Sales vs Business Development: Why You Need Both - But What’s the Difference?

Sales and business development: Two distinct paths converging to drive sustainable growth and success.

When scaling a business, it’s common to either combine sales and business development into one role or heavily focus on one over the other. While this approach can work in the early stages, it often becomes a major obstacle as your business grows. Sales focuses on driving immediate revenue by converting leads into customers, while business development is about creating long - term opportunities by forming partnerships, entering new markets, and uncovering hidden Sales vs Business Development: Why You Need Both - But What’s the Difference?growth avenues. To truly scale, you need both functions working in harmony - focused but separate.

The Role of Sales: Building Relationships That Drive Results

Sales isn’t just about closing deals. It’s about building lasting relationships with prospects and turning them into loyal customers. Sales teams need to focus on understanding client needs and aligning solutions that fit those needs. This keeps revenue flowing and nurtures long-term relationships that will continue to drive business.

Example: Salesforce’s revenue grew by 121% in its first two years due to their sales team’s efforts to build strong, personal relationships with clients. This allowed Salesforce to quickly dominate the CRM space by focusing on customer needs and closing deals that addressed those problems​.

HR Daily Advisor

The Role of Business Development: Laying the Foundation for Growth

While sales focuses on today, business development is about building for tomorrow. It’s about forming strategic partnerships, entering new markets, and exploring avenues for growth that may not yield immediate returns but will create long-term opportunities. Business development requires strategic thinking, as well as a strong understanding of the broader industry landscape to keep your company positioned for future success.

Example: Amazon’s rapid growth in the late 90s can be attributed to its focus on business development. By securing key partnerships with distributors and investing in infrastructure, Amazon was able to scale from $511,000 in revenue to $15.7 million within two years​.

World Economic Forum

Why You Need Both: Balancing Today’s Revenue with Tomorrow’s Growth

Many businesses, particularly when they’re just starting out, either combine sales and business development roles or focus on one while neglecting the other. While this may work in the early stages, it limits your potential as you grow. If you focus solely on sales, you may see immediate revenue but risk stagnation as you lack the strategy to create new opportunities. On the other hand, if you concentrate only on business development, you may have a pipeline of future opportunities but miss out on immediate revenue.

It’s crucial to separate the two functions as you scale to achieve both short-term wins and long-term success. Businesses that align their sales and business development strategies are 47% more likely to experience long-term growth​.

Source - HR Daily Advisor

Ask yourself: Is your business structured for both immediate success and future scalability? Are your sales and business development efforts aligned, or are they competing for resources and focus?

Sales vs Business Development: Bridging the Gap for Better Alignment

Define Clear Roles: Make sure your sales team is dedicated to closing deals and driving revenue, while your business development team is focused on uncovering long-term growth opportunities.

Align on Shared Goals: Although the day-to-day tasks are different, sales and business development should have complementary goals. Business development identifies the opportunities, and sales converts those opportunities into paying customers.

Use Data to Measure Success: Utilise KPI's to track both sales performance and the effectiveness of business development strategies. For sales, track metrics like conversion rates. For business development, measure the success of new partnerships or market entries. Data can help you pinpoint where your processes are working and where they need adjustment.

Ensure Regular Communication: Create a feedback loop between sales and business development. Sales teams can provide insight into real-time market needs, while business development can highlight potential opportunities for future growth.

Success Stories (and a Cautionary Tale)

Zoom: Zoom’s strategic business development partnerships with educational institutions and corporations fuelled its rapid growth. By 2019, the company had reached $330 million in revenue by combining these partnerships with an efficient sales team that quickly converted leads into long-term clients.

Source - HR Daily Advisor, TSI

Spotify: In its first two years, Spotify secured key partnerships with record labels, which helped build its user base to 10 million. Their sales team capitalized on this growth by converting free users into paying subscribers, balancing both functions effectively.

Source - HR Daily Advisor, StartUs Insights

WeWork: WeWork’s failure highlights the risks of misaligning sales and business development. While they aggressively expanded into new markets, they didn’t align these efforts with a strong sales strategy, leading to financial losses and a valuation drop from $47 billion to $8 billion.

Source - HR Daily Advisor

Why I Created SalDevo

I created SalDevo to address the common disconnect between sales vs business development—two functions that are often seen as competing rather than complementary. Too many businesses overemphasise one at the expense of the other, missing the chance to unlock their full growth potential. Real, sustainable growth comes from aligning sales and business development, where sales focuses on closing the right deals and business development uncovers new opportunities for the future.

At SalDevo, we bridge the gap between sales vs business development, helping you align these critical functions to work toward shared goals. Our hands-on, tailored approach identifies gaps, optimises processes, and ensures your business is primed to scale smarter, faster, and sustainably.