Business Development with Kendr

Build a business development system you can inspect

Begin with a commercial decision

Business development connects a useful offer with an organization that may benefit from it, then establishes whether there is a real opportunity to work together. Sending more messages is an activity, not a business outcome. A sound system helps you decide whom to research, why a conversation might be useful, what to say, when to stop, and what evidence justifies the next step.

In this course, Kendr helps you research accounts, draft emails, maintain reusable skills, prepare discovery calls, and run scheduled reviews. You remain responsible for the offer, evidence, relationship, and approved external actions. The goal is a repeatable process that produces relevant conversations and accurate records, rather than an impressive pile of generated copy.

Meet the fictional practice business

You work as Riya, a business development lead at HarborOps. HarborOps offers a two-week onboarding handoff review for small B2B software companies. The fictional package costs USD 2,400 and includes a workflow map, three reusable handoff templates, and a prioritized improvement backlog. Implementation, software licenses, and guaranteed revenue improvements are excluded. These are course facts, not Kendr prices or a real offer you may advertise.

The main practice prospect is LumenDesk, a fictional 60-person B2B software business. Its public careers extract lists two onboarding roles. That is evidence of hiring activity, not evidence that its onboarding is broken or that its COO wants consulting. A second company, MeadowHR, has explicitly requested information in a fictional inbound inquiry. The difference will affect priority, wording, and next steps.

Download the workbook and prospect CSV. All people, organizations, addresses ending in .example, quotes, and results are invented for learning. Never send the exercise messages to actual recipients or present the fictional customer result as your own proof. The baseline exercises work entirely from the supplied pack; live Kendr use is optional and may consume account credits.

Map the stages before automating them

Use these stages for the practice pipeline: research, qualified account, draft ready, contacted, engaged, discovery, proposal, won, lost, and nurture. Define what evidence permits entry and exit. A qualified account fits your target and has a documented reason for research. It is not necessarily a sales opportunity. A proposal needs discovery evidence and a request or agreement to consider scope. Won requires an actual commercial acceptance under the business's process.

Maintain a separate contact-eligibility field. A high-fit account with an unresolved permission review or an opt-out must not become eligible merely because its score is attractive. Also maintain a next action, owner, and date. Stages describe what has happened; next actions describe what should happen next. Mixing the two makes the pipeline look healthier than it is.

Worked example: choose the right next action

LumenDesk has a relevant hiring signal but no recorded conversation. Its next action is to verify the signal and prepare a reviewed hypothesis-led draft. MeadowHR has asked for a workflow review; its next action is to acknowledge the request and ask a focused discovery question. PineMetric fits the target but has opted out; its next action is to preserve suppression, not prepare another sequence.

Use Kendr Chat to make these distinctions explicit:

Act as a business development planning assistant for the fictional HarborOps case.
Using only the supplied offer and prospect records, return one row per account:
account ID, observed fit, evidence, unresolved facts, contact eligibility,
current stage, and proposed next action.
Keep account fit separate from permission to contact.
Do not invent buyer pain, consent, meeting bookings, or completed sends.
This is a planning exercise; do not message anyone or change a CRM.

Your course portfolio

By the final module, you will have an ideal-customer profile, scored account list, research brief, email sequence, reply-handling guide, discovery agenda, proposal, three reusable Kendr skills, two schedule recipes, pipeline review, and operating playbook. Save versions in the workbook. The Academy saves lesson completion and assessment results to your account; local workbook entries are not automatically synchronized or graded.

The capstone is self-assessed practice using a supplied rubric. The course certificate follows lesson completion, module quizzes, the final assessment, and the displayed account requirements. It does not mean an instructor audited your campaign or that a live automation was deployed.

Guided exercise

Write one sentence defining the outcome you want from the fictional campaign. Map LumenDesk, MeadowHR, and PineMetric to their current stage and next action. Add one condition that must be checked before contact and one condition that must be checked before creating an opportunity.