Budget season is the moment BD leaders dread and secretly love in equal measure. You’re being asked to put a number on the future and the future, as anyone who’s ever lost a pitch on a Friday afternoon knows, has a habit of not cooperating.

There’s an unspoken tension at the heart of every agency budget conversation. Leadership wants a growth number they can take to the board and the bank. Finance always wants something defensible. The BD team, or solo CGO, is somewhere in the middle, trying to translate a weighted pipeline that’s part science and part educated guess into a revenue forecast that everyone can count on.

The pressure between being optimistic and conservative is real. In some agencies where culture rewards hustle and confidence, it can feel almost disloyal to point out that not every prospect in the pipeline is going to convert. Overstating the pipeline creates more than a budget problem, it creates a resourcing problem, a cash flow forecast problem and, when the year plays out differently to plan, a credibility problem.

A healthy pipeline is a probability-weighted view of future revenue, and Exec Leads treating it as anything else is where they get BD teams into trouble.

If you’ve got $2M worth of opportunities in play, the question isn’t “how do we budget for $2M?”. The question is “what is our realistic conversion rate, what stage are each of these at, and what external factors could affect the timing or outcome?” Sophisticated BD leaders assign a probability of conversion based on factors like stage of conversation, strength of relationship, competitive landscape and historical win rates. It’s not a perfect system, but it gives finance teams something more reliable to work with than raw pipeline value. Navigating budget season successfully requires planning for multiple scenarios rather than one single objective. Its more common to have three – the “low-ball” base (same as last year) result, the “growth” target (better than last year) result and the stretch (pushing the team out of comfort-zone) result.

The base case is a conservative but realistic repeat of existing pipeline, with an incremental increase. The target case reflects base plus a few new key opportunities landing. The stretch case is what the year could look like if everything goes well, or better than expected. Of course, each scenario is a mix of farming and new opportunities and should come with a corresponding view of what the agency needs to invest in BD to achieve it. When you present the budget this way, you’re signalling to finance that it is not hedging. You’re also giving leadership the information they need to make good decisions about investment whilst interpreting their risk appetite.

A common BD budget mistake is treating new business investment as a fixed overhead rather than a variable that should scale with ambition. If leadership wants 20% revenue growth, the BD function needs to be resourced accordingly. That means enough people, enough time and enough budget for pitching, networking, content and tools. The return on BD investment is genuinely difficult to measure in agencies, but the cost of underinvestment is much easier to see in a shrinking client list, an over-reliance on a small handful of accounts, and a team that’s constantly reactive rather than proactively building relationships.

If you’re heading into budget season asking for more BD resource, get your CMO hat on and come prepared with a clear view of your current win rate, your average pitch cost, your conversion timeline and the revenue value of the opportunities you’re pursuing. That’s the language that will get you the budget you need. BD leaders understand that their credibility with finance and leadership is one of their most valuable professional assets and that credibility is built, or eroded, one sales forecast at a time. When you call something cautiously and it lands, you’re a realist who knows the market. When you consistently overpromise and underdeliver, you’re someone whose numbers get silently discounted before they even hit the spreadsheet.

This budget season, resist the pressure to fill the pipeline with optimism and not much else. Be specific about what’s real, be transparent about what’s uncertain, and build a forecast that the whole business can actually plan (three different versions) around.