Business Development Jobs: What Scaling the Career Ladder Entails

Abstract

Many organizations are seeking graduates and professionals to fill positions with varying levels of responsibility in business development. If the parameters of a marketing or sales career are recognized, the same cannot be said of this new organizational function. This article therefore tries to identify the tasks, attributes and incentives offered to business developers at the entry level, mid-level and upper level. The research method retained is content analysis of job postings, an efficient approach to study the characteristics of postings. The results show that tasks in business development jobs are drawn from both marketing and sales. Desired attributes of business developers emphasize the sales dimension, along with managerial qualities at higher levels. Lastly, incentives offered include traditional monetary benefits, and advantages linked to organizational attractions and the work environment.

Making planning work: insights from business development

“…Previous systematic empirical research on business development is case-based. The different case contexts for business development activities are a medium-sized technology-based firm (Uittenbogaard et al, 2005), IT SMEs (Davis and Sun, 2006), biotech firms (Kind and Knyphausen-Aufseß, 2007;Lorenzi and Sørensen, 2014), interviews with entrepreneurs and marketers with business development experience (Eidhoff and Poelzl, 2014;Giglierano et al, 2011) and content analysis on business development job postings (Turgeon, 2015). In earlier research on corporate diversified firms, Burgelman (1983) identified the business development function as critical for the impetus stage of the corporate venturing process in the context of internal corporate venturing.…”