What is Business Development? Complete Definition And Guide

Our practical and comprehensive guide to business development aims to answer all your questions about the business development role and what it could mean for your company.

Have you ever heard the term “business development“ during meetings and got the feeling that no one really knows what it means?

Well, let’s dive into some of the most important things to know about this term and its potential growth role for a business.

We’ve all seen job postings for “development executive” or “director of development” , or perhaps the flashier “development strategist” , and even the grand “VP of Business Development”.

If you are a small business owner, you may end up going to a business and development center for advice.

But what do these papers really mean? 🤔

What is Business Development?📌

Business development (BD) is essentially any activity or idea that aims to make a business better over time.

This means making use of customers, implementing strategic partnerships, using your markets and building your company’s reputation. 📈

BD positions at every level, from executives to vice presidents, are looking for ways to help the business grow revenue, physically expand and grow, while fostering long-term and strategic partnerships in the process.

So why is there so much confusion about what it is and what it means?

A development professional usually talks to several departments:

• Sales
• Finance
• Marketing
• Client services
• Legal
• Strategic management
• Product’s release
• Increased brand awareness

This explains why people often confuse marketing with business development.

The Difference Between Business Development And Marketing 🤝

Marketing is the process of creating, transmitting, and delivering offers that have value to your customers or strategic partners. The key is to identify all available growth opportunities.

While your business professional will look for ways to appeal to target markets , your marketing team will tailor their marketing skills and budget to create the material that enables that target appeal to occur, creating complementary partnerships and long-term relationships. .

The professionals can develop the plan, while the marketing team creates the content and marketing copy.

However, while content creation can easily be outsourced to freelancers, agencies, or even university writing services, a developer should know your business inside out.

Success comes when both departments work together to ensure the success of a product’s commercialization, based on the development and research that informs subsequent marketing material.

How Will A Business Grow In Different Areas?

• Creation of strategic partnerships for the future growth of the company and consideration of potential business partners.
• Examine existing markets and development opportunities.
• Growth of the company ‘s reputation with a well-founded business plan.

How To Shorten The Distance Between Your Customer And Your Product 🌉

Let’s face it, without your client you wouldn’t have a business. They pay for what you sell and they are the reason your business will fly or fall.

Development professionals will analyze the relationship between what sells (or what could sell) and what the client really needs, to align the gap and offer something of added value, and take advantage of the existing strong relationships.

Business Development Bridges The Distance Between Your Customer And Your Product

Your goal is to bridge the gap between your customer and your product. Take, for example, an automobile company that sells a new sports car.

You may be selling the latest model, but you’re seeing a decline in sales. It turns out that your client is being sold a car with everything you think he needs: parking sensors, Wi-Fi inside, all the work.

But they have to pay X amount more, and they don’t need those add-ons, so they prefer to go to another car company instead that sells their product for less money and with fewer gadgets.

What Will Your Development Professional Do?

• Observe the customer’s interaction with a product to establish the problem.
• Talk to the product development team to create the product the customer wants.
• Collaborate with the marketing department in the development of the new brand and its implementation.
• Generate possible leads before passing them on to the sales department.
• Look for new strategic partnerships that help you reach the customer.

Growth Of Those Strategic Partnerships 🌱

Strategic partnerships are all relationships with other organizations that can help you grow your customer base , target an ideal customer, enter new markets, or help your business develop unique strengths it didn’t have before.

This is essential for building any size business, from the smallest of start-ups to large established corporations.

Traditionally, a larger company may provide the infrastructure or capital, while the smaller company offers the expertise in a particular skill that the more prominent company needs.

• Publisher collaborations are the perfect way to see how strategic partnerships can be beneficial for business development.
• Scholarly publishing has been greatly disrupted by the mandate that all peer-reviewed scientific publications be open access.

A larger publisher could suffer in this climate, as it is more difficult to make company-wide business model changes quickly and effectively.

The development professional at that large company might turn to a smaller publisher with experience in shifting subscription journals to the acceptable open access model. The smaller company will benefit from the larger company’s investment in its technical expertise.

The Development Professional Would:

• Look for strategic partners who can provide them with technical knowledge.
• Develop and work with them to grow the business relationship.
• Find out what the strategic partner wants and how it will benefit you in other ways (if not just financial benefit).
• Negotiate the cost and outline the conditions of the contract.

Strategic partnerships work at all levels, from maintaining positive relations with the press to building good relationships with your key suppliers.

The business development strategy works to establish beneficial relationships that grow the business by increasing profits, reach, insights, and reputation.

How To Enter And Understand The Markets🧐

Understanding your markets is primarily about understanding your customers on a broader level, and leveraging this understanding will help your business grow.

This is what Matt Janaway of MarketingLabs says:

“The only way to be successful is to understand your target customer, whatever market you want to enter. You need data to support your decisions and make sure you take the right steps to get the best results.

Ongoing testing, research, and strategy adjustments are critical to ensuring the right message is delivered to the new audience, even after the business is established in a market.

Just because something has worked well before doesn’t mean it can’t be made to work better with a few tweaks based on what your data tells you.”

If you do it without the help of a strategic partner, your development professional will need to research or work with a team that understands the buying trends and culture of the potential market, while also establishing whether development in that market will ultimately benefit to the enterprise.

Consider that a company wants to expand into market X, but wants to know if its product Y will be a hit with its customers.

The business professional must find out how the potential customer will react to the product, whether it will be valuable to them, and whether success in that market will contribute to the growth of the business.

Just because something has worked well before doesn’t mean it can’t be made to work better with a few tweaks based on what your data tells you.

What Should Your Development Professional Do? 💼

• Work with the market research team or a consultant to conduct a market analysis .
• Analyze how the customer would react to the proposed product with marketing tools.
• Talk to the marketing team that adapts the brand to the destination culture .
• Establish potential sales contacts and pass them on to sales.
• Decide if this market movement will ultimately benefit the company.

Increase Your Company’s Reputation ✊

The company’s reputation is key to business growth.

Customers won’t buy your product if they don’t trust you, and partnerships can’t be strategic if people don’t want to work with you, while markets won’t pick up your products if they don’t know who you are.

People have to recognize your brand and your product for the right reasons.

Another important aspect to consider is the adoption of the product . How do your customers react to your product? The ability to measure and scale output could prove valuable in the long run.

Develop Ethics And Transparency👐

A company’s reputation will grow if it markets itself as an ethical and transparent company , and the development strategist ensures that the company meets all customer needs without cutting back on any ethical aspects.

Loyalty to employees is as important as loyalty to customers . Satisfied employees represent a company that operates with integrity and transparency, as people tend to trust an organization that treats its people well.

In addition to maintaining transparency in its interactions with customers, organizations and employees, maintaining an environmentally friendly policy is also vital for the company to develop as an ethical establishment.

Global companies often lose customers because they have bypassed an unethical warehouse where their products are made, or disposed of their waste in a detrimental way.

Development professionals will examine the core values ​​of the company and ensure that they are in line with fundamental human rights and environmental policies.

Functions and Responsibilities 👀

The role of a development professional will vary from company to company.

In a small company, the business executive may be concerned with the overall growth of the company , while larger teams may have each member dedicated to a specific project, such as a product or market launch.

The titles of the jobs in the different companies could be:

• Development Executive
• Development Strategist
• Director of Development
• Director of Development
• Development Consultant
• Development Representative
• Development Associate
• Development analyst
• Development Officer

Because some companies find the business development function overlaps with sales or marketing, smaller companies may merge the functions or put them into entirely different business functions.

Business Development Skills📑

As with any role, there is a fundamental skill set that will see you thrive in a development role.

Here are our top 10 recommendations for you to succeed in the role and create growth opportunities. We’ve put together a couple of them, as sometimes you can’t have one ability without the other.

Research and Strategy

Researching the latest industry trends , new product potential and market expansion is an essential part of the role. Checking small business blogs and learning more can be very beneficial.

The strategy of what to do with the research is necessary to put the work into practice, as you will need to have an action plan to take your research from theory to practice.

Being customer-centric is great, but only if you can give the customer what they want without costing your company too much money.

Managing expectations is an integral part, as it’s all about walking the fine line between offering the customer a fantastic product and making a profit at the same time.

Analytical Mind

To succeed in business development, you need to be able to spot patterns and trends in a wide range of information, from reports and datasets to articles and industry research.

Delving into the core of the problem is also essential for planning and strategizing along the way.

Communicative And Collaborative

Whether it’s targeting a new client, running a cold calling campaign, or encouraging different departments to work with you (or each other).

Having excellent interpersonal skills is essential to successfully managing many aspects of a business development project. Being willing to help others is also a vital element of strategic partnerships.

Creative Thinking

Companies can only grow if the development department has new and innovative ideas.

Creative thinking about launching products or solving problems is essential to overcome obstacles to growth and create something unique for your customers.

Project Management

You’re going to have a lot to do, and being hyper-organized is the key to success.

By managing each new development opportunity as a project, you’ll have an overall strategy , a set plan , and a budget to work with.

It also allows you to turn many dishes into one, go through the application of managing deadlines and have excellent planning skills.

Goal Oriented

Good business developers will work towards a set goal . What new product will reach customers? And will entering this new market benefit the company?

Working towards established and measurable goals, and enjoying the achievements, or learning from the failures, will make you an asset to a business development team.

Negotiation

You may not be on the sales team, but you will need to know how to negotiate .

Whether it’s getting a new customer account, negotiating a good vendor deal or a strategic partnership that has long-term value, negotiation is a crucial part of business development.

Resilience

You’re going to be pulled in 100 different directions, and you’ll need resilience cubes to learn from mistakes and pick yourself up after failures.

There will be times when you don’t know if something has been successful, and you will have to keep working with those uncertainties.

Critical Thinking and Decision Making

Making decisions and having logical thinking is essential to guarantee the growth of the company and the success of the projects, especially when under pressure.

You will be the person people turn to for solutions or advice, so you will have to make logical decisions for both short-term and long-term planning that achieve a common goal.

1. Maintain Humility

Last but not least, your ability to stay humble will ensure that you continue to grow and improve your success rate.

Success goes to our heads, and this can make new business relationships difficult and lead to setbacks. Be open to learning from everyone and anyone.

Business Development Vs. Sales📈

If business development is the process of researching new products and fitting them into a new market, sales is the process of successfully selling the product in that market.

You can’t sell your product without doing the development work first , but you won’t make money or build your business without selling your message to potential customers.

The Customer, The Product And The Market 🙌

The development arm of a company will be concerned with identifying its ideal customer(s) and figuring out what product they want, then developing the product and making sure it fits well in today’s market.

Lastly, professionals would be tasked with maximizing referrals from existing clients.

At its core, it’s all about lead generation as you develop a list of potential new opportunities (your target market).

It is all the work that is done to make sure that the right product is sold to the right market and that growth opportunities for the company are secured.

Sales: Successfully Sell Your Product To The Customer💸

The sales team is responsible for selling the product once all the background product and market testing has been done and shipped through the correct sales channels.

To successfully maximize your sales in the marketplace, you’ll need a thriving sales team with established KPIs that grow in size as your product becomes more successful and ensure that all leads are processed through the sales funnel.

The chosen KPIs may change based on your business and your sales cycle.

The selling tasks of a successful salesperson should include: managing prospecting , presenting to interested parties, converting qualified leads, and effectively bringing new business to your company within your sales function.

A Combined Role: Where The Two Overlap 📰

In large companies, the sales team may not have time to pursue all the leads generated by the development team.

In fact, hiring a broker in a sales development role can help ratify a Biz Dev sales lead before it’s passed on to sales executives for follow-up, freeing up your time to focus on successful sales.

Alternatively, the sales development role could scout leads , while the development team focuses on product development and market expansion.

When things go wrong

Businesses often have a lower success rate if they do not understand the need for independent sales and business development teams .

If a company expects its sales team to blindly sell a product to a market that doesn’t need it or to generate all the leads on its own, it won’t have time to successfully sell the product or it will be useless because the customer doesn’t want that product. .

Or, the company hires too much of one and not enough of another.

A sales team with no leads is starting from scratch and selling blind, while a business development team with a small sales arm can perfectly research their products and the market, but has no one to sell to.

Having strong partner relationships will also foster effective communication across all facets of the development role, making sure all teams are on the same page.

Business Development Tools🔧

A key factor for the development of a company is the saving of time and the fact that professionals have enough time to focus on the key areas of the business.

Tools like fully integrated sales and marketing CRMs, sales management tools, or software that syncs with email and allows you to manage documents on the go are perfect for the development professional.

Here are our top 12 recommendations for tools to help development in a company and why we think they are useful.

Important Information: We are proud to be affiliated with some of the tools mentioned in this guide. If you click on an affiliate link and subsequently make a purchase, we’ll earn a small commission at no additional cost to you (you don’t pay anything extra).

1.Close 

Close is a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool that saves time with email automation , predictive dialers and calls, all in one easy-to-access place. Unlike other CRM tools, its highly automated features save valuable time and are extremely easy to access.

Close has some impressive integration options with platforms like Zoom, Slack, Asana, Gmail, and much more.

With Close, you can interact with your entire team with great collaboration tools and make sure no one is left without knowing anything about any project.

The user interface with Close is easy to use and everything you need is easily accessible.

Pros

• simple user interface
• Great automated email feature
• Great for outbound sales

cons

• Technical assistance needs to improve

Price

Close has four pricing plans.

• The first is the starter, ideal for small teams at $29 per month.
• The second is the basic plan, suitable for disclosure at $69 per month.
• The third is the professional plan, ideal for teams looking to automate their entire email platform at $99 per month.
• The fourth and final plan is the business plan, best for CRM and sales optimization at $149 per month.

2.HubSpot 

HubSpot is a fully integrated CRM that acts as a one-stop-shop for all your marketing, sales, and customer service needs. It is the perfect CRM for business development, since it provides all the analytics of your business and the sales funnel in a single functional space.

As seen in the image above, there are several cubes to choose from.

Whether your team is focused on marketing, sales, or other services, HubSpot can meet all of your business needs. HubSpot has recently added a new hub to its family, known as the “Operations Hub” .

This hub focuses on everything you need to make sure your business strategy succeeds.

One of the features of HubSpots that stands out is its ability to target your specific audiences. This ensures that the marketing or sales team knows all the important steps.

Pros

• Easy to use
• Efficient email integration
• quality free version
• Educational Knowledge Center

cons

• may have errors
• frequent updates

Price

HubSpot has four pricing plans.

• The first plan is free .
• The second plan is the starter and is best for small to medium teams, priced at $45 /month.
• The third plan is the professional plan and it is suitable for medium and large sized teams at $800 per month.
• The fourth plan is the business plan and is ideal for large companies at $3,200 per month.

3.Amelia

Amelia is a simple but powerful automated booking specialist , working 24/7 to ensure that your clients can book appointments or events and pay online even while you sleep.

Amelia WordPress booking plugin will fully automate interaction with potential customers, help them choose the right service and employee, take care of payments, real-time SMS reminders to both customer and employee for appointments reserved, canceled or rescheduled.

Amelia is easy to navigate and there is no training to worry about using the software. Its integration with Google Calendar makes it an attractive option for businesses.

Pros

• updated features
• simple user interface
• many features
• Good calendar synchronization

cons

• Customer service needs to be improved
• Occasionally glitches occur

Price

Amelia has three pricing plans.

• The first plan is the basic one, for $59 a year.
• The second plan is the pro plan at $109 per year.
• The third and final plan is the developer plan at $249 per year.

4.Pipedrive 

Pipedrive fully automates leads from chatbots and web forums, saving you time generating leads. Built-in insights and AI enable quick and easy reporting on key areas of the business.

Your marketing department or sales teams will enjoy managing leads with Pipedrive.

Pipedrive offers many opportunities for business collaboration , from being able to use it on mobile and integrating it with other apps, to maintaining communication with team members, he points out.

Pipedrive has an impressive deal closing statistic. Users can expect to close 28% more deals after one year of using Pipedrive.

Pros

• simple user interface
• Good management of the sales portfolio
• Good integrations

cons

• The technical service can be improved
• The mobile application can be improved

Price

Pipedrive has four pricing plans.

• The first plan is the essential plan at $12.50 per month.
• The second plan is the advanced plan at $24.90 per month.
• The third plan is the professional plan at $49.90 per month.
• The fourth and final plan is the business plan at $99.00 per month.