Career Overview: The Business Development (BD) career field is similar to marketing and sales career fields in the civilian sector. Director and senior level Business Development professionals work closely with Business Unit and company leadership to craft and execute BD strategies that align to the overall business strategy. Likewise, they participate in strategic planning, customer engagement, and attend conferences and Industry Days, and lead DoD contractor Customer Relations Management activities.
Business Development Analysts work with BD leaders to create new business pursuit plans that outline processes for customer qualification, pursuit evaluation, customer shaping, proposal response and writing, and positioning for follow-on work during execution.
Customer Relations: BD analysts help identify, establish, foster, maintain and track customer relationships, they assist in shaping program opportunities, developing capture strategies, bring the customer prospective into winning proposals, and advise program managers on the execution of existing business.
Business Teaming: The BD analyst is responsible to identify and align with companies that have complementary skills required to compete on specific business opportunities. Likewise, BD analysts are responsible for management of relationships with teammate companies
Business Capture: The BD analyst identifies competitive and non-competitive business opportunities, and prioritizes them against corporate strategy and capabilities to determine allocation of resources to those opportunities (bid/no bid). When bidding, the BD analyst helps establish proposal teams, win themes and strategies, and contributes as needed to the proposal effort.
Business Development Metrics: The BD Analyst is responsible for establishing and quantitatively managing the performance of capture efforts to include orders projections, orders performance, and proposal win rates. BD analyst apply captured metrics to future efforts to refine company strategy and process.
The business development career field is all about relationship building, understanding customer needs and matching them against company capabilities. Successful BD professionals help their companies grow and create job growth, job variety and career advancing opportunities for company personnel.
Career Path: There are multiple career paths for BD professionals. Some BD professionals start in the career field right after college and work their way up the BD ladder. Other BD professionals move over from their technical fields into BD, and lastly many transitioning and retiring military personnel start their DoD contracting career in BD bringing their vast military training and experience to the civilian sector.
Salaries: BD salaries vary by region, but start around ~$60k for entry level and can be in excess of $250k for executive level BD directors not including annual bonuses which can be substantial with major program wins ($10K to $50K+)
Professional Organizations: The Association of Proposal Management Professionals (APMP). APMP is the worldwide authority for professionals dedicated to the process of winning business through proposals, bids, tenders, and presentations. APMP promotes the professional growth of its members by advancing the arts, sciences, and technologies of winning business. APMP offers the world’s first, best and only industry-recognized certification program for professionals working in a bid and proposal environment. APMP certification is the global standard for developing and demonstrating proposal management competency.
Training & Certifications: One of the premier training organizations for DoD Business Development Organizations is Shipley Associates. Their courses in Capturing Federal Business, Managing Federal Proposals, and Writing Federal Proposals should be mandatory for all DoD BD professionals. If you are considering a career as a DoD BD professional I highly recommend these courses.
Education: Most BD positions require a bachelors degree and having a masters degree is highly recommended.
Job Search: To review currently open Business Development jobs that DoD contractors are actively hiring for I recommend going to the career page of several of the DoD contractors profiled on this site and searching for jobs with the titles “Business Development”, “Capture Management” and review the jobs and job requirements that come up.