Business development isn’t sales. And that difference matters more than you think.

A short read on how business development, sales and marketing fit together — and why getting your whole team comfortable with BD is one of the most valuable things you can do.

For years, I couldn’t have told you the difference between business development, sales and marketing. I used the terms interchangeably, like most people do.

It was only when I moved into the technology sector, working under some seriously sharp commercial directors, that the penny dropped. Once you see the difference, you can’t unsee it.

Here’s how I think about it now.

Three jobs, one goal

Sales is the easy one to grasp. They closed the deal. Money in the pipeline. The bottom line. There’s a clarity to sales that the other two don’t have.

Marketing creates visibility and tells the story. It takes what you’re selling and puts it in front of the people you want to sell to. The tactics are vast. The job is simple: be seen and be understood.

Then there’s the thing in the middle. Maxine Fox, who I run our CATCH workshop with, calls business development “the bridge”. I think that’s exactly right. Especially in consultancy.

If you’re selling high-end digital transformation projects that run to six figures, nobody signs on the strength of a clever campaign alone. People buy when they trust you. Business development is the relationship-building that earns that trust — the connective tissue between the individuals in your business, the story your marketing tells, and the deal your sales team eventually closes.

No bridge, no crossing.

So why does this matter for your business? Because BD is too often treated as someone else’s job. It gets handed to the senior people or filed under “sales”, as if everyone else is off the hook.

But in a consultancy and professional services business, everyone is part of the bridge. The graduate at the networking event. The delivery team on a client call. Every one of those moments either builds trust or chips away at it.

When your whole team is comfortable with business development, you stop building trust only in the rooms your directors happen to be in. You start building it everywhere.

Through Women in Tech North East, I see this constantly. Capable, brilliant people hold back from BD because they think it isn’t their job, or because it feels like selling. It isn’t selling. And it’s a skill — which means it can be learned.

That’s why we built CATCH.

What's (the) CATCH?

CATCH is a practical, jargon-free workshop for junior professionals who’ve been told to “develop business” without ever being shown how. No theory for theory’s sake. No death by PowerPoint. Just a clear framework, built around three pillars, so people leave knowing who to focus on and how to start conversations that lead somewhere.

Maxine and I were both hopeless at BD once. We’ve since built our businesses on it. So we know it can be learned — because we learned it.

If you’d like your team to stop treating business development as a dirty phrase, let’s talk.

Download our flyer to find out more

CATCH 2026.

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