Business Development

Business development entails tasks and processes to develop and implement growth opportunities within and between organizations. It is a subset of the fields of business, commerce and organizational theory. Business development is the creation of long-term value for an organization from customers, markets, and relationships. Business development can be taken to mean any activity by either a small or large organization, non-profit or for-profit enterprise which serves the purpose of ‘developing’ the business in some way. In addition, business development activities can be done internally or externally by a business development consultant. External business development can be facilitated through Planning Systems, which are put in place by governments to help small businesses. In addition, reputation building has also proven to help facilitate business development.

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, research and development, production, marketing, and 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.

Business development professionals frequently have had earlier experience in sales, financial services, investment banking or management consulting, and delivery; although some find their route to this area by climbing the corporate ladder in functions such as operations management. Skill sets and experience for business-development specialists usually consist of a mixture of the following (depending on the business requirements):