July is a useful moment to stop and take stock of your BD. Not because anything has necessarily gone wrong, but because the habits and plans that felt right in January tend to look different six or seven months in – and H2 is long enough to make some deliberate decisions about how you want to use it.
This isn’t about a full strategy review or setting new targets. It’s a simpler exercise: look at what’s been working, protect it; look at what hasn’t, and give yourself permission to let it go.
Start with what’s actually been happening
Before adjusting anything, it helps to be honest about what the last six months have looked like in practice. Not what you planned, but what you actually did — and what came from it.
A quick audit doesn’t have to be formal. Three questions are usually enough:
- Which BD activities have you done consistently, even during busy periods?
- Which relationships have moved forward — deepened, become more relevant, produced something?
- What were you doing in January that you stopped, and does it still feel worth restarting?
The answers tend to clarify things quickly. What survives a busy H1 is usually worth protecting. What dropped away without consequence is usually telling you something.
What to protect
The activities worth carrying into H2 are the ones that have been sustainable — not the ones that felt important in theory. If you’ve been having a monthly coffee with a key referrer and it’s been generating introductions, that’s worth protecting. If you’ve been posting on LinkedIn consistently and it’s keeping you visible with the right people, don’t let it slip when September gets busy.
This connects back to what we explored in January around what ‘enough BD’ actually looks like — the idea that a small, realistic baseline maintained over time outperforms bursts of intense activity followed by long gaps. Midyear is a good moment to identify what your baseline actually is, based on evidence rather than intention.
What to simplify or drop
Most BD plans start the year with more in them than is realistic. By June, it’s usually clearer which initiatives are genuinely going to happen and which have been in reality deprioritised for five months running.
Dropping something isn’t failure in our opinion — it’s editing. A BD plan that reflects how you actually work is far more useful than one that makes you feel behind every time you look at it. If a particular event series hasn’t produced anything worth following up in six months, it might not be the right use of your time. If a piece of thought leadership has been half-drafted since February, it’s worth deciding now whether it’s going to happen or not.
The goal is to go into H2 with a shorter, more honest list — one where everything on it is something you can realistically sustain.
A note on relationships
One of the easiest things to overlook in a midyear review is the relationship dimension. Activity is visible and easy to audit; relationship quality is harder to assess but often more important.
It’s worth spending a few minutes thinking about which relationships have progressed this year and which have drifted. Former clients you haven’t spoken to since a matter concluded. Referrers who were warm in January and haven’t heard from you since. Contacts you met at events and meant to follow up with. None of these require a significant time investment to revive — a short, personal message is usually enough — but they do require you to notice the gap first.
Framing BD in your appraisal
For associates, midyear also tends to mean appraisals — and BD is a topic that frequently lands badly in those conversations, on both sides.
The most common problem is that BD gets assessed as activity rather than progress. A list of events attended, articles drafted, coffees had — without much examination of what any of it produced or where it’s heading. That kind of review is easy to sit through and easy to forget.
A more useful way to frame it is to come prepared with a short narrative: what you’ve been focusing on and why, what’s moved as a result, and what you want to prioritise in H2. That’s a different kind of conversation — one that demonstrates commercial thinking, not just compliance with an expectation.
Practically, that means being able to distinguish between BD activity and BD progress. Activity is what you did. Progress is what changed: a relationship that deepened, a contact who became relevant to a live matter, a piece of work that came in partly because you stayed visible. Both matter, but the latter is what partners are actually interested in — and it’s worth making it explicit rather than hoping they’ll infer it.
If the honest answer is that H1 was busier than expected and BD took a back seat, that’s a reasonable position too. What partners want to see is that you understand the landscape, have a clear view of where you want to focus, and have thought about how to make it more sustainable going forward. That’s a far stronger appraisal conversation than a defensive account of everything you tried to fit in.
The reset
Midyear BD reviews don’t need to be lengthy. An hour of honest reflection — what’s working, what isn’t, what the next six months should look like — tends to be more useful than any amount of planning done under pressure in January.
The aim is to go into H2 with less on the list, more confidence in what’s there, and a clearer sense of what progress actually looks like for you. That’s a good position to be in.