What to Consider When Hiring a BD Manager
Like what you see? Consider subscribing to get the latest articles here.
Hiring a business development manager is a massive decision for most construction companies. It is a straight overhead role, and the ROI can be challenging to justify.
Plus, many business owners ask themselves: Shouldn’t my estimating staff do the BD anyway?
But a good business development manager can be a game-changer for an organization. With the right tools, skills, and tenacity, they can support a healthy pipeline and give you substantially more confidence in your ability to close work.
So, what should you consider when hiring a BD Manager? Here are a few thoughts.
Why builders outperform sellers in BD
I am probably heavily biased in this opinion. Still, if I were considering hiring a Business Development resource inside my construction business, I would lean heavily towards hiring a construction professional who needs to learn how to sell, vs. hiring a salesperson who needs to learn construction.
The buyers in this industry--whether you are a GC or sub--almost always expect to deal with someone who they find credible.
It's possible to find a salesperson without construction experience who your prospective clients will find credible, but it is much more difficult. (Learning everything you need to know about construction to speak to it with any credibility is a tall order.)
Meanwhile, sales and business development are skills so lacking in the construction industry that some simple tools and training can get you better than most of the other "salespeople" out there.
So, I'd rather you know how to build, talk credibly about the industry, and learn the sales skills you need than the other way around for a few major reasons:
They collapse the trust gap fast. A superintendent-turned-BD manager who can sketch a phasing plan on the whiteboard, talk MEP coordination, or explain how you’ll protect operations during a live renovation establishes authority in minutes. That accelerates movement to scope, budget, and schedule—where deals are won.
They qualify better. Builders understand what makes projects risky: bad logistics plans, no path to negotiate, impossible phasing, or “free con forever.” They walk away from pursuits that aren’t a good fit—and redeploy energy to better fits.
They hand off cleanly. Because they think like builders, they bring operations in early, reality-check assumptions, and set projects up to earn back points through buyout and execution. Your promise in the sales meeting survives through to operations.
When a sales-first hire can still make sense
There are exceptions. I’ve seen companies hire a sharp salesperson and teach them construction—and it can work.
A gifted seller can open doors, organize a pursuit, and keep momentum when a team is stretched thin. It works especially well when you have a highly technical team who can be there along the way to support the sales effort.
There are situations where a classically trained seller shines:
Highly programmatic work with clear playbooks (e.g., multi-site refreshes) where access and cadence matter more than deep technical nuance.
Long enterprise pursuits across multiple stakeholders where orchestration, storytelling, and patience are the main game.
Thin top-of-funnel where you simply don’t have enough first meetings to justify a builder’s time in BD.
Even then, pair that person with a technical lead early and create a two-in-the-box motion: the seller opens doors and manages cadence; the builder leads the technical discovery and shapes scope.
Role design
If you are hiring a BD Manager, make the role expectation explicit: you most own the sales process and ensure the rest of the company supports you in stacking a healthy pipeline and ultimately closing deals. You are a business development manager, which means that you are not only doing the business development, but also managing business development across the organization. Hold regular “BD” meetings with the estimating, preconstruction, and operations staff to ensure people throughout the company are attacking the business development efforts within their charge.
You must support closing deals in this position, and ultimately take responsibility—in coordination with the Director over estimating/preconstruction--to hit the company’s revenue goals.
Don’t shy away from making these expectations explicit.
How to hire: questions and tests
“Walk me through how you would phase a live-environment TI on three floors while keeping operations running.”
“Tell me about a time you recovered margin after award. What changed? What did you do?”
“In a first meeting with an owner’s rep, what are your 5 discovery questions?”
Add a practical exercise. Give them a short RFP excerpt and 15 minutes to outline a precon approach and a meeting agenda. You’ll see how they think, speak, and sequence decisions.
Interviewing Red flags
Lots of sales jargon, thin on means-and-methods.
Willingness to promise “unlimited budgeting” with no path to award.
Discomfort bringing operations to the table early.
No opinion on margin discipline (“we’ll make it up on volume”).
Bottom line:
In construction, credibility is the shortest path to trust, and trust is the shortest path to award at defendable margins. You can teach a builder the sales basics faster than you can teach a pure seller to think like a builder.
My take:
Hire builders who can sell, equip them with a simple sales system, and hold the cadence. You’ll earn more meetings, more credibility, and more wins you actually want to build.
Spark Notes:
Hiring a BD Manager is a big overhead decision, but the right one can fundamentally change your confidence in pipeline health and closing work.
In construction, builders tend to outperform pure sellers in BD because credibility collapses the trust gap faster, improves qualification, and leads to cleaner handoffs to operations.
Sales-first hires can work in specific situations, but only when paired tightly with technical leadership and clear role design.
Bottom line: credibility drives trust, trust wins work at defendable margins, and it’s far easier to teach a builder how to sell than a seller how to think like a builder.
