Categories: Good Advice.....Not Always Solicited

Difference Between Business Development and Sales

Here’s why I love Twitter: was just reading this tweet by harrisonweber :

Is it possible to automate the process of building biz dev relationships? “I say no.” http://t.co/iixUFP6nbO

— Harrison Weber (@HarrisonWeber)

December 17, 2013

It was a comment on a blog post written by Scott Pollack who was writing in response to a commenter of a previous blog post he had written over a year ago. I had never heard of Scott prior to this — I am now following him on Twitter and his blog. Anyway, the question regarding automating business development got me thinking about the difference between the real role of “sales” and “business development” in an organization.

As you will see, the classic song by the Supremes (also covered by Phil Collins) is definitely appropriate. I’ve talked about this many times with my team: sales IS NOT business development. Sales, regardless of ticket size, is largely transactional — sometimes the transactions come in short cycles, sometimes long. But ultimately, the job of sales is to go out and execute a process over and over again to drive revenue. As a result, you can include automation into a sales process (whether it be in the form of marketing emails, outreach programs, or inside sales teams) and have great success if you have a solid sales and marketing process and execution.

Business Development, on the other hand, is NOT about closing TRANSACTIONAL deals — it’s about closing TRANSFORMATIONAL deals. Think about it. Transformational deals are the deals that have not been done before that help a business grow or expand in new directions. As a result, successful business development requires thought, patience, creativity, compassion and consultative relationships with your partner/customer. You can’t automate that, and you really can’t put a quota or stake your quarterly number on it.

The good news, however, is that, with time and care, transformational deals can become the basis for future transactional deals when done right. I think sometimes, this is where startups get it wrong — they view sales and business development as interchangeable. They hire process oriented salespeople to do business development or creative biz dev professionals to be quota carrying, transactional salespeople. Unless you already have a tested and working process for closing deals that needs repetitive execution to ramp growth, you really need to hire a good business development professional to find the deals that can transform your business.

So, remember, just as Diana Ross tells us “You can’t hurry love,” you can’t hurry business development. It don’t come easy. It’s a game of give and take. And just as in love, when you play the game right, business development can transform your business into something great.