This article walks through what a career in business development entails including definitions of the term business development, what skills are required for success and lessons learned based on my 13+ years of experience. Click a link below to jump to a particular section.
What is Business Development?
Business Development is a career path where your job is to put your company in a favorable position to win new business opportunities that align well with the company portfolio and strategy. It is different from a true sales job in that are often teeing up opportunities for subject matter experts to ultimately win via a request for proposal and/or interview process. Since the skills of several team member are often required to win new business, you are typically not tied to an individual quota but rather a team target. Business development is highly strategic and requires creative thinking to separate your company from the competition. Companies will often hire business development professionals if they are a) a professional services firm or b) offer a more complex product or service vs. a more transactional widget. Business development is often a vital role in a company’s strategy to achieve revenue growth.
Example of a Business Development Job
My first job in Business Development was working for an architecture firm in Chicago. The skill set they were seeking was not necessarily someone with an architecture degree but rather someone who could keep track of upcoming design projects for colleges and universities in the Midwest region. While the architects leading the higher education studio were also expected to conduct business development, they were often too busy overseeing current projects to devote focused time to new work acquisition. In contrast, my entire job was dedicated to the task of researching new projects and meeting with the right people. I would keep studio leaders looped into my efforts and bring an architect along to any customer facing meetings.
We almost always had to submit our qualifications via a Request for Qualification (RFQ) process where we would answer a series of questions to highlight our related experience and skills of the proposed team members. From there, a short-list of 3-4 firms was generated by the institution and then those firms were invited to an in-person interview. As the Business Development Manager, I was overseeing all steps of the process and guiding the strategy based on all the information I had gathered about the project. Typically, I didn’t attend the actual interview as the decision makers were most interested in speaking with the team who would actually design their project.
My core responsibilities included:
- Determining which institutions in our geographic market had capital projects planned AND, had funding for those projects. I followed the money.
- Researching all the decision makers and influencers associated with the project and setting up meetings with them.
- Determining the team of professionals whom we would propose for the project.
- Communicating project details to the internal team to brainstorm our win strategy.
- Meeting with industry partners tracking the same project to uncover any important details about the project.
- Preparing to respond to an RFQ or a Request for Proposal (RFP) which is when a fee proposal would be required.
- Leading the interview prep process including coaching individuals and the team on public speaking and crisp messaging.
- Conducing debriefs for both wins and losses.
The typical career path includes the following roles:
- Business Development Representative: Can be entry-level positions if the essential skills involve researching market trends, industry trends and preparing data analytics for company leaders to review. If the role of the business development manager is to include customer facing meetings, the company may elect to hire someone with a few years of experience post bachelor’s degree. Attending networking events and meeting with industry partners is part of the role and a great way to get experience having face to face, professional conversations.
- Business Development Manager: In this role, the individual is regularly meeting with industry partners and potential clients. They are often tied to key verticals and tasked with leading the strategy related to winning targeted new opportunities. A successful business development manager can successfully mobilize internal team members on tasks completion including “managing up” on task delegation and execution.
- Business Development Director: Typically, this person is overseeing a team of business development managers and oversees execution of the overall business development strategy. Coaching is an important part of this role in order to deepen the skills and professional growth of team members.
- VP, Business Development Manager. You will typically find VP roles at larger companies where year over year business growth and maintenance is critical to ongoing operations. This individual is a highly strategic thinker who advises the team on high level direction.
Skills Required for a successful career in business development
- Strong communication skills – both internally with colleagues and externally with potential clients and industry partners.
- Strategic thinking – you are the master mind behind these targeted pursuits and often have to be creative in getting meetings with the right people and differentiating your company from the competition.
- Organization skills
- Project management
- Writing skills
- Self-starter mentality – you are often in control of your own schedule so knowing where and how to spend your time is critical. Busy doesn’t always equal productive.
How do you climb the corporate ladder in Business Development?
The most successful business development team members that I have seen possess these attributes. They…
- Are laser focused on their core markets / verticals and the identification of projects with the highest probability to win.
- Ruthlessly prioritize their time and don’t get distracted by opportunities that aren’t a good fit for the company.
- Work with their team on developing detailed capture plans to win targeted projects and then, they diligently implement the plans.
- Are often maximizers in that they are able to tap into the top strengths of each team members as part of the strategy to win new work.
The long game
As you consider the business development career path vs. joining a pure sales team, it is important to understand that business development is typically more of a long game in terms of building relationships with industry partners and customers. Every day you are making incremental gains towards achieving your goals, but the results and wins may take some time to realize. Sales cycles are typically longer for products and services that are more complex in nature. It is often required to get to know layers of people within an organization and finding creative ways to earn a meeting with busy professionals is a must.
Meeting with Prospective Clients
Once you have identified which clients have upcoming projects, you’ll want to sketch an org charge of who will be decision makers and who will be influencers. Decision makers, as the name would suggest, are the ones who ultimately decide which partners / vendors / consultants get awarded work. Over a period of time, it is the role of the business development manager to learn what is most important to the decision makers related to the project so that you can position your services in a way that helps achieve the decision maker’s goals and overcome any challenges. One of the best ways to secure meetings with decision makers is to offer something of value vs. just making an ask for information. Influencers are people who have direct access to the decision makers but don’t necessarily have a vote on which company gets selected for particular project or assignment. Influencers can be incredibly helpful with sharing knowledge about the project and what is important to key decision makers.
Meeting with Industry Partners
A big part of the role of a business development manager is meeting with industry peers who are pursuing similar types of projects. You are able to share leads as well as information about decision makers and project priorities. Often these meetings take place over coffee or lunch but you can also catch up on the phone. Preparing for these meetings is important as you want to share information that will be of value to your industry peer so that the information exchange is somewhat equal. You also need to use your judgement on what information you share with which peers. Some strategic nuggets should be kept to yourself as you don’t want any competitive advantage knowledge to make its way back to your competition. I have a handful of partners who I deeply trust and it is with those people who I shared the most information.
Working in Tandem with your Colleagues
Business development is not a lone wolf sport and I have seen many people falter in their career because they want to “do it all themselves” in an effort to get all the credit. Here is an example of how I would leverage the strengths of the team on order to achieve the best possible outcomes for a pursuit.
I spent nearly 10 years doing business development for a large construction company which had a deep resume of complex, hospital renovations projects. As you can imagine, there are countless nuances and logistics to consider for such projects and I wasn’t in a position to discuss the nitty gritty of those projects in key meetings. If we were pursuing work with a specific hospital and I was able to secure a meeting with a decision maker, I would bring a Project Manager or Superintendent who was working on a related project at another hospital. Prior to the meeting, I would brief my colleague on everything I knew about the future project, the person with whom we were meeting and what I wanted us to accomplish. I was doing the strategic planning behind the meeting / pursuit and then my colleague was the subject matter expert who could talk about specific details such as what to consider in a complex renovation. Team sport all the way.
Lessons Learned
Business development wasn’t a career choice that I sought out but rather stumbled upon. I was in a marketing job and wanted to get into an external facing role. I happened to know the Director of Business Development for an architecture firm as my best friend already worked there. I was 27 years old, knew nothing about architecture or business development but, I was a quick learner, willing to hustle and highly motivated to succeed. While I did many things right, below is a list of my lessons learned from 13 years as a business developer.
- Don’t waste your time with potential customers or clients who will never hire you. Ruthlessly prioritize your time even if that means you have less meetings in a given week. Since I was largely in control of my schedule and time management, I would sometimes fill my days with meetings that weren’t relevant to our goals.
- If there is no money, there is no project. I remember hearing that one private institution in downtown Chicago had a desire to build a new student center but they didn’t have a great way to get the project funded. The VP of Administration was more than happy to meet with me to talk about the project and his visions but no surprise, the project never came to fruition. Just because a client will meet with, doesn’t mean you should meet with them. A busy schedule doesn’t mean a productive one necessarily.
- You don’t need to be everywhere. Time is the limited resource that we all have and not all events are created equally. Choose the events that you attend strategically. If you aren’t going to be mingling with targeted clients or gain access to valuable information, consider skipping the event. This avoids burn-out as well.
- Don’t cast a net too wide. Be laser focused on opportunities within your sweet spot.
- Don’t try and do it all yourself – business development requires the ideas and talents of a broad group of tea members.
Give to get
This is both a best practice and a lesson learned that deserves its own section. Often, the people with whom I was trying to meet with on college campuses were Vice Presidents and therefore very busy. To earn a meeting with them, best practices called for offering valuable insights or thought leadership that could directly benefit them as it related to their role on the project.
For example, a common title for the key decision maker on a new building at a private college would be “Vice President of Finance and Administration.” These individuals were extremely financially minded and therefore an example of thought leadership that I would offer up in my request to meet would be: “We’d like to walk through how our firm was able to deliver a high-quality design within the budget for our last 5 projects on college campuses.” Instead of just expecting this person to do all the sharing, we were proactively offering to share information that will benefit the individual and project as well. I cringe a bit when I think of my early business development meetings with decision makers. I was often just talking about our project portfolio without understanding what was important to this particular individual and the project at large.
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