Business Development

The Business Development and its associated tasks and processes are often in discernible from traditional management and marketing approaches, such as strategic management, marketing management, sales and marketing, and entrepreneurship. While there is much activity carried out under the umbrella of ‘‘Business Development’’, there is not a consistent picture to guide business practitioners and other stakeholders in the understanding of what effective business development actually is. This may hamper effective management of business development and, critically, it does not enable scientific scrutiny and tests of when and where business development activities actually contribute to superior performance across firm types and across industries.

Sales and Marketing come in between: "the tasks and processes concerning analytical preparation of potential growth opportunities, the support and monitoring of the implementation of growth opportunities, but does not include decisions on strategy and implementation of growth opportunities”

Business developer tasks and process: The business developer is concerned with the analytical preparation of potential growth opportunities for the senior management or board of directors as well as the subsequent support and monitoring of its implementation. Both in the development phase and the implementation phase, the business developer collaborates and integrates the knowledge and feedback from the organization’s specialist functions, for example, R&D, Product, Marketing & Sales to assure that the organization is capable of implementing the growth opportunity successfully. The business developers' tools to address the business development tasks are the Business Model answering "how do we make money" and its analytical backup and roadmap for implementation the Business Plan.