Writing
Marketing and business development are not the same job
One role optimises the funnel. The other decides whether it's the right funnel. Confusing them is expensive.
These two roles get conflated constantly, usually by organisations that need both and end up with neither. The confusion is expensive: you hire for one, expect the other, and end up disappointed in someone who was never doing the wrong job in the first place.
The distinction, once stated, is simple.
Marketing creates demand for what exists. Business development builds the structure that makes demand possible.
Marketing takes a defined product, a defined audience and a defined price, and directs attention toward it. Campaigns, positioning, content, channel, brand. Real skill, hard work — and it assumes that what's being sold is already the right thing, for the right people, at the right price.
Business development questions those same assumptions. Is this the right market? Should pricing work this way? Which distribution partnership would unlock something that isn't possible now? What revenue path haven't we built? Where is this business leaking value?
Marketing optimises the funnel. Business development decides whether it's the right funnel.
Why this mistake is expensive
The most common failure I see: a company has weak sales, so it raises the marketing budget. More spend, more content, more campaigns. The result barely moves.
Because the constraint was never demand generation. It was that the product was priced wrong for that segment, or sold through a channel the buyer doesn't use, or aimed at a market too small for the model. No amount of marketing fixes a structural problem — it just makes the leak more expensive.
The mistake runs the other way too. A company with strong structure and no marketing has an efficient machine nobody knows about. Both are real. They're two different problems.
The business developer is an architect, not a contractor
The most common misreading of my role is that a business developer is someone who goes out, performs a small miracle, and comes back with the largest possible contract.
That isn't the job. We build the conditions under which that contract can exist. We construct the structure the deal becomes possible inside of.
Think about the difference in output. A contractor brings in money once. An architect builds a system that generates money on its own — and keeps generating it after they've gone.
That's also why business development can't be measured only by contracts signed this quarter. The real output is capacity: the paths, the partnerships, and the internal structure that make next year's deals inevitable instead of lucky.
Which one do you need?
A rough test.
If you know exactly what you're selling, to whom, at what price, and the problem is that the right people don't know about it enough — you need marketing.
If you're not sure the price is right, or which segment to target, or how the product reaches buyers at scale, or where new revenue could come from — you need business development first. Marketing works far better afterward, because it's pointing at something that actually holds up.
And if sales have stayed flat despite a growing marketing budget, that's usually the clearest sign you have a structural problem wearing marketing's clothes.
Working out which one you actually have is often the whole job itself. If you're not sure which side your problem is on, that's a conversation worth having.