Business Development Overview#

Business Development is critical to 2i2c and is responsible for:

  • Interfacing with customers (future and existing) to understand their challenges

  • Developing our business through sales (securing contracts, grants and renewals) and marketing

  • Providing product guidance to the Product and Services Team (P&S) based on market insights

  • Providing thought leadership to industry stakeholders

  • Connecting communities to amplify science (e.g. funding, research opportunities, etc.).

High-level goals of the Business Development Team#

The Business Development team is guided by the following three-pronged strategy:

  1. Maintain base. Make current users happy. Strive for zero churn. Resolve support issues. Empower champions to describe the value 2i2c enables. Make renewals easy.

  2. Growth. System to get more leads (marketing). System to convert leads to customers (new sales). System to get more revenue through renewals (renewal sales).

  3. Capture revenue. Collect membership fees, usage fees, fees for add-on services. Recover cloud costs. Strive for zero losses.

General responsibilities of the Business Development Team#

  • Sales

    • Account Management

    • Growth / Sales strategy

    • Feasibility assessments (i.e. making sure the work we sell is work we can do)

    • Deliverables-based fundraising (grants and projects).

  • Consultative thought-leadership (informed by our Product strategy)

  • Market Research

Capabilities & Capacity Needed#

  1. Iteratively improve 2i2c’s business model

  2. Know science and philanthropy well enough to sell and seek grants

  3. Strategic enough to prioritize and focus on highest value sales

  4. Uses & improves systems to triage & manage work

  5. Builds “executive” client relationships with org leaders, program directors

  6. Maintain relationships, escalation point if those people aren’t happy

  7. Comfort with selling / asking for money

  8. Capability to report on value delivery to purchasers

The Business Development Slack channel#

Key Roles#