Any chemical manufacturing business has a sales group.  Sales people will sell existing products, that is, products for which the manufacturing facility already has a process.  It is relatively straightforward to sell existing products.

If your company is so disposed, the sales group might also market its ability to take on new projects.  To sell this kind of capability you need a special kind of sales person.  Many companies call such sales people “Business Development” managers. Such people almost always have a strong technical background and a desire to interact with customers. 

A business development manager is a special kind of animal.  In addition to their technical ability they must have a wide range of general business skills.  Such a person must have a thorough grasp of all phases of manufacturing- R&D, pilot plant, semi-works, and production.  This intimate understanding of manufacturing is not limited to just the technical aspects of making a proposed material to specifications.  There is raw material sourcing to be done as well as the generation of an economic model of the proposed process.  And, before you can even offer a product you have to do your due diligence in the intellectual property arena. 

The business development person must somehow mesh the customers price and delivery requirements with the company production timeline. For the development of a new product,  a company needs a process that operates at scale.  To get a scaled-up process, it has to have a process validated at the pilot plant scale.  To get a pilot scale process, the company needs its process bench chemists to pony up a process that is cost efficient and safe. 

The practice of business development will involve math.  Costing and pricing are two economic activities that will put you in contact with accounting and with upper management.  This is where the job can become highly stressful.  Your company will probably have costing numbers that are reasonably accurate.  I say probably because there is some philosophy involved. 

Your accountants will use GAAP- Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.  I’m not an accountant and I have no aspirations to be one.  All I can say is that the allocation of costs to a given product, at least in a multipurpose facility, will involve some assumptions about how to partition resource costs to any given process.  The previous sentence can be the source of incredible confusion for companies.  The method by which costs are allocated can lead to numbers that are unrealistic on either the high or low side.  Overly low numbers can lead to pricing that is too low to sustain the operation.  Overly high numbers can lead you to offer quotations that are not competitive. Both circumstances are not desirable.

A business development person must be intimately familiar with all phases of manufacture.  Fundamentally, business development people are show horses.  They represent their company on site and at meetings and conferences off-site.  A business development person must have excellent communication skills, be an effective public speaker, and be in command of details in diverse fields.  And, it really helps if you have some savoir-faire.   Personal skills like the ability to listen, to carefully drill into customers and competitors for specific details without being rude or creepy.  It helps to be able to dress well, understand decorum, and display good manners.  It is better to be sincere and risk being taken advantage of on occasion than be cagey and deceptive. This kind of thing does really matter. 

Many chemists out there who have yet to hatch from the academic and post-doc world may not have heard of this job description. Other manufacturing arenas may use engineers in this capacity. In the chemical manufacturing field, chemists can step into this type of activity and be in the center of the activity and at the edge of technology all at once. Having done it, I can only encourage fellow chemists to consider it as a career path.