What is the difference between marketing and business development?

It’s simple, really.

Marketing is the process of understanding a market’s needs, tailoring your services and solutions to those needs, and generating awareness and interest in what you have to offer. A marketing department’s key performance indicators will typically include the generation of ‘marketing qualified leads’ (MQLs) or prospective clients. 

Business development (or sales) is the process of understanding a specific prospect’s needs, proposing services and solutions to address those needs (opportunistically or formally in a tender response), and then converting the prospect into a client. In that sense, a business development team’s KPIs will typically include the value of new business won or secured.  

Our Strategy and Planning Expertise

We’re marketing and business development stewards, strategists, and tacticians. We combine strong traditional strategic marketing skills with experience in the effective use of the latest online marketing techniques.  We’re objective. We conduct industry and client research to understand the environment (the opportunities and threats) and your business’ strengths and weaknesses. We then use that information to inform a marketing strategy and month-by-month marketing plan.

Marketing Strategy

A well considered marketing strategy will provide your business with focus and direction. It will define and articulate your market position, value proposition, differentiators and strategy. It should include measurable goals to be achieved each year or term and be regulary reviewed to assess whether the marketing strategy remains sound, which marketing activities are most effective, and that you have the necessary in-house and external marketing resources and systems.

Marketing Plan

A marketing plan will ensure your marketing and business development team is focused and accountable. It will remove the emotion from decision-making and help you to limit discretionary spending. Every person in your business will be clear about your priorities, what you are seeking to achieve, and how you will achieve your objectives. We can develop and implement, should you require, a detailed fully costed month-by -month plan of all the recommended marketing activities. 

You can’t manage what you don’t measure

There are only three ways to measure results in business: dollar value ($), number of (#), and percentage (%).