Sam Miri has spent more than two decades leading business development across hardware, software, sensor technology, gaming platforms, and wireless chips — and in that time, the gap between good and great has become unmistakable.
It’s not found in the fundamentals. Everyone knows to build relationships, stay persistent, and know the customer. The real gap lives in the habits, instincts, and judgment calls that good BD leaders make inconsistently and great ones make almost automatically. Here’s what actually separates them.
They Qualify Harder and Earlier
Good BD leaders are reluctant to disqualify opportunities. Every inbound conversation feels like potential. The pipeline stays full — and moves slowly, because a meaningful portion of it was never going to close.
Great BD leaders qualify aggressively from the first conversation. Who owns the budget? What’s the internal urgency? Is the timing real or aspirational? A focused pipeline of high-probability opportunities outperforms a bloated one almost every time. The best BD leaders know their time is the scarcest resource in the process.
They Understand the Customer’s Internal Politics
Closing an enterprise deal rarely comes down to product quality alone. It comes down to navigating the internal dynamics of the customer’s organization — who the real decision maker is, who influences them, who has the most to lose if they say yes.
Good BD leaders understand the person across the table. Great BD leaders understand the organization that person operates inside. They identify champions early, help those champions build the internal case, and anticipate objections from people they’ll never meet directly. In long-cycle enterprise deals, that organizational intelligence is often the deciding factor.
They Know What They Won’t Do
Every experienced BD leader has a story about a deal that looked right on paper but felt wrong — a customer whose demands were unsustainable at scale, a partnership that reflected a fundamental mismatch in priorities.
Good BD leaders struggle here because walking away from revenue is hard to justify when pipeline growth is the metric. Great ones have a clearer internal compass about what serves the business long-term. They’re willing to have the uncomfortable conversation — and have enough credibility from their track record to make it stick.
They Report Honestly — and Play the Long Game
Internal BD reporting has a well-documented optimism bias. Stalled deals get described as “in discussion.” Cold relationships get listed as “warm.” Great BD leaders push back on this. They’re the first to flag when something is in trouble and the last to paper over a problem with optimistic language. That honesty is exactly what makes their good news mean something.
The same discipline extends to relationships. In hardware and connected device markets, the best contacts today may be the most important buyers in three years. As Sam Miri has seen across a career spanning sensors, lighting, gaming technology, and wireless chips — the relationships that generate the most pipeline are rarely built inside a sales cycle. They’re built in the years between them.
Leave a Reply