Business development and sales are often used interchangeably. The stereotypes: business development executives fly around in private jets and cut deals on an exclusive golf courses; sales executives wear tight plaid pants a baggy, pilled sport coat and make unsolicited sales calls armed with collateral that the executive printed on their personal inkjet printer. So, nobody is in sales (except the other guy) and everyone is in business development. However, there is a difference between the roles and the stereotypes are unfounded; business development executives fly commercial and sales executives have killer wardrobes.
Karmies has a CEO, she brought me coffee yesterday, we have a CFO (me), I wrote a job description of an intern programmer, and we have a CTO, he purchased our office supplies. Eventually we will be less horizontally structured and, more traditionally, vertically structured (although vertical corporate structures continue to evolve into hybrid organizations). Until then our titles are interchangeable with whatever we’re doing at the moment.
Business development contains an element of sales, but it also has an element of product development and is strongly partner-centric. Sales works on creating revenue by selling, typically, to the end-user. Business development executives work on initiatives that will benefit the company in the future, sales executives work in the present.
Business development activities and sales activities at Karmies are working in advance of its upcoming product launch. Our sales and business development efforts are complicated by the fact that we do not have a product available to the public yet.
Karmies business development efforts are focused on third party messaging apps that will integrate the Karmies keyboard with their app. Cutting deals with messaging apps is a business development function; cutting a deal with critical partners requires understanding the technical issues of integrating one proprietary product with another proprietary product, the complex revenue model that will develop from a partnership, understanding future features that the partner wants to offer its customers and how Karmies will support those efforts and of course sales skills (everything is sales, for example, asking your boss for a raise requires sales skills).
The nature of the technology industry is unforgiving, miss out on integrating a hot technology or picking the wrong technology (I was once on the picking the wrong technology end of the spectrum, so I speak from direct experience) can be terminal (Mindspring, Altavista, Blackberry, Prodigy, CompuServe). Picking a winning technology does not guarantee success, but it doesn’t hurt. Karmies’ business development offering is unique, so capturing meetings and generating excitement around the product with our potential partners has been encouraging.
Our sales efforts are focused on institutions of higher eduction and sports franchises. Again, we have been met with enthusiasm for Karmies.
The complication we are encountering is immediacy of product demand relative to our current state of product development. How we are addressing this complication is the topic of my next blog.