The Great Divergence of BD of Sales
What is Business Development?
1968...the Sales profession fundamentally changed.
1968...the year of the "Great Divergence"
1968...the BD profession took off.
What happened in 1968?
In 1968, Xerox created the "Needs Satisfaction Selling"
It was a sales training program rapidly adopted by other corporations.
That program spawned other new sales methods.
All of them oriented around a common theme.
The customer is king.
Prior to 1968, scale was king.
In 1909, Henry Ford, an icon of the Industrial Age, famously said...
“Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black,” when his sales executives asked him to customize the Model T vehicle colors.
Later in his 1922 memoirs, he recounted, "I cannot say that anyone agreed with me. The selling people could not, of course, see the advantages that a single model would bring about in production."
During this period of mass production, highly personalized customer journeys were not economically feasible.
During the 1960's, the Information Age was born.
Telecom tech rapidly enabled buyers to share their customer experience.
B2B became a lot more competitive and execs scrambled to respond.
Sales people used to highly scaled order-taking now had to listen.
They had to personalize solutions for prospects.
They now had to advocate for their prospects and not simply advocate for their corporation.
Otherwise, poor experiences would permeate rapidly and revenue would tank.
• Sales = a transaction in which the buyer receives goods in exchange for money
• BD = customer and community advocacy that creates corporate growth.
Executives at Xerox scrambled and created a new customer-centric sales training program to turn sales people into business developers.
I researched the history of job listings of BD roles dating back to 1923 when the first known Director of BD was hired by the San Francisco Stock Exchange.
BD jobs started to take off in the late 1960's.
Today, BD roles are the top 25 fastest growing according to LinkedIn.
Today...
• BD leads prospecting during the Activation Phase
• Sales qualifies and converts leads as quickly as possible in Conversion Phase
Tony Gray, BDP
Author of the Business Development Body of Knowledge