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