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Comment by michaeldhopkins | Hacker News Reader

Steve's argument against business development is that it costs money and sells a product without finding out if the product will work. For a startup selling something without a proven market, business development is a bet on luck because the sales engine will try to sell whatever it's given by the engineers without getting feedback from the prospects about how to more closely align the product to an existing demand.

That joke is dumb, though. Blank explains exactly what business development does and acknowledges its place in the customer development cycle! (What does a "customer development" person do, one might also ask.)

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I fully understand and agree with Steve's point against hiring sales people before finding the product/market fit.

However, at least in my mind, in a bit larger organization it is the Business Development people who continues to do the customer development work while Sales is focused on 'exploiting' the first found fit (which might or might not be a big one).

To use Blank's framework I suppose business development carries on the customer development role assuming a feedback channel to product development is in place. This is especially true for enterprise business development where a sale can be a 2-12 month, detailed discussion about needs.

However, I note you don't really mention customer development as something you did in your original post. It sounds like you basically did sales, which though a huge job is in Blank-land something that doesn't take the customer's feedback and use it to iterate the product itself. So, maybe you need to rephase what you did if you did what Blank calls customer development.

I did work very closely with the product development, however actually my question was why the title Business Development seems to give negative vibes for people? And is this the case all over the world?

The job I was denied btw was a sales job and the feedback was that my Business Development experience was not sales enough.

Probably it's just that business development is too loosely defined. I've seen it applied to everything from heavy enterprise sales to college students hired to pass out flyers. No different than any other generic title in that respect. Probably, sales at this company meant something more pressured and your range of sales experience and more relationship-managed approach wasn't what they wanted. That, or the interviewer wasn't listening to you and had a simplistic, title-based view of the world.

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