Finding remarkable Business Development Professionals can be a hard task, although most recruiters look for employees with long experience in business development, they may not be the best candidates, they can be one of those employees who have 10 years of experience which consists of 1 year multiplied by 10, instead you should seek to hire based on qualities and traits plus experience; find candidates who are proactive, caring, possess leadership skills and can still be good followers, these are almost rare to find as only few people reach that level of professionalism at work. In most cases, you hire a business development consultant to help you solve a specific problem or more often help you define a plan of action for taking you where you want to go. In such cases, you want someone who can deliver in writing a road map for future activities.
These can include fine tuning departmental tasks, aligning the IT department, figuring out how to market a company’s goods or services to a wider market, negotiating with suppliers, understanding any legal matters that may arise in the course of business, managing sales, understanding the financial needs of the business, and coordinating all of these areas into cohesive action plans for the business as a whole.
In terms of education, almost any person regardless of the background can become a business developer, if you do a quick search over LinkedIn you will find that the most talented Business Development Professionals have an MBA degree, MBA graduates make excellent Business Developers as they understand how the business operates as a whole, they have knowledge in HR, Marketing, Accounting, Strategic Management, Project Management, Logistics, Business Planning and much more.
In this perspective, business development refers to: tests and processes concerning analytical preparation of potential growth opportunities, the support and monitoring of the implementation of growth opportunities, but does not include decisions on strategy and implementation of growth opportunities.
Secondly, but perhaps more importantly, the business developer must be able to take a holistic perspective, use his/her intuition when analyzing results, and show proof of creativity and ingenuity when synthetizing information in order to conclude which next steps the business should take.