Business Development

Business development is a combination of strategic analysis, marketing, and sales. Business development (or "biz dev") professionals can be involved in everything from the development of their employers' products and services, to the creation of marketing strategies, to the generation of sales leads, to negotiating and closing deals.

The job of the business development professional is typically to identify new business opportunities—whether that means new markets, new partnerships with other businesses, new ways to reach existing markets, or new product or service offerings to better meet the needs of existing markets—and then to go out and exploit those opportunities to bring in more revenue.

Since the field is a cousin of marketing and sales, even when an organization doesn't have a stand-alone business development department or employees with the phrase "biz dev" in their job titles, you can bet that folks in sales and/or marketing are handling business development responsibilities. You can find biz dev jobs in all industries—at everything from tech startups to huge pharmaceutical companies. What the work entails, exactly, depends on how big a company is and what industry it's in.

Business development is among the foremost concerns of any organization, and as a manager, much of your attention will be devoted to developing and exploiting the business opportunities that are presented to you and your company.

Business development and making your organization successful is reliant on good knowledge of best practice and management theories.

Business development management involves asking yourself some searching questions. Are you prepared to change to realize the vision created by your business development strategy? What must your business excel at? How does that affect processes, people and customers? Who does the planning and controls the implementation of the business development ideas, answering to which goals, actions and measures?

Perhaps most significant of all, you have to decide whether to be radical rather than incremental – are you revolutionary in your skills as a business development manager or are you more evolutionary?

Small business development contains a paradox – if the business turns out to be successful then it won’t be so small any more. The challenge, then, is that of developing a small business to grow while retaining the elements that made it successful in the first place.