Business development representatives typically focus on expanding a business’ opportunities, partnerships, and markets, laying the groundwork for long-term growth. Sales teams, on the other hand, center their attention on converting leads, closing deals, and driving immediate revenue.
So why is it important to understand the differences between business development and sales? Separating the two:
- Streamlines GTM efforts
- Aligns teams to achieve specific growth goals, and
- Keeps each side accountable to their own metrics and mission
Here’s how to delineate the roles of business development and sales in your company, and what to look for in key professionals across both roles.
What is Business Development?
Broadly speaking, business development’s primary objective is to expand the business, increase revenue, and create long-term value. “Biz Dev” concerns everything a company does to expand its operations, from collecting newly qualified leads to prospecting to networking at scale.
A business development representative (BDR) will evaluate your company’s buyer personas, determine where to find them, and begin the process of lead generation. Once these leads are assessed and qualified, they can be passed off to your sales department.
More experienced or specialized BDRs might be tapped to develop corporate partnerships or conduct in-depth research into new market segments.
How is Sales Different from Business Development?
Sales takes qualified leads from the business development team and ushers the leads to a sale. After getting in touch with a customer and kicking off the sales process, a sales rep will steward the deal toward closure, working to acquire the prospect as a new customer.
Businesses may employ a variety of sales methodologies and strategies to maximize their sales performance. Common approaches include consultative selling, relationship selling, solution selling, and inbound selling. Each has unique characteristics and focuses on different aspects of the sales process.
Here’s how the differences between sales and business development shake out:
Business development primarily focuses on identifying new opportunities and establishing strategic partnerships to drive growth. This means business development professionals:
- Conduct market research
- Analyze industry trends
- Identify potential clients or customers
- Seek new prospects
- Initiate conversations
Business development’s main goal is to expand the company’s reach and increase its market share.
Sales, on the other hand, focuses on closing deals and generating revenue.
This means that sales professionals:
- Build relationships with prospective clients
- Present product or service offerings
- Address customer concerns
- Meet revenue targets
- Maintain client relationships
- Maximize profitability
How Business Development & Sales Work Together
Though they each have distinct objectives and responsibilities, business development and sales are closely connected and complement each other in achieving overall business success.
Business development provides sales teams with a pipeline of potential customers, helping them identify and target the most promising leads. In return, sales teams offer valuable feedback on customer preferences, market demands, and the competitive landscape, so business development professionals can continue to refine their strategies and identify new opportunities.
When they align their efforts, business development and sales teams can create a powerful partnership that drives sustainable growth. Business development sets the stage for sales success by identifying new markets and opportunities, while sales teams capitalize on these opportunities to generate revenue.
When both functions work hand-in-hand, companies can expand their customer base, increase market share, and achieve long-term success. Tools like ZoomInfo Copilot can help facilitate seamless collaboration between business development and sales by keeping important account information, activities, and signals all in one place.
Why Separate Business Development and Sales?
Why bother keeping sales and business development separate? In short: it’s efficient.
Closing a deal takes a lot of effort and relationship-building. At some point in a company’s growth, it no longer makes sense to have salespeople chasing down cold leads and researching potential prospects while balancing ongoing deals. Combining sales and business development spreads your reps’ attention thin, which could lead to avoidable mistakes.
By separating sales and business development, each team can go all-in on their specific goals instead of splitting their attention. Business development professionals can dedicate their time to identifying new opportunities and expanding the company’s reach. Sales professionals can focus on closing deals, meeting sales targets, and maintaining relationships.
This separation also makes it easier to identify areas for improvement because you can track and measure performance on a more granular level.
Effective Collaboration Between Business Development and Sales
Here are some key strategies for fostering communication and collaboration between sales and business development:
- Open Channels of Communication: Encourage regular communication through meetings, shared project management tools, and clear communication channels.
- Aligned Goals and Metrics: Regularly review and adjust based on market trends, customer feedback, and business priorities.
- Handoff Practice: For a seamless customer journey, make sure teams are on the same page regarding customer needs, preferences, and previous interactions.
Top Traits to Look for in Business Development and Sales Professionals
Creating a successful, growth-focused business requires strong employees on your business development and sales teams. You’re not going to want to hire just anyone — as with any role, there are several principal attributes you’ll find in the ideal hires for business development and sales. Make sure you understand the direct skills and qualities needed for each function.
Essential Skills and Qualities for Business Development:
- Strategic Thinking: Business development professionals need a strategic mindset to identify opportunities, partnerships, and markets that align with company goals.
- Analytical Mindset: Analyzing market trends, conducting research, and evaluating data are all vital for making informed decisions and recommendations.
- Adaptability: The market, customer needs, and technologies are constantly evolving. The ability to quickly adjust strategies and approaches enables business development professionals to stay competitive, seize new opportunities, and effectively address unforeseen challenges.
- Strong research skills: BDRs need strong research skills to re-engage old leads, refine or create buyer personas, and target high-potential markets. They also need to know how to leverage existing resources like CRM data to enhance prospecting efforts and identify key decision-makers for enterprise deals.
- Excellent contextual knowledge of markets: Business development professionals will need to identify high total lifetime value (TLV) prospects and understand growth opportunities in your target market. With strong market insight, they can uncover valuable, hard-to-reach leads for significant impact.
Essential Skills and Qualities for Sales:
- Persuasiveness: Sales professionals need to be persuasive and convincing to sell products or services successfully. Excellent communication and negotiation skills are a must for people in sales positions.
- Adaptability: Sales reps need to be prepared to sell over different mediums, including social media (particularly through LinkedIn) as well as via sales calls. From prospect to prospect, they’ll also need to prove themselves adaptable, modulating their conversational style and building rapport with all kinds of potential customers.
- Resilience: Sales is a road paved with objections and roadblocks, and reps will need to learn fast. Nowhere is that truer than in SaaS, where the longer sales cycle and multiple channels of communication make complications routine. A certain amount of gritty resilience is a must.
- Curiosity: An underrated quality in a top sales rep, curiosity is fundamental to long-term success. Sales reps will need to address all kinds of people and will be obliged to pursue all kinds of sales strategies — and an eagerness to learn can help.
- Receptive to feedback: A given for hiring in either area — or in any area, for that matter. In fact, a principal reason to seek out curious, resilient sales reps is that both traits make them more receptive to feedback from their sales leads.
Being receptive to feedback is not just a question of mentality — it’s also a practical approach that your entire sales division should subscribe to. Tools like ZoomInfo’s Chorus conversation intelligence platform help target areas where your reps can improve their communications with prospects. Chorus records rep calls, and managers can review the calls and offer advice to help that rep win deals.
Keeping the Balance Between Business Development and Sales
If you give one discipline too much priority over the other, you’ll find you have either a dry well of qualified leads or an unworkable surplus of them. And if you treat them as identical, your reps will be overworked and stretched too thin to give either sales or business development the attention they need. Specialization is simply just more effective.
The key is to see business development and sales as two sides of the growth coin. Both play a significant role in driving growth and revenue. Keeping in mind the distinctions between sales and business development — and the ways they can collaborate — will drive much stronger decision-making and move your business forward to its best possible future.