Mixing marketing and business development

Editor’s note: Michelle Stockman works with Little Rock-based Arkansas Capital Corp. to promote entrepreneurship development around the state. Stockman earned a bachelor’s degree from Loyola University-Chicago in communications and fine arts, and earned a master’s in entrepreneurship from Western Carolina University. Her thoughts on business success appear each week on The City Wire.

There used to be a time when companies simply needed to hire salespeople to “drum up business.” Today, the sales cycle and functions for many companies and industries has become quite complex. What used to include marketing and sales to create business now includes market strategic planning, branding, advertising, blogging/social media outreach, business development and sales. Business development as a function within a business has been rapidly growing over the past 10 years.

What is business development? Like marketing, this may be a mysterious title and be confused with what marketing is within a company. However, business development is simply a way for businesses to profit by creating new revenue streams. Marketing is a function of knowing how to move the company or its products into the hands of the consumers. Business development is taking that product or service and finding new customers to sell to or new ways to sell the products to the customers.

For instance, the Susan G. Komen Foundation has embraced business development even though they are a non-profit foundation. The Susan G. Komen Foundation has developed countless partnerships with for-profit companies to develop and sell products with their signature pink ribbons on the products. The foundation receives a royalty that acts as a portion of their sustainability while their business partners have created new revenue streams by manufacturing and selling the products.

As Seth Godin puts it, “you don’t see business development from the outside, particularly all the potential deals that fail along the way. Many companies, though, spend millions of dollars a year looking for deals and then discovering that they pay off many times over. Others, particularly smaller competitors, are so focused on their core business that it never occurs to them to consider partnerships, licensing, publishing, acquisition and other arrangements that might change everything.”

In short, business development is finding new ways to sell what you already have. There are no rules on how to go about this for your business, but the business should develop a process on how to add and engage the market research/marketing process.

Additionally, work with a good business lawyer if a new partnership is formed to introduce your product to a new market place.

Lastly, be ready to put the time and resources into executing your business development ideas. You may have a great idea, but ideas collect dust within the mind if there is no means to execute.

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Stockman can be reached at [email protected]