from Hacker News

The Difference Between Business Development and Sales

by kml on 7/11/12, 4:27 PM with 5 comments

• by tryitnow on 7/11/12, 7:53 PM

  Someone should send this article to every young person starting out in business, whether they're and entrepreneur or not.

  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.

  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.

• by fab1an on 7/11/12, 5:36 PM

  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 a sales person (except when you do know that you absolutely must 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.

• by dfriedmn on 7/11/12, 9:01 PM

  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.