In recent years the term Business Development has emerged to cover what we used to call Sales and Marketing. Try looking for a sales job on any of the popular job hunting websites and there are virtually no sales jobs. They are all looking for Business Development professionals. Sales and Marketing are rarely talked about independently but are very different processes. If you search the popular job hunting website you find very few sales jobs.
Sales is the process of closing the sale. It may involve face to face sales at a retail store, relationship building in business to business sales that result in ongoing orders, negotiating a contract, or a number of other processes. It is the act of interacting with the customer, presenting the specific product that meets the buyer's needs and desires, establishing a price and completing the transaction.
Marketing can present product for sale such as an advertisement for a new car. Marketing can also be used to create demand for a either a product or an industry. A few years ago there was a commercial for mouth wash. Everyone was showing displeasure at the breath of the subject of the commercial. It made a large number of people who had never considered they had a bad breath problem worry about bad breath. The ad and others like it created a demand for a product that no one knew they needed.
Marketing can include brand building through advertising but also sponsoring special events that you would like associated with your company; charity events, school plays, even holiday parades.
Business Development can also include market research, developing or modifying product, tracking sales, looking into new markets. It also includes Customer Relationship Management (CRM.) CRM is an organized way for managing growing a company's relationships with customers and prospective customers. This can be simple index cards with notes on customers to a variety of CRM software.
Original Content copyright 2010 Thomas Robinson
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