan is working before the numbers show the strategy is working.
Arcem Entry Systems, a commercial door company in Indiana, set a target of 20% of each salesperson's week for prospecting, up from 0%. Their company had run on inbound and referrals and Rich Love, Arcem’s CRO, wanted to achieve more predictable growth.
Over the next year, the team sent 20% fewer quotes and grew sales 16%. "I don't know who wouldn't want that. Less work, more money," said Rich.
Week by week, those numbers show which part of the loop is carrying your growth and where the gap is.
Where Does Next Year's Growth Come From?
For most commercial services companies, revenue growth comes from three places at once. New buildings that fit the profile, opportunities that make it past the fourth touch, and customers who already trust your team with one building.
A business development strategy writes all three down, assigns them, and checks them every week.
None of it runs on its own. As Taj puts it, "You definitely get out what you put in."
If you want to see what the Acquire, Manage, Grow loop looks like in your territory, schedule a demo of Convex. We'll walk you through examples of your target buildings, pipeline, and how you can tap into existing customers where the next conversation is already waiting.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between business development and sales?
Business development decides where growth comes from: which markets, buildings, relationships, and partnerships to pursue. Sales wins the deal once a conversation starts and turns a first meeting into a signed agreement.
What are the 4 pillars of business development?
Most frameworks land on four: new customer acquisition, relationship and pipeline management, account growth, and strategic partnerships. In commercial services, the first three run as one loop (Acquire, Manage, Grow), and partnerships with property management firms and referral sources feed all three.
What does a business development manager do?
A business development manager owns the target market, the relationships that open doors, and the health of the pipeline before a proposal goes out. On smaller commercial services teams, the role also carries a quota and runs growth inside existing accounts.
What are the main types of business development strategies?
Most business development strategies fall into five types: market expansion, strategic partnerships, existing account expansion, new service offerings, and positioning. Commercial services teams usually get the most from the first three, because each one follows the building.
How many touches does it take to book a meeting in commercial services?
Ben Walters, Sales Leader at Convex, puts the range at 8 to 15 touches across phone, email, LinkedIn, and in-person visits. He suggests at least half of them happen by phone.
Related Topics
Demand Generation for Commercial Services: How to Build an Outbound Lead Generation Engine
The Modern Sales Process for Commercial Services: From First Touch to Close
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