The same playbook our consultants use. Yours, free.
Practical training programmes built from the work our senior consultants do every day — distilled into self-paced courses for people building their careers, leading their teams, or running their businesses. No paywall. No fluff. No upsell. Just the material we wish someone had handed us.
Becoming a Great New Business Development Manager.
Six modules. Roughly three hours. The exact muscle our senior BD consultants spent careers building.
What this course will actually teach you.
Most BD training is written by people who have never carried a number. This course was written by senior practitioners who have built and led commercial functions across more than 20 sectors. It is the briefing we would give to a new BD hire on day one.
Business development sits at the awkward intersection of sales, strategy, and relationship management. Done well, it builds the pipeline that funds everything else. Done badly, it generates noise that looks like activity but doesn’t convert.
This course walks you through the full discipline — from spotting opportunities and qualifying them properly, through the relationship work that takes years and the deal-closing techniques that matter on the day, to the metrics that tell you whether any of it is working.
It is written for aspiring BD managers, founders running their own commercial function, account executives stepping up into BD, and operators who want to think more rigorously about how revenue is built. No prior sales background is required.
Six modules. Sequential. Practical.
Each module is a self-contained PDF you can download, read, annotate, and refer back to. We recommend reading them in order — later modules build on earlier ones — but each can stand alone if you only need a specific topic.
The foundations: what BD actually is, where it ends and sales begins, and the mindset that separates good BD managers from the rest.
- The BD function inside a modern commercial team
- Hunters, farmers, and the role each plays
- Why most BD training fails — and what works
How to find the right opportunities before your competitors do. Practical research methods that produce qualified leads, not noise.
- Mapping your addressable market
- Reading buyer signals (and ignoring vanity ones)
- Prioritisation frameworks that actually work
The longest-payoff skill in BD — and the hardest to fake. How to develop genuine commercial relationships at every level.
- The economics of trust in B2B
- Mapping decision-makers and influencers
- Account management beyond the first sale
Moving from individual deals to a coherent sales strategy. How to build a plan that ties commercial activity to business outcomes.
- Setting credible commercial targets
- Choosing your go-to-market model
- Aligning sales, marketing, and product
The skills that look easy when someone good is doing them. Tactical and strategic frameworks for getting to a signed contract without leaving value on the table.
- Reading the room and the deal dynamics
- Concession strategy and trade variables
- Closing techniques that don’t feel pushy
How to know whether what you are doing is working. The metrics that matter, the ones that don’t, and how to build a feedback loop that compounds.
- Lead, lag, and pipeline health metrics
- Win/loss analysis that produces lessons
- Building a continuous-improvement cadence
No login. No friction. No upsell.
Self-paced training the way it should be. Open the modules in order, work through them on your own schedule, return whenever you need a refresher.
Download what you need
Click any module above. The PDF opens in your browser or downloads to your device — your choice. Save them all if you prefer to read offline.
Read at your own pace
Each module is roughly 25–35 minutes of focused reading. Most learners complete the full course over two or three sittings spread across a week.
Apply & refer back
The frameworks are designed to be used, not memorised. Keep the PDFs on your desktop and refer back when a real situation calls for them.
By the end of this course, you will be able to:
Run a credible BD function from day one
You’ll understand the full BD discipline well enough to step into a role and make sensible decisions in your first 30 days — not just defer to your manager.
Identify and qualify real opportunities
You’ll be able to look at a market and tell good leads from bad ones — before spending six weeks on something that was never going to convert.
Build relationships that compound
You’ll have a clear framework for developing senior commercial relationships — the ones that produce repeat business and referrals years later.
Negotiate and close without leaving value behind
You’ll have the language and the discipline to navigate complex deals — getting to signature without giving away margin or making promises you can’t keep.
Built with the G&G senior BD network.
Course material distilled from the practitioners who run our New Business Development and Growth as a Service engagements. Hosted and presented by the G&G Specialist team.
Alex Thomson
Alex hosts the Grant & Graham Academy and the firm’s Specialist podcast series — bringing together course material, case-study commentary, and conversations with the senior consultants who built the source material.
Each module is reviewed by the Grant & Graham senior network before publication, ensuring it reflects the discipline as practised in real client engagements rather than a theoretical syllabus.
Related reading from our blog.
Articles by Grant & Graham senior practitioners that complement the course material — real perspectives on the BD discipline from people doing the work.
More courses, in the pipeline.
The Academy is being built out across the disciplines our senior consultants work in every day. Here’s what’s queued up next.
Leading a Transformation Through the First 90 Days
The most critical phase of any change programme. What to do, what to defer, and how to read the room before making big decisions.
Setting Up an International Entity
The practical playbook for company formation across jurisdictions — banking, compliance, structure choices, and the traps to avoid.
Building Senior Leadership Capability
Why most leadership development fails to deliver commercial outcomes — and the small number of programmes that actually do.
Sometimes you’d rather hire than learn.
The Academy gives you the playbook. If you’d rather have one of our senior practitioners run the play themselves — into your business, from week one — that’s what Grant & Graham does for a living.