March - 2000 - issue > Career Wize

Vasudev Bhandarkar is our model business developer. Between the time we started interviewing Bhandarkar, vice president for business development at wireless Internet startup Cellmania.com, and the time we completed the interview a week later, he had received and accepted an offer to become the CEO of GrayCell, a company funded by the likes of Draper International, Walden and Exodus Communications cofounder K.B. Chandrashekar.
Such are the prospects of business developers, those who are often perceived as people who hang out at conferences, attempting to network and explore business opportunities. If that’s what you think of when you think “business developer,” well, you’re not wrong. But you aren’t exactly right, either. Those who take on this title have to “really cover every aspect of the business,” according to Bhandarkar.

From Basement to Board Room

In the past, “some of the finest minds” in the industry and many CEOs had to work their way up through the ground floor — and, in the process, working in almost every department of a company. For example, John Sculley, who headed Apple in the 1980s, began his career on the bottom-most rung of the corporate ladder — as a trainee at PepsiCo and worked his way up the position of CEO, Bhandarkar pointed out.

“An ideal business development guy will have done a stint in engineering, marketing, sales, customer support, quality assurance and finance,” Bhandarkar said.

Some other business developers point to other traits that make for success. Ashis Khan, a business developer at Basis Communications, thinks a key quality for a successful developer is the ability to understand consumers, identify market segments, and also keep an eye out for future technologies that can dynamically change the market. To Maneesh Sagar, a vice president at a Connecticut e-commerce firm NeuVis, an essential prerequisite to success is “total belief” in the company and its products. Equally important is a willingness to do just about anything that will promote this belief, said Sagar, who, at a recent company conference in Palm Springs, personally distributed 1,500 copies of the Wall Street Journal to participants because it carried a story on NeuVis.

Even though Bhandarkar thinks a business developer should come from a well-rounded background of having worked in all areas of an enterprise, he entered the field with a strong background in basic sciences and research. He received bachelors and masters degrees in physics at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai, and went on to receive master’s degrees from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR, Mumbai) and Colorado State University. His solid background in basic sciences enabled Bhandarkar to work at Bell Labs for two years; he moved on to Digital Equipment Corporation for eight years, and on to Apple Computers for another two years before entering the exciting world of business. Later, Bhandarkar also studied management, specializing in marketing, at Santa Clara University.

Bhandarkar then founded Alma Enterprises, a builder of customized support systems with clients such as Intel and Cisco, and assumed the position of CEO, bringing well-rounded management experience to his job. In a sense, remarked Bhandarkar, being the CEO of a startup is akin to being a business developer. Soon Alma merged with Selectica, and Bhandarkar became the vice president of marketing and business development.

The primary role of a business developer is to work with every component of the product supply chain from consumers to suppliers, according to Bhandarkar. At Cellmania, he was at the forefront when it came to striking deals with phone manufacturers, wireless carriers, e-commerce sites, shopping malls, content sites, technology sites and companies that could be considered niche players with their unique business models.

Business developers also must work closely with the marketing team to ensure that external communications are carried out consistently with the overall positioning of the company. “Business development is at the cutting edge of the companies go-to-market efforts right from the company’s inception and often functions as the first provider of customer requirements into a company’s product organization,” Bhandarkar remarked.

Finally, business developers need to work with the company’s financial team to ensure that contracts, commissions and other company commitments are delivered in a way that is consistent with the overall business philosophy of the company.

That said, it must be mentioned that Bhandarkar built the company’s Web site with his “own bare hands.” As he loves to point out, there are no restrictions on the number of hats a business developer can wear at any given time.

Bhandarkar has an anecdote to illustrate the point. When he was at Selectica in Santa Clara, he got an email from Hewlett-Packard in Germany. “Excitedly I answered the email in a few minutes and pursued the gentleman by phone,” he recalled. “He told me that German companies don’t do business with companies that have less than 25 employees and that he was working on a project for a very large auto manufacturer.”

Bhandarkar neglected to mention that Selectica had only 15 employees.

“I said that if he were to send someone to visit our offices we could share with him all the relevant information about us, such as number of employees,” Bhandarkar said, pointing to the need to be quick-witted, without exactly breaching the ethics code.

Several weeks later, the company’s employees grew to 20 by the time Selectica had signed an agreement with H-P, Germany. “A couple months later, Selectica got a contract, and even later H-P’s corporate office in Cupertino issued a press release identifying Selectica as a best-of-breed configuration vendor!” Bhandarkar said. This contract elevated the valuation of Selectica by a lot, admits Bhandarkar, but anything could have happened if he had blurted out that the company had only 15 employees at an early, and clearly inopportune, stage of the talks.

Sacrifices and Rewards

If there are indeed no rules for business developers, there are no fixed hours either, because they tend to be at the senior management level.

“You wake up in the morning and you’re on the phone with Europe,” Bhandarkar said. “At other times you’re flying to the East Coast.” He feels sacrifices come in the form of not spending enough time with family. “When business beckons, it’s often the family that falls in the priority list. I view that as a hardship of the job.”

The rewards, however, are there for all to see, in black and white. “When you can see that there is two- to three-fold increase in the valuation of the company from one financing round to another, you can see that you have been handsomely rewarded,” said Bhandarkar.

According to Ashis Khan, it’s important to understand the market segments in which a company operates and the dynamics of the market.

“You need to pick your ‘fights’ very carefully,” he said. “You must own the segment and therefore, the segment must be well-defined, quantifiable and addressable.”

For most products, it may be better strategy to target a small segment to begin with, and work to become the number-one in that segment before making efforts to capture related segments. He cites a work experience that also taught him new lessons. “In my current job, we started a product line based on ATM controller and identified high-speed Internet access as our market and identified as our market sub-segment the ADSL-based stand-alone routers for small to medium business,” recalled Khan. But instead of marketing our product as ATM controller, we positioned the product as a “DSL network processor” that implements all the Layer 2 and Layer 3 network processing for DSL service, gaining a great position in the market, he added.

To attain the ability to successfully target market sub-segments, Khan said, one must develop the skill of listening to the customer and in the industry — and also hearken to a customer’s customers. “In other words, understand the entire food chain of the industry,” he advises new business developers or those that aspire to become one. For example, if you are in a communication chipset industry, you need to know not only your customers that are equipment vendors, but also their customers — telecommunication companies and, finally, the consumers, he says.

Towards fulfilling his position, Khan says he attempts to define the product clearly in his mind and to others; then positions it in the best possible segment; develops relationships with partners and alliances to attack the chosen segments; trains sales teams and also oversees sales and marketing.

Besides, Khan considers it his duty to determine the future roadmap of the company, by being involved with product development teams as well as sales and marketing teams. To be a successful business developer, one must also be able to identify the technology trends at an early stage, according to Khan.

When Khan realized the emergence of a big market for Web appliances in 1995, he started a business unit immediately. “It took several years for the market to develop, but when it happened, my company was in a very good position,” he said. “You must be able to anticipate technology trends and discontinuities. You will never get all the information [you need] to start a new venture — but the most important thing is to participate in the market so that you can learn all the issues and leverage that knowledge.”