The Morning Habit That Makes Better Business Development

Before most executives check email, Taylor Thomson is already three newsletters deep into his morning intelligence ritual.

He scans approximately 15 industry publications daily—Modern Retail, Glossy, Morning Brew, and others covering marketing and retail landscapes. The entire process takes 15-20 minutes. He extracts the most relevant pieces into a shared Google Sheet his business development team uses to inform their prospect conversations.

“You can pull so much interesting information from how people are thinking, what they’re doing, what their challenges and pain points are,” Thomson explains. When a retail company announces strong earnings, their competitors immediately start questioning whether their marketing strategies are adequate. These moments create openings—but only if your team understands the context.

This intelligence gathering represents something most finance executives skip: actively creating conditions for better sales conversations rather than just measuring their outcomes.

Thomson, who leads revenue operations at WITHIN, learned this approach from years in roles that required rapidly developing working knowledge of unfamiliar industries. At a previous financial services firm, he could hold ten-minute conversations about wildfire investigation protocols, pharmaceutical supply chains, or tech sector dynamics—subjects he’d researched that morning.

“I can have a 10-minute conversation with you about how fire investigators in California investigate wildfires and make decisions about who is at fault,” he notes. “I can’t have an 11-minute conversation, but I can go 10 minutes.”

This skill—quickly developing sufficient context to have substantive conversations—proves essential for business development. Prospects don’t want to hear generic pitches. They want to talk with people who understand their specific situations.

The morning briefing creates that understanding at scale. Rather than each BD rep independently researching prospects, Thomson curates intelligence the entire team can leverage. When someone announces a funding round, Thomson flags it. When supply chain disruptions hit a sector, the team knows before prospects mention it.

“When a startup IPOs, that in and of itself is not only going to affect that startup, but also every one of their competitors,” Thomson explains. Smart teams connect these dots. Most organizations don’t bother.

The practice also models what Thomson advocates more broadly: creating value without demanding immediate returns. He doesn’t track ROI on his morning reading time. He can’t draw direct lines between specific articles and closed deals. But he knows the cumulative effect of being informed matters.

For executives wondering how to make BD teams more effective, Thomson’s answer is counterintuitive: stop optimizing their outreach sequences and start improving the intelligence they’re working from. Better context produces better conversations, which eventually produces better results.