What is Business Development?
Recently, I’ve been asked a lot about what’s Business Development. How is it different from Sales or Customer Development? In response, I’ll share what I do as a Business Development Director at Dreamix.
To start, you must know the industry I work in. Dreamix is a 25 people software company which through services and products delivers value to its clients & partners. Being in the IT industry and as the Business Development guy in the company, my primary responsibility is the revenue generation. This involves a lot of strategic decisions – whether Dreamix has to focus entirely on services, products or both. Once this is decided, I have to figure out the sales channels. For Dreamix they are direct (we directly do business with the end users of our products or services) and through partnerships. Then, I’m responsible to find these end clients or partners and for this I have developed strategies, processes and tasks separated into inbound and outbound activities.
The inbound represents all the efforts we put online to generate content and to engage users in the social media such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Quora, SlideShare. It will educate our prospective clients/partners and help them find about, and contact Dreamix. The outbound involves the emails, phone calls and events’ participation via which I can directly approach companies I believe we may add value to. The inbound process is done by Monika and me helping her by setting up together the right targets, goals, and tasks to achieve them. The outbound is fully done by myself, meaning finding the right companies and people, figuring out the most suitable communication channel, then writing emails or making the right phone calls, then negotiating, then closing. You think that’s it, but not even close. Being a small company, we don’t have account managers, so I’m the account manager at least at the beginning as these clients/partners trust me most, because they’ve communicated with me the most. Moreover, I take everything personal as the companies I approach are carefully selected and I really want to work with & help them. I am the person that watches out for their interest.
Furthermore, it often happens that Dreamix doesn’t have enough talent or the right set of skills for the new projects so I have to find other people to do the necessary tasks. Thus, I am involved in the talent search and development. Moreover, knowing that the tech colleagues are the ones doing the projects and products, I am also involved in the efforts to make them feel great at Dreamix.
This is, in brief, what a Business Development Director in a small software company does. For me personally the best part is that I get to meet many smart and interesting people from all over the world. It is really exciting, challenging and rewarding.
P.S. Thank you for your time reading my blog post. If you are interested in knowing more details about our inbound, outbound or talent strategy shoot me an email at stoyan.mitov@dreamix.eu or write a comment below. Now, it will be great if you share what is to be a Biz Dev at your company and share some best practices.
Stoyan Mitov
Blogger at JAXenter, business development director at Dreamix, co-founder at Grajdanite.bg and active sportsperson by passion.
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