The Business Development Strategy is used to underpin your main Business Plan and essentially it sets out a standard approach for developing new opportunities, either from within existing accounts or by proactively targeting brand new potential accounts and then working to close them. The definition of business development is generating qualified new leads. Be responsible for driving processes for business development with solution architects and executives and be responsible for creating winning strategies and maintaining quality relationships.

To achieve this, they need to find potential new customers, present to them, ultimately convert them into clients, and continue to grow business in the future. Market development involves selling more of your service or product to repeat customers. However, your business development reps and sales reps do need to be on the same page about who your ideal customers are—their characteristics, qualities and the kinds of problems your offering can best help them with.

In identifying new business opportunities, part of the job is to collect and compare pertinent data on the target market, from which recommendations and proposals can be drawn. Most successful business owners will tell you that a carefully planned business strategy was involved.

In the marketing strategy there has to be a feedback loop to let management know what customers and clients are thinking. This strategy will lead to the rapid commercialization of new products and services later. However, even though viral marketing can do that, you might initially need intense coordination between sales and marketing (and engineering) to understand what part of your product might carry some virality.

In many cases this role is a liaison between sales, marketing, procurement, and management. If you are targeting the wrong market or using the wrong approach to get into the right market, you will drown, no matter how great the product or service is. Along with the market come obviously, the customers.