Business Development: What’s Behind the Name?

Abstract

Growth is one of the biggest challenges for companies in the context of increasing global competition and highly differentiated customer needs. Many markets have reached their saturation and can no longer continue to grow. Therefore, companies have to adapt to new market demands and need to identify new opportunities to further develop their business beyond current market boundaries. Identifying growth opportunities is the core challenge business development units face. Although business development is now a widely spread term in the business world, yet little is known about its nature from an academic point of view. The purpose of this paper is to explore on the basis of in-depth field interviews with practitioners from German B2B companies to analyse the concept and scope of business development. The research design aims at analysing five main areas to explore the new phenomenon, namely: understanding, organisation, employees, instruments and trends of business development. In detail we first look at what business development encompasses, second how it is organised within the company and its interaction with other departments, in particular with the marketing department. Third, what qualification do the employees who work in business development have and what competences are crucial. Fourth, which instruments are used and fifth which current trends in this respect can be identified.