Marketing and business development should not be treated as two separate journeys toward growth. They have different jobs, but they are looking at the same market, the same customer and, eventually, the same revenue line. Once those functions stop sharing context, the business starts making decisions with half the picture.
Why should marketing and business development work together?
Because each function sees a different part of the same growth problem. Marketing sees patterns at scale: what people notice, search, respond to, ignore and remember. Business development hears the market one conversation at a time: what clients actually ask for, what partners will agree to, where deals slow down, what competitors are promising and where an opportunity might be hiding.
Long before McKinsey, I had a habit that made some marketing conversations longer than they were supposed to be. Someone would ask me how to market a product and, instead of jumping into channels, content or campaigns, I would start pulling the business apart: the product, the price, the customer, the sales conversations, the reasons people were buying and the reasons they were not. I did not have a fancy name for that way of thinking. I just knew that if the business part was weak, marketing would eventually expose it.
My logic was simple: if I could help build a better product, I would have a better product to market. Companies still bring marketing in after the big decisions are already made. The product is ready, the pricing is fixed, the market is chosen, and then someone says, “now make people want it.” Sometimes the brief is not a marketing problem at all. Sometimes the product, offer, route to market or commercial model needs attention first.
Later, when I joined McKinsey, marketing and business development sat much closer together by default. That felt natural to me because I had already reached the same conclusion through experience: one side gives the other context it cannot get alone.
The market does not experience your departments. It experiences one business.
What goes wrong when the teams work in silos?
The business starts optimizing departments instead of the customer journey. Targets can look healthy inside each team while the overall path from attention to opportunity is broken. The same pattern appears across go-to-market functions more broadly: BCG has described siloed marketing, sales and customer-success teams as a source of limited accountability, unclear priorities and disconnected customer experiences.
Market entry becomes two plans
When marketing and business development are disconnected, a company can enter a market with two different versions of reality. Marketing can research demand, map competitors, build positioning and create awareness. Business development can open doors, find local partners, test commercial appetite and get the right people into a room. If the two tracks do not talk, the business can end up marketing an offer that partners do not want, or building partnerships around a message customers do not understand.
Lead quality turns into a blame game
Misalignment becomes obvious when one team celebrates volume and the other questions value. Marketing says the campaign worked. The commercial side says the leads are weak. Then everybody starts defending their own metric. The useful question is not who failed. It is where the disconnect started: the audience, the offer, the qualification criteria, the message, the follow-up or the definition of a real opportunity.
Useful feedback arrives too late
A clean handoff is not enough because market intelligence needs to travel both ways. A business development conversation can change a campaign. A campaign can reveal a new market opportunity. Customer behaviour can change the offer. A partner can change the route to market. If teams only meet when one is handing work to the other, that intelligence arrives after the decisions have already been made.
This is also why cross-functional operating models matter. McKinsey has highlighted shared goals, cross-functional teams and end-to-end accountability as important parts of modern marketing operating models. The point is not to erase expertise. It is to stop expertise from becoming a wall.
Should marketing and business development be one function?
Not necessarily. The goal is connection, not collapsing two disciplines into one job. Marketing builds attention, positioning, demand and preference. Business development builds relationships, partnerships, opportunities and commercial paths. They require different skills, tools and conversations.
What should be shared is the context around the work: who the business is trying to reach, what problem it is solving, how value is explained, what qualifies as a real opportunity, what the market is saying back and which business result matters most. A clear marketing strategy and a clear business development strategy should meet before execution, not after it.
How can marketing and business development work as one growth system?
The simplest way is to connect both functions around the same business goal while keeping ownership clear. The structure does not need to be complicated. It needs to make information move faster than the departments can drift apart.
- Start with the business goal. Before channels, assets or outreach, agree on what needs to change for the business: revenue, market entry, qualified demand, partnerships, retention or another measurable outcome.
- Use one definition of the audience and opportunity. Marketing, business development and sales should not be working from different versions of the customer. Agree on who matters, what problem is being solved and what qualifies as a meaningful opportunity.
- Build the feedback loop before launch. Decide how client conversations, campaign signals, objections and partner feedback will get back to the people shaping the strategy. Do not wait for the post-campaign report.
- Connect the measures across the journey. Reach, leads and meetings are useful, but they become more valuable when the business can connect them to opportunity quality, conversion, partnerships and revenue.
- Keep strategy close to execution. The people making the strategic decisions should stay close enough to the work to see what the market is actually doing and change course when needed.
At Loor Connect, this is why a marketing brief can turn into a business development conversation, and a business development project can turn into a marketing one. If the business is launching, expanding, repositioning or entering a new market, the question cannot only be “what campaign should we run?” It also has to be where the growth will come from, who needs to say yes, what the offer needs to look like and what happens after attention becomes interest.
What to do next
If marketing and business development feel disconnected, start with the operating habits before changing the org chart.
- Align the goal. Write down one shared growth goal for the next quarter and make sure both teams can explain it the same way.
- Compare definitions. Compare how marketing and business development currently define the target audience, qualified lead, qualified opportunity and priority market.
- Create the loop. Create a recurring feedback point where campaign data and commercial conversations are reviewed together.
- Connect the metrics. Choose at least one metric that connects activity to a commercial outcome, not only to departmental output.
- Find the break. Review one live initiative end to end and identify where information, ownership or context gets lost between teams.
Final thoughts
I still love a great campaign. I still get excited about branding, content and the creative side of the work. But if I cannot connect the idea to a commercial path, it feels unfinished. And when I see a strong business opportunity with no clear story, positioning or way for the market to understand why it matters, that feels unfinished too.
Growth usually happens in the space between both. That is the space I like working in.
See you,
Tai Perez
