Get me the money = Marketing + Sales + Business Development

My (curious) wife casually asked the other day “Honey, I am trying to setup the selling organization for my new company, can you help me understand the nuances between, marketing and sales. Also, not to forget business development, so I can decide which ones I need and when”. As I opened my mouth to answer the question (which isn’t the easiest in front of an inquisitive wife 😉) I wondered if I had a clear cut, simplistic answer and I saw myself struggling a bit.

Just in case you are wondering that this was a naïve entrepreneur questioning the obvious, think again! All through my career, I have come across senior leaders who tend to use terms like Marketing, Sales and Business Development interchangeably; sometimes correctly (more by luck) but most times incorrectly, not knowing the nuances that set them apart. This gets even worse when some of them go hiring for those roles – God help the aspirants!

Those questions got me thinking for a more simplistic answer to compare & contrast the three and create a ready-to-use visual framework for it. So the writeup below might interest you if you fall into one of the categories: a) Sales(S), Marketing(M) or Business Development (BD) professionals (or someone aspiring to go there) trying to understand the nuances, b) an Entrepreneur looking to setup a structure for your selling organization – irrespective of stage. Just a word of caution though – presented below are not pedagogical definitions (even though I reference some), but a practitioner’s view on the functions. Also note, while the concepts outlined below apply to most industries, the writeup is mostly focused on the ever-burgeoning software industry where I have practiced these over the last two decades.

Now let’s jump-in with a brief refresher of what these terms mean before we go to nuances. Marketing to me simply put “Is the science and art of making your product known to intended audience, via laser-sharp messaging, at a compelling price-point, via appropriate channels, leading to awareness of the product and a pipeline of interested customers”. While you could see the most popular definitions here, one above enlists all key aspects of the role and most importantly it’s the intended outcome in practice. Obviously the actual world isn’t as simple, especially in large organizations (think Microsoft, Amazon, Google) where increasing scale begets marketing function to be further subdivided into Product Marketing, Field Marketing and Integrated/Corporate Marketing roles. Nonetheless, it’s important to call out that the role requires a good mix of strategic insight (especially Product Marketing) as well as marketing program execution capabilities to land messaging through digital channels, events, etc. (especially Field Marketing), in order to deliver its promise. See table M below for more details.

Table M:

Moving on, while marketing is all about spreading the right message to right audience and creating traction, Sales is all about “searching-for and qualifying interested customers in a given geography or industry, convincing them to sign the dotted line, getting the product delivered & utilized for them and being an ongoing trusted advisor for evolving needs, all with the outcome of getting the money home”. So, net-net, sales takes what marketing has initiated to the finishing line (ideally in alignment with each other). Once again, depending on the scale of organization and complexity of the underlying product, Sales roles can be further subdivided into Relationship/Account Sales, Territory Sales, Channel Sales, Solution Sales and Technical Sales roles (table S below for details). Sales requires primarily a deep knowledge of customers, business & players (especially Relationship & Account Sales), industry use-case understanding (primarily Solution, Territory and Channel Sales) and deep knowledge of the product being sold (primarily Technical Sales). While strategic insight is an important trait for a seller, the people and relationship aspects trump it single-handedly.

Business Development, unlike the two above, is less pedagogically harmonized and has a cloud of haziness depending on who you are speaking to. Business development as a Software practitioner “is an art (part science) that could include “defining the organization or product goals, business models, Go-to-Market (GTM) plans, growth strategies (organic vs. mergers & acquisitions), partnership & alliances with intended outcome of generating revenue and/or profit growth in an accelerated manner”. As you observe, BD is pretty broad, not only having a good overlap with marketing and/or sales roles, but also with roles like Product Management, Corporate Strategy, Partnership Management, as well as others (finance, legal, HR) that are strategic to the intended outcome mentioned above - of generating revenue and/or profit growth in an accelerated manner. At the same time there are two very clear points of distinction from sales and marketing: a) BD is much more strategic in nature and needs a much more broader canvas of understanding from Organization-to-Product-to-Partner-to-Customer & b) many organizations utilize BD roles at incubation stage for undefined programs, until they see light of the day and then transition them to more defined team like Marketing, Sales or Product Management. Due to the breadth of these roles, they are generally suited for people with an ability to look strategically at the big picture, ability to learn new things quickly, and heightened capability to understand the motivations of and collaborate across functional boundaries. Common roles in software industry under this umbrella include: Channel Alliance BD, New Market-entry BD, Product Incubation BD, Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) BD and many more custom created by enterprises (see table BD for definitions below). 

Table BD:

Here are some key observations from the notes above:
- M & S are more defined organizations/roles while BD organizations/roles are relatively more custom defined per the company under purview
- M & S have less overlap among each-other, unlike BD which has multiple overlaps with M & S, as well as many other roles in the company
- As we subdivide the functions/roles to say for example – Field Marketing (in case you read the table M above) you see overlaps happening there as well. Many companies have field marketing as part of the sales organization for better alignment to intended goals.

Now how these three come together can be summarized in the two visuals below. Y.1 is representation in a traditional license based businesses shown as a linear flow from company-to-customer (holds true also for FMCG and many B2C businesses), while Y.2 is a more appropriate representation of contemporary as-as-Service (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, as well as other variants) businesses taking a product from the company-to-customer in a closed-loop, constantly-on process.

Visual Y.1:

Visual Y.2:

About the KEY DIFFERENCES and why they shouldn’t be seen under the same light, refer to the table below which differentiates the three on basis of 5 defining aspects i.e. Nature of work, Customer partner interaction, Primary functional goals, top skills and basis of compensation.

It’s important to note here that the defining aspects above also vary quite a bit within the role category. For example, by nature of work, an integrated marketing role is more execution based than product marketing as showcased in aspect #1 above.

Finally, a plotting of the roles on the basis of Customer, Partner, Industry empathy on X-axis vs. Organization, Product comprehension on Y-axis.

Now on the topic of – if/when those roles are needed. Most organization start with a marketing professional (or agency) that helps gets the word out in the market about the company and its product, to start lining up customers. In a business-to-business (B2B) setup, almost at the same time, you need to standup a sales organization which for business-to-consumer (B2C) could be delayed further out (depending on exact nature of business & GTM plan). As revenue grows, Sales teams grow faster than marketing which are generally more centralized and work at a much broader scale comparatively. BD on the other hand remains with a handful of people mostly directly in touch with the top leadership, working to impact strategic growth levers (examples: partnerships, inorganic growth opportunities) that have much higher impact on growth metrics and help break the Sales headcount-to-Revenue relationship in scalable manner. To a point where large companies MSFT, AMZN, GOOG have very well-oiled sales and marketing organizations, while BD roles/functions are part of a separate organization or in some cases span across departments (varying by company). As an example – MSFT didn’t have any BD org until Satya came on board (but had the function split into Product Marketing and Product Management), while GTM functions lying within Sales and Marketing. In case you are interested here is a good read on why the change was good (and correlate with what you have seen with MSFT in market in the last 3-5 years)

As I mentioned at the start, this is a not a pedagogical study of respective sciences but a practitioner’s view of the selling functions and roles within the context of primarily burgeoning software Industry (as well the allied professional services). Hope this helps create a simplified framework to plot these functions and their roles within the selling organization and why you would need the same.

Surely made my wife happy (that’s an unending illusion), who liked it, but also suggested I write smaller articles which are easier to consume. My response, “Yes Boss .... On the job now!”

Earlier published on LinkedIn page blogs:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/get-me-money-marketing-sales-business-development-rajat-bawa/