Sales Development vs Business Development: The Difference

Sales development vs business development: Sales development finds and qualifies new prospects and hands them to sellers; business development usually means opening new markets, partners or strategic accounts. In many companies the two titles overlap.

Sales development

Sales development is the top of the pipeline: researching accounts, reaching out by phone and email, qualifying interest and booking a meeting or an RFQ for the account manager or sales engineer who will quote. It is measured in activity and handoffs: calls, emails, conversations, meetings and qualified opportunities. The people doing it are usually called sales development representatives (SDRs).

Business development

Business development has a wider and less fixed meaning. In many manufacturers it covers longer-horizon work: entering a new industry or region, building distributor or OEM partnerships, or winning a program at a strategic account. Some companies, though, use business development representative (BDR) for the same outbound prospecting role an SDR does.

Side by side

How they fit together in manufacturing

For a contract manufacturer or component supplier the two often feed each other. Business development decides where to play: a new industry such as medical devices, a region, or a distributor relationship. Sales development then works the accounts in that space, one conversation at a time, until a buyer sends drawings and an RFQ. The sales engineer or account manager quotes and follows the quote to a purchase order. Either function can sit in-house or with an outside partner; what matters is that each has a clear target and that handoffs between them are tracked.

Which one you need

Read the job, not the title: check what the role is measured on. For the outbound side, the 2026 data gives a sense of scale: 834 calls and emails per quote, and 7.7% of calls answered. See touches per quote and the prospecting calculator.

In the data

• Touches per quote: the finding
• Which prospecting channel produces quotes

Figures are from the Factur 2026 U.S. Manufacturing Sales Study, November 2025 – October 2026. From Factur’s outbound prospecting for U.S. manufacturing suppliers: every opportunity that reached a quote, its amount, and whether it became a purchase order, plus the calls and emails logged in the CRM, over the 12 months November 2025 – October 2026 compared with the 12 before, by opportunity close date.

More terms

• RFQ (request for quote)
• Quote-to-PO rate
• Purchase order (PO)
• NAICS vs SIC codes
• Touches per quote
• All terms

Factur runs outbound prospecting for U.S. manufacturers · facturmfg.com · More free data on U.S. companies by state: Insights