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BD Lily
Assembling top individuals doesn't make a team. This article outlines how to design a small but solid team using three principles—role design, execution autonomy, and communication structure—along with the Quinn and Cameron organizational growth model.
Of Google's countless projects, only about 50% succeed. The company even runs a unique space called 'The Google Cemetery' that displays tombstones of discontinued services. Google dissects these failures like autopsying a body, identifying direct and indirect causes of problems, documenting them precisely, and establishing countermeasures.
Open innovation is a paradigm where companies must intentionally bring in external ideas and technologies, share internal assets with the outside world, and create value to survive and grow. In other words, it's about breaking down organizational boundaries and increasing the probability of innovation through active external engagement—clearly demonstrating why 'absorptive capacity' is a core competitive advantage for modern startups.
Why Business Development Feels Out of Place in Korea
When you ask what BD professionals do, most answers sound similar. "Isn't it something like sales?" "Doesn't the strategy planning team handle that?" In Korea, business development is often bundled under sales, partnerships, or strategic planning rather than recognized as a distinct function.
But when you open the job descriptions at global companies like Salesforce, AWS, Stripe, HubSpot, and Notion, the story changes. These companies define BD professionals as clearly distinct roles, and those definitions vary remarkably from one company to the next.
Under the same "Business Development" title, one company seeks someone to qualify leads, another looks for someone to design ecosystems, and yet another wants someone to grow communities.
Enterprise SaaS (CRM)
What Salesforce's business development representatives (BDRs) focus on is clear: discover new business opportunities, identify potential customers' pain points, and filter only the leads worth the sales team's time.
Why this role is necessary becomes obvious when you think about the sales floor. In enterprise sales, spending equal time on every lead is inefficient. Treating a lead with 10% conversion potential the same as one with 60% slows down the entire sales organization.
Salesforce's BDRs eliminate this bottleneck. They use CRM data and reports to prioritize prospects and build relationships with major customers from the earliest stages. The essence of this role is designing the front-end structure so the sales team can focus only on "higher-value opportunities." (Reference: Salesforce BDR JD)
Marketing & Sales SaaS
HubSpot places inbound marketing at the center of its business model. So the problems its BD professionals face are different. Rather than generating leads directly like Salesforce, they focus on growing prospects who have already come looking for information into quality business opportunities.
How does this actually work? Visitors who come through content read blogs, download guides, and sign up for webinars. HubSpot's BD connects this journey data to the CRM and designs the flow so customers naturally move from "gathering information" to "considering a purchase."
Building a collaborative structure between sales and marketing teams to optimize the customer experience is also core to this role. (Reference: Why HubSpot values business development)
Fintech Infrastructure
Business development at Stripe isn't about selling payment technology. It's closer to building the infrastructure for payments to work seamlessly.
Why does this distinction matter? Emerging markets have different payment methods, regulations, and user behaviors. The payment flow that works in Southeast Asia may be completely different in Latin America. Stripe's BD identifies these differences and designs API localization and integration processes for each market.
They collaborate with local partners and developer communities to strengthen the infrastructure ecosystem, and often lead pilot programs to validate product-market fit. (Reference: Stripe BD JD)
Cloud Infrastructure
AWS's business development organization differs from the previous three companies. Rather than qualifying leads or growing inbound traffic, it specializes in partnership and ecosystem design.
What does this look like in practice? AWS BD connects key technology players in each industry. They link healthcare-specialized partners in healthcare, financial experts in finance, and retailers in retail to design customized go-to-market (GTM) strategies by domain. Working closely with these partners to co-develop AWS-based solutions or rapidly expand new cloud services across industries falls within BD's scope. (Reference: AWS BD JD)
Simply selling solutions is completely different from building an ecosystem where partners can create new value on top of AWS.
Productivity SaaS
Notion's business development is the most distinctive. Instead of advertising or sales-led approaches, it took an entirely different path: community-driven growth.
How does this structure work? Notion enabled actual users to act as ambassadors, voluntarily sharing templates, notes, and use cases. They ran student and educator community programs and designed a growth loop where user-generated content naturally goes viral online.
Thanks to the "users bringing users" structure, they acquired 30 million global users without large-scale paid advertising and are gradually expanding to enterprise customers. (Reference: Notion's growth approach)
Here, BD's role is to design and operate community programs, build loops for user-generated content to spread, and design models that transition from bottom-up adoption to enterprise conversion.
BD at these five companies does different work. They qualify leads, grow inbound traffic, build infrastructure, construct ecosystems, and design communities. But the common thread running through these five roles is clear.
These companies define BD professionals not as 'technicians' or 'salespeople' but as 'architects of structure.'
A role that doesn't directly generate revenue yet designs new business opportunities, connects partnerships, and creates the organization's growth engine. A role that considers "how to build structures that sell" rather than selling something directly. That's why in many organizations this position is misunderstood as a 'boundary role.' It's difficult to specify exactly what should be done, and hard to measure performance with short-term KPIs.
But the reason leading global companies seek this role ultimately comes down to one thing: they need people who can break out of existing frameworks to create new ecosystems and change the rules of the industry.