The Difference Between Business Development and Sales

Someone should send this article to every young person starting out in business, whether they're and entrepreneur or not.<p>Biz Dev is usually considered more prestigious because partnerships of one sort or another can move a lot of volume quickly or can create new opportunities that radically change fortunes. It also requires understanding business models, strategies, etc.<p>Sales might require an understanding of the user or might not. The company I work for does enterprise software and I seriously doubt our sales people know a whole lot about the user experience. They do know how to schmooze and most importantly how to be persistent and by persistent I mean continually bothering people. I have found discussions with BD professionals to be interesting and occasionally enlightening. Most conversations with salespeople annoy me - whether those conversations are a sales job or just sitting around chatting.

I agree with the article but would add that a lot of times sales people are hired under the "business development" umbrella simply to not call them "sales" people - most businesses don't want to be contacted by <i>a sales person</i> (except when you do know that you absolutely <i>must</i> acquire a certain widget). At the same time, this isn't true for most startups: most startups by definition (given they do something new) don't sell existing must-have products but current nice-to-haves with a potential to become future must-haves if their transformative vision pans out.

Education is also a much weaker predictor of sales abilities than of biz dev potential. Sales seems like a more directly learnable skill. Sales also tends to leave highly-educated people with a negative taste (that's absent from biz dev), even though good salespeople can have as big an impact on the bottom line.