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Nick Sowden
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1 year ago
in Business Development in a Web 2.0 World on Learn To Duck
Micah - Great post. I really like this explanation of the role.
I work on a very small Biz Dev team at Collective Intellect (another local start-up. You running the Bolder Boulder tomorrow?) I'm also just of out my undergrad and don't have much to compare my current work against.
When people ask me details about my day, I stumble through a mediocre explanation along the lines of, "A little bit of sales, a little bit of strategy and planning. But more than half of my day is totally unstructured work - reading, learning, talking to contacts, etc." Your description is much better.
Question - should the unstructured nature of my job at CI (no day is the same, wearing lots of hats, very little instruction as to what my responsibilities are) be attributed to working at a start-up or working in Biz Dev?? Do you think all biz dev jobs require as much creativity to be successful?
I work on a very small Biz Dev team at Collective Intellect (another local start-up. You running the Bolder Boulder tomorrow?) I'm also just of out my undergrad and don't have much to compare my current work against.
When people ask me details about my day, I stumble through a mediocre explanation along the lines of, "A little bit of sales, a little bit of strategy and planning. But more than half of my day is totally unstructured work - reading, learning, talking to contacts, etc." Your description is much better.
Question - should the unstructured nature of my job at CI (no day is the same, wearing lots of hats, very little instruction as to what my responsibilities are) be attributed to working at a start-up or working in Biz Dev?? Do you think all biz dev jobs require as much creativity to be successful?
1 reply
Your question is interesting. First off, sales and business development are two different things. Use the lijit widget on my sidebar, as there is a post I wrote, and my friend Eric Olson (used to do BD for feedburner) wrote about the difference.
Second, the answer is really a mix. Startups require every member to wear multiple hats. I think its why I like them. I wear the hat of a product manager, business development dude, evangelist, and many other things (some times appreciated, and some times not).
But at the end of the day here is the deal: You have a product or service that you want people to use, so 1) make sure its the best it can be; 2) it has inherent value to those using it; and 3) you believe in it. Sometimes to make that a reality, you have to do multiple things.
I also think that a fundamental difference between sales and business development is the internal measure of success. For sales its all about numbers; for business development its all about usage. Those lines are often blurred, which is why sales and business development get confused, but if you have a compensation plan that includes a variable component, and you find yourself motivated to achieve goals to make the commission/bonus/whatever you are a sales person.