We use funny titles in the engineering business. I think that's because engineers consider themselves "professionals" and eschew any relationship to "sales" or "marketing". We think if we call it "business development" or "consulting" it is somehow less distastefull than "selling." Selling is a dirty word.

In most other businesses though, marketing and selling are key to the firm's success. Marketing to them encompasses all facets of bringing your products or services to potential customers: product and market research, strategic market planning, promoting or advertising your services, business development (see below) and selling.

In most other industries, such as the technology business, the term Business Development has a much different connotation than it does in the engineering business. Business Development, a subset of Marketing, is about developing partnerships and strategic relationships with other firms. It could also include developing a market in the early stages, such as opening a new geographic area or new country, or identifying markets for a new product or service.

In the engineering world we use the terms "Marketing" and "Business Development" quite differently. These are often essential pseudonyms for another activity: Sales. Sales is also a subset of Marketing. In engineering, unlike virtually every other business, we don't do "selling". Selling is a dirty word. Actually we do do it, we just call it something else.

Selling is that subset of marketing where we interact with actual prospective customers to trade our services for money. Selling is about positioning our firm in the most advantageous position possible to win a specific sales opportunity. Unlike many of the other aspects of Marketing, selling is a "contact sport." It involves meeting and communicating with individuals responsible for buying our services. It is about identifying what the client is attempting to accomplish, fix or avoid (their concept) and connecting our strengths to their concept and discriminators in a way that is compelling.

In engineering we also use the term Marketing to denote the clerical staff who write our proposals. This is often a rude awakening to that BA Marketing grad we recruit for our engineering firm who essentially finds him or herself working the dog watch cranking out proposal after proposal. What a waste of their talents!



Rick