What Is a Business Development Executive

if you're looking to learn exactly what a business development executive is how it works and whether it's an opportunity you should be interested in make sure you stick around because we're going to get all your questions answered in this video what's going on everybody it's patrick day here before we get started make sure to give this video like subscribe turn on notifications if you want to see more videos like this and let's get started now the first thing we got to do is we need to define what exactly a business development executive is and for

the sake of this video the definition is a role in an organization responsible for growth and customer acquisition now this type of role is primarily focused on b2b business development and sales so that's very different from b2c right so business to business is when you're a business selling to another business business to consumer b2c is when you're a business selling directly to the consumer that would be for example you know when you buy something from a retail store you know you're just going to a shop to buy something cheap but when you're selling business to

business you usually are selling something that's more expensive that only businesses would buy and it's not something individuals would uh purchase for example an expensive software that would cost 10 000 a month only a business would really buy that right and so when you are a business development executive you're the person at a company essentially trying to grow the business using b2b methods and a business development executive is a person who is really doing all the hand-to-hand combat they're the one in the trenches talking to the customers and really they're the ones that have their

posts on the market and although being in business development can also be a entry-level role you do have a lot of responsibility because you're essentially the representative of a company trying to start a conversation with another company to see whether or not they would be interested in buying your products or services or partnering up with you in any way and now the business development executive world can go by many different names depending on your industry and company so some common names that are used interchangeably are business development representative business development manager maybe just business development

or even sales development reps so essentially all these roles although there are different names they pretty much do the same thing there might be slight variances and differences depending on the company you're working at so don't worry too much about what the name is focus on when you're looking at let's say the job listing what exactly is the day-to-day going to look like and that's going to give you a real detailed look on exactly what you're going to be doing so now that you got a general understanding of what a business development executive is let's

go deeper into exactly what the day-to-day is like and specifically what you'll mostly be doing is sales prospecting and lead generation so like i was saying before what this really means is that you're the person as a business development executive who is going to reach out to customers and figure out who's going to be the best fit to buy your products or services or the best fit for your company to partner with and the first step of all this is actually just to create an ideal customer profile so being a business development executive is all

about first doing your research understanding exactly who exactly you should be targeting right because you can have let's say the best product or service in the entire world but if you're trying to sell it to the wrong person well they're not going to spend any money with you because they never needed your solution in the first place that's why you know it takes some intelligence to be a business development executive because you have to really think about who exactly should buy my products and services right and some strategies you try are going to work really

well some strategies to try aren't going to work at all and you know it's a trial and error process a lot of the times so for example you're going gonna have to come up with a lot of different ideas when you're trying to work with other businesses right so you might think okay you know today i'm gonna target casinos in the west coast of america who have a revenue of 10 million and above and that just might be an idea that you thought of based on you know previous customers but you have no idea if

it works so what you do is you have ideal customer profile define who these people are why they should buy you build a list of all the companies that fit this profile so maybe you might build a list of 20 50 100 people that fit this ideal customer profile and then what you would do is you would find all the key decision makers at these companies who you know you want to generate a meeting with and have a conversation to really see whether or not they want to buy from there once you have the companies

all the decision makers at the company the next step of the process is actually to do outbound lead generation so you got your list you got the people next you have to contact these people usually it's cold meaning that you know if you're working at a company and you're trying to reach out to another company they probably have no idea who you are they never heard of you before but that's okay because what you want to do is you want to either send a code email linkedin messages or you want a cold call and which

one you should use really depends on what works best in your industries some industries code emailing works extremely well and you can just stick with that other industries you might have to be cold calling a lot and people don't really respond to emails right so it really just depends on what's the industry norm at the company you are working at and the whole goal of these activities whether it's cold email linkedin cold calling is really just to generate a meeting either in person or over the phone with a potential customer that you want to work

with and you want to see whether or not they are interested in working with you and that actually takes us to the next step of the process which is to qualify your prospect right now a prospect is somebody that you have identified who might be a good fit for your product service but just because you feel they're a good fit doesn't mean they actually are good fit and that's why it's a business development rep's job to qualify this prospect so once you generate the meeting typically if you're working at a large organization let's say like

a google or microsoft or an oracle what you're going to do is the business development person right or sales development right who generated the meeting will take a phone call with whoever you get the meeting with and on that phone call you're not trying to sell them anything you're just trying to qualify meaning you're trying to see you know what their pains are what their challenges are and see if your products and services can actually solve their problems right that's qualifying you're not selling quite yet you're just trying to see if they would even have

a possibility to buy your products and services so in the example let's say you are targeting casino companies in america on the west coast you would want to talk to someone like the director of marketing or the vp of marketing to see whether or not they would want to buy something from you and when you get on the phone let's say with the vp of marketing you just want to ask them a bunch of questions to see you know what their challenges are what their pains are and try to see whether or not they will

be a fit to buy your product and service now if they are good fit after let's say a 15-minute call or a 20-minute call then what you want to do is you schedule another meeting where you go more in depth on their challenges and you know what problems they have and you what you would do is you would invite their team all their decision makers and you would also invite your account executive meaning that's the more senior sales person who is going to come in to try to close the deal and build a relationship with

the potential customer right and so now you've got all these people who are coming into a meeting and you're trying to see whether or not it actually makes sense to work together but before you even get to that bigger meeting you know as a business development executive you're going to have to set that meeting up right get the first meeting qualify the customer and set them up and schedule the next meeting for everyone to have a conversation so if you are a business development executive and it really it's like an entry-level role whether you have

zero experience or maybe one or two years of experience maybe your whole entire job is to generate meetings qualify the customer schedule the next meeting bring in your senior sales person after that and then they will take it from there and your job is really just to get the conversation going and pass it along to your company now that's how it typically works in larger organizations where there's specific people doing every little step of the sales process right whether it's generating a lead or closing a client there might be two different people now if you

are working at let's say a smaller organization where they don't have so many different sales people you might actually have to generate your own meetings and then you might have to be the account executive at the same time and close your own deals and doing these two things at the same time is kind of difficult when i started oracle i basically did that but it is possible because you just have to learn two different skill sets at once which is lead generation and closing deals so let's go ahead and give you an example of what

a business development executive job looks like if you let's say are working at a tech company right so right now i'm on the website angel.com which is a website where you know a lot of startups are hiring and as you can see here we're looking at the business development representative and like i said before business development business development executive pretty much the same thing they're just using different names for it but you know the job itself when you look at the job description is exactly the same so grammarly is basically a website where you know

you put in some text and it fixes your grammar i actually use this product they don't pay me to say that i've been using them for years actually and i'm guessing that if they have a business development you know representative job they're probably going to try to go into enterprise so meaning that you know if if somebody's paying just like a hundred bucks a year like ten dollars a month for example and if they get into let's say a big company they sell let's say a hundred seats well a hundred people times a hundred uh

dollars per year is a lot of money so that's why it makes sense to have a business development representative try to reach out to a lot of big companies and sell these large enterprise packages where they get one deal it's thousands of thousands of dollars per year so as a business development representative right um basically expansion of grammarly's developing enterprise products like i said before so my guess was correct and you want to look at this part you know collaborate test new ideas and approaches right so pretty much like i said before you got qualified

leads so meaning you gotta you know cold call people's encode emails and talk to them qualify the customer before they actually you know move forward to an account executive you work with the sales team which is account executive marketing product right and you're the person who's really talking to the customer so you're going to give all this valuable insight and research back to your team and like i said before uncover the prospects business challenges identify new relevant business opportunities right so essentially you know whether you look at you know this uh job description of grammarly

or anybody else and then let's say who we're looking for um basically it's all about your attitude right you don't necessarily have to have so much sales experience but for this one it's kind of interesting it says it has at least two years of hands-on sales experience but it's an entry-level job which is kind of weird right i think a lot of companies do that they ask for a lot of years of experience for an entry-level job which doesn't really make sense but if you have customer service experience maybe you're a customer service rep or

something like that or any kind of experience where you are let's say you know talking to people even if you don't have tech sales experience you can still use your your attitude your personality and your experience working with people and apply it to a job like this and the most important thing is really open to feedback and coaching because you're basically going to learn everything on the job so like i said before really the main job is to identify companies right prospecting building lists reaching out to them cold calling cold emailing qualifying them on the

phone and moving it to the account executive and that's pretty much the role and you know for a job like the one we just described they're paying between 70 to 95k ote meaning you get a base hourly maybe it's like 45k base salary and then 30k commission if you hit 100 of your quota that's just my guess and which is pretty good that's almost 100k just for doing like an entry-level sales job so that said that is pretty much what a business development executive is and pretty much what they do on a day-to-day basis if

you enjoy this video make sure to give it a like subscribe turn on notifications and let me know in the comments if you're someone who is trying to get a job in technology or trying to start their career in sales because i'm really curious to know and if you are then i can make more videos on how to really break into this industry so i really do hope you guys got some value out of this video my name is patrick dang and i'm gonna see you guys in the next one