Scaling BD: Teams, Culture, and the Tech That Drives Growth

In a recent episode of Amplify, the podcast from the Association for Accounting Marketing, Brian Blaha, Chief Strategy Officer of Winding River Consulting joined host Chris Camarafor a conversation centered on his experience building and scaling business development functions at accounting firms.

Few people in the accounting profession have thought more deeply about what it actually takes to build a growth engine inside a CPA firm than Brian Blaha. Over 29 years at Wipfli — starting as an auditor, becoming partner, building the Chicago market from scratch, and ultimately serving as Chief Growth Officer for eight years — Brian developed and refined a playbook for BD that's as practical as it is strategic.

In a wide-ranging conversation on the Amplify podcast, Brian shared lessons learned from growing Wipfli's BD team from zero to 50 people, the role data and technology played in making that team effective, and why he believes the future of business development is human plus digital — not one or the other.

Building the Team: From Acquisition to Architecture

Wipfli's BD team didn't start with a hiring plan. It started with M&A. When the firm acquired advisory practices that already had business developers in place, Brian inherited a small, fragmented team and set about building something coherent around it.

The first challenge was alignment. The firm was transitioning from a service-line go-to-market strategy to an industry-focused one: a shift that demands BD professionals understand the full breadth of a firm's capabilities, not just the one service they were originally hired to sell.

Compensation structure was another early priority. Brian worked through multiple iterations of the comp plan to ensure it reinforced the right behaviors and reflected the firm's actual growth strategy. To justify continued investment in the team to firm leadership, he developed a straightforward performance metric: dollars won divided by compensation — a multiple that measured return on BD investment. Early on, the benchmark was modest. As the team matured, top performers were generating upwards of ten times their compensation in won business.

"Anytime you brought in a new BD, it actually dropped your multiple, because there's a ramp-up time," Brian explains. "So we kept the metric not too far out of range and just started layering people on as we could prove we were being successful."

Structuring the team also required a clear-eyed view of what different types of BDs actually do. Not every BD is a hunter, some are gatherers, and not every partner is equipped to support a complex sale. Brian built a team that reflected that reality — a mix of hunters, relationship developers, and, as the firm's digital strategy matured, sales development reps focused on converting warm inbound leads from the website.

CRM: From Compliance Tool to Strategic Asset

Wipfli was an early CRM adopter, first adopting rudimentary solutions in the early 2000’s before evolving to more sophisticated systems. But for years, the firm’s CRM functioned primarily as a compliance mechanism. Partners were given a clear economic motivation to use the program, with comp tracked to sales recorded in the CRM tools.

The turning point came when leadership made CRM usage a condition of compensation increases. That created the data discipline necessary for something more powerful: real business intelligence.

Once Brian was confident the data was genuinely accurate, he could begin surfacing meaningful insights. During COVID, when lead volume started declining, the data gave Brian the visibility to push back against the instinct of others to keep people focused on serving clients: "I was seeing the data. I said, no — we have to get our people selling, because if we don't, we won't have work to do six or seven months from now."

The growth dashboard Brian developed brought all of that data together in one place — lead volume, pipeline status, deal credit, client segmentation — and became a tool that partners and industry leaders referenced regularly. It's a model that reflects something data-driven firms understand well: when good data is in front of people consistently, it changes how decisions get made.

The Tech Stack: Intent, Intelligence, and Integration

Beyond CRM, Wipfli invested in a targeted set of tools that added meaningful intelligence to the BD process. Sales Navigator helped the firm's most active business developers and rainmakers stay connected to their networks and identify new opportunities. Bombora, a buyer intent tool, surfaced signals about when prospects were actively researching topics relevant to the firm's services.

Brian is candid about the risks of intent data. One partner received a signal, reached out, and led with the data directly — making the interaction feel more surveillance than service. The lesson: intent data is most powerful when it opens a conversation, not when it drives one. Emotional intelligence in how you use the data matters as much as the data itself.

On his roadmap before leaving Wipfli were relationship intelligence tools like Introhive and Propense, which map existing relationship networks across a firm to surface warm paths into new opportunities.

The Relationship Maturity Model

One of the most distinctive frameworks Brian developed at Wipfli traces back to his days building the Chicago market. When he relocated in 2011, he identified 165 target prospects and quickly realized that the path from introduction to client is a gradual journey — one that he needed to track.

The result was a zero-to-five relationship maturity model. At zero, there was no relationship at all. At one, perhaps a shared referral source or indirect connection. By four, the prospect was essentially a client who didn't know it yet: calling with questions, accepting every lunch invitation, engaging in strategic conversations. Five was a live client relationship.

Brian applied a parallel model to existing clients, tracking the depth of the firm's penetration into a client organization: from a transactional relationship with a single point of contact, all the way to trusted advisor status with the full executive team. The model gave his team a consistent language for assessing where they stood and what needed to happen next in any given relationship.

What's Changed in BD (and What Hasn't)

When asked how business development has evolved over his career, Brian's answer is more nuanced than one might expect. In some ways, he argues, the fundamentals are unchanged. Show up where your prospects are. Build genuine relationships. Develop real industry expertise. The tried-and-true organic growth strategies still work.

What has changed is the buyer. Today's purchasing decisions involve more stakeholders — Brian described working a complex sale for nearly a year before getting in front of a leadership team of five, plus a board of eight or nine. That means building confidence across a broader set of decision-makers, not just one CFO. And in a world where prospects research firms long before they ever reach out, the ability to validate expertise digitally — through a polished LinkedIn presence, consistent thought leadership, and a credible digital footprint — has become a prerequisite, not a differentiator. It's one reason inbound marketing has become such a critical part of the modern firm's growth model.

The AI Question: Human in the Loop

Brian sees a clear role for AI in the BD process, but frames it in a way that reflects his broader philosophy. Drawing on the concept of the "smile curve" — the idea that value in any process concentrates at the beginning (strategy and planning) and the end (delivery and relationship) — he argues that AI will increasingly handle the work that sits in the middle of a sales cycle: research, proposals, statements of work, administrative sequencing.

That's not a threat to great BD professionals. It's a multiplier. If AI can compress the time required for those baseline activities, skilled BDs can run more sales motions simultaneously without requiring proportional increases in headcount.

What AI won't replace, in Brian's view, is the ability to build trust, read a room, and close a deal. "Where true value sits is still going to be building relationships, closing deals, having the emotional intelligence to read a buyer," he says. "That's still going to be in the hands of the human seller."

The Bigger Picture

What comes through clearly in Brian's perspective is that BD at scale isn't really about any single tool or tactic. It's about building systems — for tracking relationships, measuring performance, aligning teams, and surfacing intelligence — and then embedding those systems into the culture of the firm.

At Winding River Consulting, we help accounting firms build the growth infrastructure to compete in today's market: from go-to-market strategy and BD team development to digital presence and pipeline optimization. If you're looking to build or scale your firm's growth function, we'd welcome the conversation. Contact us today to learn more.