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CV Business Development — Product Guide

CV Business Development is where the firm's growth work happens: tracking opportunities and pitches, planning and executing client travel, requesting market research, and finding untapped opportunities. It turns business development from a reactive, hard-to-measure activity into a structured, visible pipeline.

Who uses it: BD professionals and managers, practice-group BD leads, and marketing/BD operations. Leadership consumes its analytics.

New to the platform? Read the GLOSSARY first — Opportunity, Connection, Classification, and Matter have specific meanings here.

Opportunities & pipeline

Track pursuits as Opportunities with the right record type and required fields. The Proposal Workflow gives you a Kanban-style task board for pitch tasks plus a guided screen flow to create pitch and proposal opportunities correctly the first time — no guessing which fields are mandatory.

  • Create a pitch/proposal: use the Proposal Workflow screen flow; it stamps the correct record type and required fields.
  • Track pitch tasks: work the Kanban board on the opportunity.
  • See Business Process Library §3.3 (Opportunity & Pipeline) and §3.5 (Pitch & Proposal) for the full process, and the feature doc cv-core/docs/features/bd3-proposal-workflow.md.

Market research

When you need current intelligence on a company or contact before a pitch or trip, request market research instead of chasing it by email.

  • A Request Research quick action on Account and Opportunity pages launches a flow that creates a research request, stamped with status Requested, your name, the date, and a default 6-month expiry, and routed to the Research Team queue.
  • The research team advances it (Requested → In Progress → Completed); you get an in-app notification when it's done.
  • Overdue requests auto-flip to Expired; queue list views surface open and soon-to-expire work.

Client travel planning & execution

Plan BD travel end-to-end and capture what came of it.

  • Plan a trip: create a trip with multiple legs (cities), add targets (accounts/contacts to visit), and track progress per leg.
  • Find who to see: Smart Target Identification suggests targets in a city using whitespace scoring; the Client Locator finds clients near a city, state, or country via fuzzy address matching.
  • Capture outcomes: from a Trip Target, record meeting notes, an outcome status, and follow-ups via a quick action. Link the visit to an existing Opportunity or spin up a new one; follow-up tasks auto-assign to you. Outcome fields lock 7 days after completion (admins can override).
  • A summary on the Trip Leg page shows completion rates and outcome analytics.
  • Features: cv-core/docs/features/trip-planning-bd6.md, cv-core/docs/features/trip-execution-bd6.3.md, cv-core/docs/features/client-locator.md. Process: §3.7.

Finding opportunities — whitespace · 🧩 Modules

The Whitespace view scores account-and-service combinations against existing matters to surface coverage gaps — where the firm has a relationship but not the work. It produces a heatmap, pushes top opportunities into weekly digest emails to relationship managers, and lets you add a whitespace opportunity straight to a campaign. (🧩 Whitespace is a ClientVerse Modules feature — Core-only firms won't have it.) See cv-core/docs/features/whitespace-opportunity.md.

Analytics & reporting

CV BD ships app-aligned report folders and standard dashboards (CV BD, plus Marketing, Lawyer, and Executive views) covering pipeline health, win/loss, and practice penetration. See cv-core/docs/features/bd5.3-bd-analytics-reporting.md and Business Process Library §3.12.

Everyday helpers

These cross-cutting capabilities show up throughout CV BD:

  • Classification & taxonomy — accounts, contacts, opportunities, and campaigns are auto-classified into the firm's hierarchy on save, so segmentation and reporting stay consistent. (cv-core/docs/features/classification-hierarchy.md)
  • AI Actions 🧩 Modules — coming — an Account Memo that briefs you on an account will run on the AI Actions framework; Modules 0.3.0 ships only the config foundation, so this lands in a later Modules release. (cv-core/docs/features/ai-actions-framework.md)
  • Lists — build dynamic, filter-driven lists from any object and share them. (cv-core/docs/features/list-builder.md)
  • Export — export child records to CSV from any record via a guided quick action. (cv-core/docs/features/generic-export-data.md)
  • Collaborators & sharing — grant a group access to records by associating them to a Wall. (cv-core/docs/features/collaborator-wall-sharing.md)
  • Notifications 🧩 Modules — updates and digests arrive via the Dispatch framework (in-app + email); a Modules feature. (cv-core/docs/features/dispatch-notification-framework.md)

What's coming

Several BD capabilities deepen in later phases — a full Business Planning app, competitive intelligence automation, and expense/BD-trip integration (see Business Process Library §4.1, §5.3, §5.4). This guide covers the MVP surface.