The business developer is concerned with the analytical preparation of potential growth opportunities for the senior management or board of directors as well as the subsequent support and monitoring of its implementation. Both in the development phase and the implementation phase, the business developer collaborates and integrates the knowledge and feedback from the organization’s specialist functions, for example, R&D, production, marketing, and sales to assure that the organization is capable of implementing the growth opportunity successfully. The business developers' tools to address the business development tasks are the business model answering "how do we make money" and its analytical backup and roadmap for implementation, the business plan.
Business development professionals frequently have had earlier experience in sales, financial services, investment banking or management consulting; although some find their route to this area by climbing the corporate ladder in functions such as operations management. Skill sets and experience for business-development specialists usually consist of a mixture of the following (depending on the business requirements):