Rémi Kokabi | Updated September 4, 2026 | 8 min read
Rémi Kokabi | Updated September 4, 2026 | 8 min read
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Business Development vs. Sales: 6 Steps I Use to Actually Grow Pipeline (2026 Guide)
Most teams I talk to say they “do business development.” What they actually do is skip straight to cold outreach with zero strategy behind it. The result? Pipeline that looks full but converts at single-digit rates.
I’ve spent years watching companies confuse BD with sales, with marketing, with “just send more emails.” And the ones who get the distinction right grow faster, with less wasted effort. In this post, I’ll walk you through what business development actually is, how it differs from sales and marketing, the 6 steps I use to build pipeline, the mistakes that kill BD efforts, and the metrics that tell you whether it’s working.
lemlist is rated 4.6/5 on G2 with 1,400+ verified reviews, so we’ve seen what works (and what doesn’t) across thousands of outreach campaigns.
What is business development?
According to Scott Pollack, a contributor to Forbes, “Business development is the creation of long-term organizational value from customers, markets and relationships.” (What is Business Development? | Osborne Interim Management) That definition is broad on purpose. BD sits above any single function. It’s the strategic work of finding growth opportunities and turning them into real revenue.
Here’s where people get confused. Business development, sales, and marketing each own a different piece of the growth puzzle.
Business development focuses on identifying new markets, building strategic partnerships, and creating the conditions for revenue to happen. It’s long-term, relationship-driven work.
Marketing generates awareness and demand. It brings the right audience to the table through campaigns, content, and positioning.
Sales focuses on identifying leads and closing revenue. It converts the awareness and relationships that BD and marketing create into signed deals.
The overlap between these three is real (I’ll be the first to admit the lines get blurry, especially in smaller teams where one person wears all the hats). But the core difference comes down to focus and timing. BD opens doors. Marketing fills the room. Sales closes.
Business development objectives
Some business development objectives can be:
Increased revenue
For most businesses, profit is the primary goal of business development. More profit means more possibilities for growing the business.
Increased operational efficiency
By making operations run more smoothly and efficiently, the company can achieve more with less time and resources.
Business expansion
An important goal for growth. This could mean increasing the company’s production capabilities or entering new markets.
Increased brand awareness
Boosting the company’s visibility and reputation through PR efforts and strategic marketing.
Strengthen market position
Focuses on differentiating the business from competitors. This can be done through thought leadership, product leadership, and customer experience excellence.
Build strategic partnerships
Forming relationships for collaborations that serve both parties’ objectives. These partnerships can enable mutual growth.
Develop new products or services
By developing and going to market with new products or services, companies can attract new customers and expand into new markets, which ultimately should help them generate more revenue.
Business development per department
- Marketing: Developing marketing campaigns, utilizing social media and partnering with influencers.
- Product: Researching new product ideas and acquiring new technologies.
- Sales: Researching and entering new sales channels. Setting up partnerships with agents in different territories. Creating new offerings by bundling products.
- Finance: The finance department supports business development by looking for cost savings through financial audits and evaluations.
- Business planning: Strategic planning to guide company-wide initiatives. Additionally, they track key metrics and help other departments implement plans for sustainable business growth.
Responsibilities of business development representatives
These are some of a Business Development Representative’s responsibilities:
- Qualifying leads
- Identifying business opportunities by prospecting, networking and researching
- Staying up-to-date on competition and market trends
- Negotiating and closing deals and partnerships
- Analyzing data to optimize sales strategies with AI-powered personalization
- Continually working to direct and strengthen the organization’s positioning
Modern BDRs do more than check these boxes. The best ones time their outreach based on buying signals, like a prospect visiting a pricing page, downloading a whitepaper, or expanding their team. Instead of blasting a generic list, they act at the exact right moment with relevant context. That shift from volume-based to signal-based prospecting is what separates reps who book meetings from reps who get ignored.
Business development steps
The exact actions will differ from company to company and industry to industry, but the steps below may serve as a rough guide to creating your business development plan.
Step 1: Market research
By understanding the industry’s landscape, trends, competitors, and customer needs, you can find new opportunities and areas for growth.
Step 2: Set goals and objectives
Without goals and objectives, there’s no direction. The goals could be increasing sales, expanding into new markets, etc.
Step 3: Identify your target audience
Create your ideal customer profile and target market segments based on demographics and buying behaviors.
Step 4: Generate and qualify leads
Any business needs quality leads that can be converted to customers.
Create a pool of leads by using tools like lemlist’s 600M+ lead database. Once you’ve built your list, verify contact data with lemlist’s Email Finder & Verifier so you’re only reaching out to real, deliverable addresses.
All leads can be instantly sent to any lemlist outreach campaign.
Step 5: Reach out to leads to build relationships and offer solutions
This step involves connecting with potential customers, clients, or partners to establish relationships, understand their pain points, and provide potential solutions for mutual benefit.
The key here is running multichannel outreach sequences rather than relying on a single channel. Combine email, LinkedIn, phone calls, and even WhatsApp in one automated sequence so you’re meeting prospects wherever they’re most active.
Step 6: Keep improving based on feedback
Continuously monitor your business development initiatives and look for ways to improve based on incoming data and feedback.
Common business development mistakes to avoid
Andrew Sobel, author of It Starts with Clients, notes that he sees “very basic but often fatal mistakes made all the time during the sales process,” often by sophisticated professionals. (12 Common Business Development Mistakes You Cannot Afford To Make - Andrew Sobel) Here are the ones I see most:
Leading with your solution instead of the prospect’s problem. Sobel puts it well in his 12 Common Business Development Mistakes: explore the client’s agenda first, testing for frustrations and aspirations, before pitching what you do. When you lead with your product, you come across as a product-pusher. When you lead with their pain, you come across as an advisor.
Rushing the close before trust is built. Complex B2B deals require multiple touches. If you try to force a proposal in the first conversation, you signal desperation rather than expertise. Real professionals actively manage the process, always pushing it forward, but with patience.
Sending generic outreach at scale. This is the 2026 version of the two mistakes above. If your emails read like they were sent to 10,000 people (because they were), you’ve already lost. Signal-based outreach, where you personalize based on what a prospect recently did or said publicly, outperforms batch-and-blast every time. This is exactly why tools that track intent signals and enrich prospect data before the first touchpoint exist.
Ignoring follow-up. Most deals aren’t won or lost on the first email. They’re won on the fourth or fifth touch. If you don’t have a structured follow-up sequence, you’re leaving pipeline on the table.
How to measure business development success
You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Here are the KPIs that matter most for BD:
Customer acquisition rate. How many new customers are you bringing in per month or quarter? This is the most direct indicator of whether your BD efforts are working.
Revenue growth. Track revenue attributable to BD-sourced opportunities. Separate it from marketing-sourced and inbound so you can see the real contribution.
Cost of customer acquisition (CAC). What does it cost you to acquire each new customer through BD activities? If your CAC is climbing while deal sizes stay flat, something in the process is broken.
Customer retention rate. BD doesn’t stop at the first sale. If the customers your BD team brings in churn at high rates, you’re targeting the wrong accounts or setting wrong expectations during the sales process.
Pipeline velocity. How fast do BD-sourced deals move through your pipeline? Slow velocity usually points to poor qualification or weak follow-up.
Track these in your CRM. If you’re using lemlist for outreach, the built-in campaign analytics (open rates, reply rates, click rates per sequence and per step) feed directly into these higher-level metrics, so you can tie specific outreach actions to pipeline outcomes.
Final thoughts
Business development is about growing a company and making it more successful. It can take many forms, from expanding into new markets to increasing operational efficiency to building partnerships that open doors you couldn’t open alone.
The difference between teams that do BD well and teams that spin their wheels usually comes down to execution. Having the right strategy matters. But having the tools to find the right leads, reach them on the right channels, and personalize at the right moment is what turns strategy into pipeline.
If you want to put any of this into practice, start a 14-day free trial of lemlist and see how the lead database, multichannel sequences, and AI personalization work together. Or book a demo if you’d rather have someone walk you through it.
Hi there, I’m Rémi, co-founder of the GTM Club powered by lemlist & Claap. If you believe Go-To-Market is the new moat in this AI-era, you should apply: https://www.thegtmclub.com/
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