You Can Catapult Your Sales Career By Moving Into Business Development
If you are successful sales person and you really want to see your career take off, you may consider moving into a business development job. This is a highly challenging career that will allow you to seek out new opportunities for your company and its products. No longer would you be calling on existing clients as your regular duties. Instead, you will be working to expand the market for your company and its products. Sometimes this involves finding new customers, and other times, you will be looking for a strategic alliance with other companies in order to find ways to strategically place your products into their market and vice versa. A business development job is not unlike that of a mountain man in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They blazed a trail where no man had been before, discovering new areas. The sales professionals are like the settlers who came after them to utilize the new resources that they discovered.
Working in the field of business development involves a combination of strategic analysis, marketing, and sales. You will be involved in everything from the development of your employer’s products and services, to the creation of marketing strategies, to the generation of sales leads, to negotiating and closing deals. A professional working in this field typically spends most of their time identifying new business opportunities. This may involve many different types of things, including finding new markets, developing partnerships with other businesses, finding new ways to reach existing markets, or locating new products or services that you can use to better meet the needs of your existing markets. You will then use these new opportunities to bring in additional revenue for your company.
This field is closely tied to the fields of sales and marketing. Even when a company doesn’t have an established business development department, there are often employees in the sales department that will dedicate part of their duties to this function. All industries will have some form of business development activities. Without it, any company, no matter how solid their current sales, will eventually atrophy and die. If your company is not finding new markets, then your competitors are.
There are many things that you will do in this field. Obviously, you need to stay on top of what is happening in the industry (including competitors, marketing strategies, pricing, etc.). You also need to stay on top of what your own company is doing, its strategy, how you stack up to competitors, and any upcoming new products that may help you find markets. This knowledge will give you the ability to identify ways to improve your company sales. Once you identify new marketing opportunities, you then need to prioritize these opportunities in order to better target your resources.
This can be a very challenging and rewarding career, especially if you enjoy blazing new trails and finding new opportunities. If you are skilled in this field, you can easily command a six figure salary.
