What is a BD Health Check and do you need one?

None of these things are catastrophic on their own. But they tend to travel in packs.

A BD Health Check exists for exactly this moment. It’s not a crisis intervention, it’s a tune-up. An independent, structured look at the commercial health of a business carried out by people who do this for a living and have no agenda beyond giving you an honest picture.

Here’s what it actually involves:

The process

We start with people. One-to-one interviews with the team members who are involved in winning and retaining business. Not just the directors, but anyone who touches the commercial side. These conversations are where the real picture tends to emerge. What people say in an interview is often quite different from what gets reported upwards.

Alongside the interviews, we do a critical assessment of commercial collateral including your  pitch decks, case studies, capability statements, proposals, website copy and look at how the business manages its pipeline. Who owns it, how deals are tracked, what happens when a prospect goes quiet.

The whole thing typically takes two to three weeks and asks very little of the client team beyond making time for the conversations.

What comes out of it

A written report covering what’s going well, what could go better, and what isn’t happening at all. A SWOT-style overview of the commercial health of the business. And specific, prioritised recommendations, not a long list of nice-to-haves, but a clear steer on where to focus first.

We’ve done this with businesses across the renewable energy sector, engineering consultancies, environmental advisors and large infrastructure organisations. The details are always different. The patterns are surprisingly consistent.

What we actually find

The most common finding is that the capability is there but the strategy isn’t. Companies with excellent technical reputations and genuinely happy clients, who have no agreed picture of who their ideal prospect is, no standardised collateral to send after the first call, and a BD process that lives entirely in a spreadsheet or in the heads of two or three senior people.

1. An energy consultancy team could articulate their value proposition confidently in conversation but had never written it down in a consistent, agreed form. Every client-facing team member was describing the business slightly differently. Their pitch deck was being rebuilt from scratch for every proposal. 
2. In a fast-growing environmental advisory business, new business had been won almost entirely through personal networks. The brand itself wasn’t doing any of the work. When key people moved on or got busy, the pipeline slowed because the relationships were personal, not institutional. 
3. A large engineering firm’s digital team had built an impressive product and proven it commercially with global clients. But their go-to-market was product-focused at every stage. There was no awareness content, no narrative about the problem they solved just detailed technical material aimed at buyers who had already decided they needed a solution. The awareness stage of the buyer journey was completely unaddressed.

In each case, the health check surfaced these things clearly and gave the teams a prioritised route to fixing them.

How do you know if you need one?

Don’t wait until you’re losing sleep. Some of the most useful health checks we’ve done have been for businesses that were doing well by most measures. Growing, busy, good client relationships but had a sense that their commercial engine could work harder. That they were relying on referrals and personal networks more than was comfortable, or that their collateral hadn’t kept pace with how the business had evolved.

A few questions worth sitting with: 

Does your whole team describe what you do the same way? 

Do you have a clear view of your commercial pipeline at any given time? 

Do you know which accounts have the most potential for growth, and who is responsible for nurturing them? 

Do prospects get a consistent experience from their first contact with you?

If any of those feel uncertain, it’s probably worth a conversation.

What happens after 

The health check is a diagnostic. It tells you what the picture looks like and where to focus. For most clients, it’s the beginning of a longer piece of work such as strategy workshops, collateral development, ongoing BD and marketing support. But some clients take the report and run with it themselves. Either is fine.

If you’re curious about what a health check would look like for your business, get in touch with Stu at hello@makethebreak.co. During May and June 2026, we’re offering it at half price £1,375 + VAT.