Many B2B organisations struggle with the same question: should business development report into sales, sit beside it, or operate as its own capability? The answer determines what the function actually does. Inside sales, it tends to become lead support for current deals. Too far away, it drifts into disconnected research. The operating model defines how business development should support sales — and where specialist capacity creates the most value.
Proximity to sales is both the value and the risk.
Business development needs proximity to sales to stay relevant: it must know which accounts matter, what the team hears in the market and which propositions resonate. Without that connection, research becomes academic and outreach generic. The function produces activity, but not pipeline that sales recognises as its own.
The same proximity is also the risk. When business development reports into the sales manager of the quarter, its agenda collapses into whatever deal needs support this week. The long-term work — market mapping, account selection, multi-touch development of future buyers — is always the first thing sacrificed, because its value shows up in quarters, not weeks.
Business development should serve the pipeline of two quarters from now, not only the deal that closes this month.
Give market development its own mandate inside the commercial model.
The most durable arrangement we see treats market development as a distinct capability with its own mandate: defined segments, named target accounts, agreed signals and a rhythm of its own — while being formally connected to sales through structured handovers and shared reviews. It is neither a junior extension of sales nor an isolated research desk.
This positioning answers the practical questions an operating model must settle: who decides which accounts get developed, when an account moves from development to active selling, and what information must travel with it. When those rules exist, specialist capacity reinforces the sales team instead of competing with it for the same attention.
Match the capacity to the market, not to the headcount available.
How much development capacity a market needs depends on how it buys. In specialist industries with long cycles and few accounts, a small team doing deep, patient work outperforms a large team doing shallow outreach. In faster markets, volume and responsiveness matter more, and the balance shifts toward qualification and speed.
The honest question is not 'how many people can we spare?' but 'what volume of quality conversations does the sales plan require, and what does producing them take?' Sizing from that requirement — rather than from leftover budget — is what separates an operating model from an organisational accident.
“The size of the development function should follow from the market's buying rhythm, not from whatever capacity was left over.”De Grijff · Commercial operating principle
Write down the mandate before growing the function.
Before adding business development capacity, write down what the function owns, which segments and accounts it serves, how it hands over to sales and how its success is measured beyond immediate meetings. A mandate on one page prevents the most common failure: a new hire who spends a year doing whatever the loudest request of the week demanded.
Review the mandate twice a year against the pipeline it actually produced. Where market development, sales and the operating model reinforce each other, growth becomes a matter of adding capacity to a system that already works. Designing that system — positioning, mandate, handovers and capacity — is exactly what a Commercial Operating Model engagement addresses.
References & further reading
- Which work belongs with which role? — De Grijff
- When outbound should not scale yet — De Grijff
- Commercial Operating Model — De Grijff
