business development
Business development is the steady work of finding new customers, partners and opportunities that help a company grow beyond what it already has.
In plain English
Think of a small chops shop in Yaba that has three regular corner shops it supplies every week. The food is good, the delivery is reliable, and the owner sleeps well knowing the orders keep coming. That is a business running well. Business development is the different, restless work of asking, who else could we be feeding, and what would it take to reach them.
It is not sales in the narrow sense of closing today's order. It is the scouting, the relationship building, the testing of new markets, the partnerships that take months to bear fruit. The person doing business development for that chops shop might be the one who walks into a school, an office canteen, or an event planner's WhatsApp group, calmly building a case for why they should be the next supplier.
In a Lagos tech startup, business development often means the founder or a dedicated hire spending weeks courting a bank or a telco for a partnership that could put their app in front of millions of people. It rarely closes on the first meeting. It is built on follow up calls, proposals, and patience.
In the United Kingdom, a Nigerian owned catering business might do business development by reaching out to universities and corporate offices ahead of Black History Month events, planting seeds months before the actual bookings come in. Someone sending money home might not see this work directly, but it is often what turns a struggling family business into one that can finally hire more hands and pay steadier wages.
The honest truth is that business development rarely shows immediate results. It is the unglamorous groundwork, the meetings that go nowhere, the emails that get no reply, until suddenly one does, and the whole business shifts up a level.
A Lagos based logistics company spends four months building a relationship with a large supermarket chain. No money changes hands during this time. In month five, the supermarket signs a contract worth ₦3,600,000 a month, and the company's revenue nearly doubles.
Questions people ask
Is business development the same as sales?
Not quite. Sales usually closes deals with people already interested. Business development finds and warms up the people who are not yet interested, builds the relationships and partnerships, and often hands the ready lead over to sales.
Does a small business really need business development?
Yes, even a one person business benefits from setting aside time to look for new customers, partners or markets rather than only serving the ones it already has, because relying on the same few clients is risky.
How do you measure if business development is working?
Look at new partnerships formed, new markets entered, new leads generated over a set period, and eventually new revenue that can be traced back to those efforts, even though the timeline is often longer than a sales cycle.
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