Business development manager job description
This title covers the widest range of actual jobs in commercial hiring. At one company it means cold outbound into a market nobody has sold to. At another it means managing partner relationships the brand already won. An advert that does not say which will attract both, and the person who thrives with a warm relationship book struggles badly in an empty territory. Below is a description for the harder version of the job, and how to screen for it.
The job description
We are looking for a business development manager to open something that is not open yet. You will work without an established pipeline, and the first version of the pitch will be yours to find.
What you will own
- A defined new market, segment or channel, and the target attached to it
- Outbound from a cold start: research, first contact, and the follow-up most people abandon
- Qualification, so effort concentrates on the accounts that can actually buy
- Partnership conversations end to end, including what has to be true for one to produce anything
- Feeding the market back to us, in a form product and marketing can use
What the job needs
- Experience opening something rather than inheriting it
- Persistence with evidence behind it: two quarters at one segment without visible reward
- The commercial judgement to stop having conversations that are never going to convert
Signals we weight heavily
- You have generated your own first meetings, recently
- You can describe a market you decided not to pursue
- You have made a partnership produce revenue rather than a press release
What a business development manager is actually accountable for
The output is revenue arriving from somewhere it was not arriving from before. Meetings, partnerships and pipeline are intermediate steps, and every one of them can be produced in volume without the revenue ever showing up.
- Revenue from a segment, geography or channel that was producing none
- A first conversation with somebody who has never heard of the company
- Working out early which of those conversations are real, before a quarter disappears into them
- A partnership that produces deal flow rather than an announcement
- Writing down what worked, so the second person into that market does not start from zero
Four ways a business development manager hire looks right and is not
Every one of these passes a resume screen. Ladders eye-tracking study timed the average initial scan at just 7.4 seconds, which is long enough to check the four signals below and not long enough to check anything that would contradict them.
Looks right
A large network in your industry
The most claimed and least verifiable asset in commercial hiring. Networks transfer badly, because relationships attach to the company, the product and the commercial terms the person was representing. The testable version is which relationships followed them across an employer change, and what those people did once the letterhead was different.
Looks right
A long list of signed partnerships and agreements
A signature is not a channel. Most partnerships produce nothing after the announcement, because nobody owned the enablement work that makes referrals actually flow. Ask what revenue arrived through one of them a year later, and who on each side did the work to make it happen.
Looks right
Business development at a large, well-known company
In big organisations this title frequently means relationship management on accounts the brand won before the person arrived. Persuading a stranger to take a first meeting when they have never heard of your company is a different act, and it is what the whole first year here consists of.
Looks right
Impressive activity numbers: meetings booked, conversations opened
Meeting volume is the easiest metric to inflate and the easiest to stay busy inside. The number that carries information is the second-meeting rate. Booking a first meeting is mostly persistence. Earning a second one depends entirely on whether anything useful was said in the first.
What to ask for evidence of instead
Four questions, and what the answer actually tells you. Take these into your own process whether or not you ever talk to us.
- Tell me about a market or segment you opened where there was no pipeline. What did the first ten conversations look like?
- What it tells you: Whether they have ever done a cold start. Listen for how the pitch changed between the first conversation and the tenth, because a pitch that did not change was not being tested against anybody.
- Which partnership of yours produced actual revenue, and what had to be built for it to?
- What it tells you: The answer is almost always joint enablement, a named person on the other side, and a reason for that person to care. Candidates who describe the signing and stop there have been delivering announcements.
- Who from your network would take your call today, at a company you no longer sell to?
- What it tells you: Converts an unverifiable claim into a specific list. The honest number is usually far smaller than the resume implies, and the candidate who gives you the small honest number is the more valuable hire.
- What did you stop pursuing, and what convinced you?
- What it tells you: Qualification discipline in a role that offers no natural stopping point. Somebody who has never abandoned a segment has either been extremely lucky or is still carrying it around in a forecast.
How Continuity1 runs this funnel
The screening above is the job. These are the numbers it produces when a function owns it end to end, set against the published benchmarks for the same market.
- 1 in 3
- Shortlisted candidates you meet who become the hire
- Aligned engagements run nearer 1 in 2, distant ones nearer 1 in 10. The market takes about 180 applicants to make one hire, and that sifting lands on your team rather than ours.
- Continuity1 tracked engagements
- ~3
- Interviews your team sits in, per hire
- Ashby puts technical roles at 17.6 interviews per hire across the whole process, up 52% since 2021. The rest of that load sits with the function, not with you.
- Ashby talent-trends report
- 1 in 9
- Accepted offers that ghost before joining
- Indian employers report nearly 4 in 10 offers dropped. We lose 1 in 9.
- nasscom community
- 95%
- Offers that close inside your stated band
- 20 of the last 21. A flat fee earns nothing from an inflated offer; a percentage of CTC earns more.
- Continuity1 tracked engagements
Every brief becomes a success profile before sourcing starts, calibrated with the people who will manage the role. That calibration is the step most hiring skips, and it is why a shortlist either matches the job or matches the job advert.
You review a scored shortlist and make the calls. The filtering never lands on your calendar.
Questions teams ask
Business development manager or account executive?
An account executive works a defined territory with an existing motion. A business development manager opens something where no motion exists. Both read as sales on a resume. Somebody excellent inside a working machine is often paralysed without one, and the reverse is equally true, so name the job in the advert.
Should we pay commission on partnerships?
Only where you can attribute revenue to the partnership, which usually takes longer to arrange than a commission plan does. Where attribution is not possible, pay against the milestones that actually create deal flow, and expect to revise the plan once you learn what those milestones really are.
How long before this hire produces?
Longer than an account executive selling into a warm territory, because the first stretch is spent finding out who buys and why. Decide before you hire what evidence of progress you will accept in that period. A business development hire judged on closed revenue in the first quarter gets exited before anybody learns anything from the experiment.
Does industry experience matter for this role?
It matters most for the door and least for the judgement. Somebody who knows the buyers gets meetings faster. Somebody who does not may ask better questions once inside them. Where the cycle is long and relationship-led, weight the industry. Where the product is new to the market, weight the curiosity.
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