Last night, I had the pleasure to meet Eric Olson, the business development guy at BuzzFeed.

We met up at Bug Labs Bug+NYC Meetup (which was rad, by the way. The device is truly a marvel of engineering, and while about the size of an old school GameBoy, it certainly would be something I would buy and play with).

After hanging out at the Meetup, we headed over to Lombari’s Pizza on Spring Street. And, as must often happen when two people of a similar ilk and profession get together, we began to discuss the perceptions of what we do.

The over-arching question was: Is Sales and Business Development the same thing?

After all, its hard to outline what “Business Development” is and is not. Sales, is much more of a process and a science. While the two disciplines share many attributes, they are different in distinct ways.

The major difference is risk. Follow me with this:

Sales: The process by which one person provides access to a product or service at the optimal price point.

For example, a sales person would rather provide a bottle of water to a thirsty person, than a quenched person, because the thirsty person will pay more.

Business Development: The process by which two groups of people determine the optimal business relationship to mutually drive revenue, and/or develop new revenue sources.

For example, I provide a widget to a blog that creates additional ad units and share in that revenue and/or am paid for the space.So what is the major difference between the two? Risk.

With Sales, there is truly limited risk to the sales person or the purchaser. Mechanically, there might be several ways a sales person is taking a risk (the price point is too high; the product stinks; etc.). But most of those are solvable through process.

With Business Development, there is a need for mutual risk to proceed mutual success. The publisher has to 1) be willing to install the widget; and 2) trust/believe that the widget will be used in such a manner that the resulting traffic will be significant enough to drive real revenue. The Business Development person has to believe that the publisher is of high quality and generates enough traffic to make the transaction viable.

Remember, with a Sales person, money is exchanging hands, while the Business Development person only has a contract with expectations for success.

This also wrecks havoc with the tracking of success. With a Sales person its relatively easy: Units sold is the primary metric. With Business Development, its not Deals Closed, but rather the results of those deals, which are not allows immediately evident.

So, at the end of the day, if you are unsure if your organization needs a sales or business development professional, think about the transaction and if it inherently carries shared risk.

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