HN Explorer

Steve Blank - What's wrong with business development?

6 points by markkum ↗ HN
I went for a second time to see Steve Blank give a speech. Again he made the same joke about how he doesn't know what Business Development people do.

Although I'm originally a programmer; in the past I've also had a title of VP, Business Development. During those years I did everything and anything I could imagine for the company I worked for, from cleaning up the office for important visitors, to writing product specs, whitepapers, web pages, user guides, proposals and new product suggestions and features, to selling to and managing partners, customers, journalists and investors, to speaking in conferences, etc. I.e. I developed the business.

Then later when I applied for a job, I was shortlisted but finally turned down because I had had a title of business development and the hiring manager didn't like that (that's directly what he told me).

So Steve, what's wrong with business development? Why does it give such bad vibes to people? And is this a universal thing?

5 comments

[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 21.8 ms ] thread
michaeldhopkins
Steve's argument against business development is that it costs money and sells a product without finding out if the product will work. For a startup selling something without a proven market, business development is a bet on luck because the sales engine will try to sell whatever it's given by the engineers without getting feedback from the prospects about how to more closely align the product to an existing demand.

That joke is dumb, though. Blank explains exactly what business development does and acknowledges its place in the customer development cycle! (What does a "customer development" person do, one might also ask.)

markkum
I fully understand and agree with Steve's point against hiring sales people before finding the product/market fit.

However, at least in my mind, in a bit larger organization it is the Business Development people who continues to do the customer development work while Sales is focused on 'exploiting' the first found fit (which might or might not be a big one).

michaeldhopkins
To use Blank's framework I suppose business development carries on the customer development role assuming a feedback channel to product development is in place. This is especially true for enterprise business development where a sale can be a 2-12 month, detailed discussion about needs.

However, I note you don't really mention customer development as something you did in your original post. It sounds like you basically did sales, which though a huge job is in Blank-land something that doesn't take the customer's feedback and use it to iterate the product itself. So, maybe you need to rephase what you did if you did what Blank calls customer development.

markkum
I did work very closely with the product development, however actually my question was why the title Business Development seems to give negative vibes for people? And is this the case all over the world?

The job I was denied btw was a sales job and the feedback was that my Business Development experience was not sales enough.

michaeldhopkins
Probably it's just that business development is too loosely defined. I've seen it applied to everything from heavy enterprise sales to college students hired to pass out flyers. No different than any other generic title in that respect. Probably, sales at this company meant something more pressured and your range of sales experience and more relationship-managed approach wasn't what they wanted. That, or the interviewer wasn't listening to you and had a simplistic, title-based view of the world.