Talent Marketplaces have the potential to significantly enhance your organization's business development practices, particularly in the context of enterprise or B2B sales.

By leveraging these marketplaces, you can drive three specific improvements:

1) Improve bid quality and turnaround time through better sourcing
2) Improve opportunity identification through better visibility and connectivity
3) Improve the business development talent pipeline

Improve bid quality and turnaround time through better sourcing

Your sales team has identified a promising opportunity, but there are two significant challenges that need to be addressed:

a) Tailored Solution: The customer requires a customized solution, but the account team currently lacks the necessary skills and expertise.
b) Insufficient time: The customer expects the proposal to be delivered within a short duration but the team may not be sufficiently resourced.

To overcome this challenge, the team can post the opportunity on the talent marketplace's internal gig ecosystem, accessing the available capacity throughout the firm. Leveraging the marketplace's matching capabilities, the system provides recommendations on the optimal combination of skills and available capacity. This allows the team to tap into the expertise of other employees to improve the quality and turnaround time of the proposal. By leveraging the 360 degree feedback feature, the contributions of these individuals can be properly recognized.

By utilizing the talent marketplace to address both the need for limited skills or expertise and capacity, your team can effectively seize this promising opportunity and boost sales performance.

Improve opportunity identification through better visibility and connectivity

In most organizations, sales teams are typically structured to concentrate on specific customer, industry, or geographical segments. While these teams rightly prioritize external efforts in developing their opportunity pipeline, they often overlook the untapped potential within their organization's internal network.

To enhance their existing opportunity identification efforts, sales teams can adopt the following approaches:
a) Leveraging the Internal Network: By broadcasting their needs to the internal network, sales teams can seek support or guidance on specific customer, industry, or geographical nuances. Other sales team members with relevant experience can offer valuable insights, ideas, or cautionary tales, enriching the team's understanding and approach.


b) Collaborating with Experts: Sales teams can proactively seek out experts within the organization who can contribute to brainstorming sessions. For instance, a sales team aiming to develop a new paid subscription alternative to an existing offering could learn from other teams across the organization who have tackled similar initiatives in the past.

c) Engaging Mentors: Sales teams can benefit from having mentors from different segments within the organization. These mentors, despite operating in different areas, can offer diverse perspectives that broaden the team's focus areas helping them explore new avenues and discover untapped potential.


While the above is practiced in pockets within organizations, a talent marketplace can help make the process sustainable and more accessible across the organization.

Improve the business development talent pipeline

To ensure the sustained growth of business development and sales teams, external recruitment efforts can be complemented by enhanced internal and lateral mobility initiatives.

Implementing a talent marketplace within the organization facilitates valuable connections and knowledge sharing between new hires or career starters and experienced colleagues. This platform enables individuals to learn from the expertise of others, fostering a culture of continuous learning and professional development.

Simultaneously, the gig ecosystem provides an opportunity for employees from various functions to explore business development roles. Hiring managers can leverage this ecosystem to test individuals' capabilities before making permanent hiring decisions. As a result, they may be more willing to provide opportunities to individuals without a traditional business development background.

By adopting these strategies, the organization can cultivate a robust talent pipeline in the field of business development.

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