Where are the Business Development Recruiters?

Recruiting in Business Development has many challenges. The first one is that – unlike other disciplines in the sales and marketing world – business development does not have a clear definition. In the UK there are no official (or even not so official) bodies governing business development.

An online search for a Business Development recruitment agency will back up this uncertainty. Whilst there will be specialist B2B business development recruiters, or firms that focus solely on recruiting Business Development roles in the professional services space, there isn’t an out-and-out Business Development recruitment agency in the U.K.

Over their time as recruiters in sales and marketing, our partners have recruited for business development roles across a variety of industries. Many of these have had a distinct lean towards the sales aspect, whilst others have had essentially been marketing roles with an element of sales thrown in. Is business development the overarching discipline that sits above sales and marketing, or is it a smaller aspect of an organisation’s drive to increase visibility in the marketplace and overall profitability?

There is no answer. And as statistics from the BD School (based in the Netherlands) attest, “70% of business developers don’t receive formal training and struggle to get results in their job.” And apparently 65% of Business Development professionals did not know what their job involved when they started it. If neither the employer or the candidate knows what the job actually involves, it is not surprising Business Development recruitment can be so testing.

Is this the reason for the dearth of specialist Business Development recruitment agencies? It could be so. Yet also, in our experience it is because there simply aren’t enough exclusive Business Development roles (or BD departments) to warrant such agencies existing. As such, if you are recruiting for a Business Development role, you will be best placed if you find recruiters who have worked extensively within both sales and marketing. Which, thankfully, everyone involved with Zero Surplus has!

What are the challenges of recruiting in Business Development?

As suggested above, the main challenge of recruiting Business Development roles is the lack of a clear career path for Business Development professionals. More often than not the job titles we see on CVs from senior Business Development professionals are from a mixture of BD, sales and marketing departments.

When recruiting for senior Business Development roles the main challenge is when, for example, a Business Development Director will have to manage both sales and marketing functions. Especially in cases when the job descriptions are written by an HR department rather than the hiring manager, the actual breakdown of what they are expected to know or have actual exposure to can be unclear. In some cases a business may be happy with their Business Development Director having limited experience of actually implementing marketing campaigns – as long as they can show they have experience of managing people who have. In other cases the candidate would be expected to have extensive hands-on experience at managing marketing campaigns.

How does business development differ from other commercial roles?

** This is where some input from you would help – the first paragraph I could sort myself… but the second one – i.e. more specific – a few notes on the back of a fag packet would help. **

According to Wikipedia sales are ‘activities related to selling or the number of goods sold in a given targeted time period. The delivery of a service for a cost is also considered a sale’. And as alluded to this can be products or services to customers through a variety of different channels. Around 25 years ago sales accounted for the majority of commercial jobs in the market. The most common roles within sales are Sales Managers or Sales Executives who operate either face to face or by phone. sales roles can be found in the business to consumer (B2C) or the business to business (B2B) sector. There are increasingly more roles in the business to business to consumer (B2B2C) sector – selling into who retailers who then sell to consumers. Every sales recruiter in our team understands these differences and why they are important to the sales recruitment process.

The digital age has meant that the sales process and in result the sales recruitment process more complex. One of the outcomes of this has been the creation of more varied & defined sales roles within the industry. These include Inside Sales, Customer Success and many roles which measure and operate more strategically. The Institute of Sales Professionals published a comprehensive paper on how both the digital age and Covid have affected the sales industry. It’s key findings were:

• Along with solid sales and digital skills, autonomy, resilience, and agility are important characteristics of a successful salesperson in the digital age.
• Money is not the only motivator for salespeople anymore. Having a set of good organisational values (missions and purposes) and good personal development programmes are important in attracting good salespeople
• Online social events, training, and flexible work arrangements are important motivators for salespeople working remotely.

The full report can be found here.

However, many sectors are still looking to recruit salespeople with a strong background in a traditional type of sales. These include Sales Assistants for retail or the construction trade, or Media Sales.

Core sales roles tend to be more all-encompassing and usually have the responsibility of the whole sales process, from cradle to grave. These roles tend to be required in smaller businesses or regional divisions of larger companies selling less complex products with short sales cycles. Such roles generally enable one person to own the process from initial contact to closing the deal. As a product gets more expensive or more complex, the sales process itself can become split and defined into more separate areas with responsibilities divided between a larger sales team.