Business Development Executive

1What you'd actually do

• Researching companies and people who might be a good fit for what you sell - using LinkedIn, company websites, news, industry directories and your firm's CRM (Customer Relationship Management software, the database that records every contact and deal)
• Contacting prospects cold: a mix of phone calls, emails and LinkedIn messages, usually a high volume of them, and usually with far more people ignoring you than replying
• Qualifying leads - having a short conversation to work out whether the company actually has the problem you solve, a budget, and someone with authority to buy, then either booking a meeting or moving on
• Booking discovery calls and demos, and in many companies handing those over to a more senior salesperson or account executive who runs the meeting and closes the deal
• Logging everything in the CRM and keeping your pipeline (the list of live opportunities at each stage) accurate, because your manager forecasts revenue from it
• Attending team stand-ups, pipeline reviews and one-to-ones where your numbers - calls made, meetings booked, revenue influenced - are looked at openly
• Going to trade shows, conferences or networking events in some sectors, and following up on the contacts afterwards
• Writing proposals, pricing sheets or tender responses, more common in roles where you own deals end-to-end rather than just generating them

2How graduates get in

• Direct application to an advertised graduate or entry-level BDE/SDR vacancy - by far the most common route. Many of these roles are advertised year-round rather than on an autumn graduate-scheme cycle, so you can apply and start at almost any time.
• Structured graduate sales schemes at larger technology, media, telecoms and recruitment firms - these rotate you through training, sometimes with a formal academy period of a few weeks before you touch a customer.
• Sales recruitment agencies that specialise in placing graduates into SDR/BDR roles - common in tech sales in London, Manchester, Leeds and Bristol. Useful, but check whether the agency is placing you into a role you actually want.
• Internal moves - starting in customer service, telesales, account management, marketing or as an inside sales support person and moving into business development once you know the product.
• Placement years or summer internships in sales or commercial teams, which give you something concrete to talk about at interview. Less formalised than in finance or law, but they exist.
• Sales bootcamps and academies (some run by training providers, some by employers) that train you in a specific area such as SaaS sales and then place you. Worth checking the terms carefully - some tie you in or take a cut.

3What employers ask for

• A degree in any subject is the usual baseline, and the subject genuinely does not matter for most employers - business, marketing and economics graduates are common but so are humanities, science and languages graduates. Some technical sales roles (scientific instruments, engineering components, life sciences) do want a relevant STEM degree because you need to understand the product.
• Grade requirements are usually looser than in law, consulting or investment banking. Many employers ask for a 2:2 or simply 'a degree', and a fair number will hire without one if you can demonstrate commercial drive. Some larger graduate schemes still ask for a 2:1 and set UCAS points thresholds.
• Evidence of resilience and target-driven work matters more than academics: retail or hospitality jobs, charity fundraising, telesales, running a society, sports at a competitive level, anything where you were measured on output.
• No professional exams are required to enter. Optional qualifications exist - for example memberships and certificates from professional sales and marketing bodies - but employers rarely ask for them at graduate level and most training is done in-house.
• A driving licence is often required for field-based roles covering a region, and irrelevant for desk-based inside sales roles.
• Some roles ask for language skills where the team covers EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) territories - German, French, Nordic languages and Dutch come up frequently in tech sales hubs.

4Skills that matter

5Where it leads

1. Business Development Executive / SDR - generating and qualifying leads, usually for a year or two, though strong performers in fast-growing companies sometimes move sooner and in slower-moving sectors it takes longer. Timelines vary a lot and are usually tied to hitting target rather than time served.

2. Account Executive, Sales Executive or Business Development Manager - you now run the full sales cycle yourself, including demos, negotiation and closing, and carry a personal revenue number.

3. Senior Account Executive or Key Account Manager, handling larger, more complex or longer-cycle deals, sometimes with named strategic customers rather than a broad territory.

4. Sales Manager or Team Leader - managing a team of BDEs or AEs, coaching and forecasting. This is a genuine career change: the skills that make a good seller are not the same as those that make a good manager, and not everyone wants it.

5. Sales Director, Head of Sales or Chief Revenue Officer at the senior end. Common sideways moves along the way include customer success, account management, partnerships, sales enablement (training the sales team), product marketing, or leaving to start your own business - the commercial exposure is unusually broad for an entry-level job.

6Where this varies

Practice differs a lot by sector. In software and technology sales the role is usually a specialised SDR job: you only prospect and book meetings, you hand deals to an account executive, targets are weekly and the environment is fast-moving with a defined promotion path. In smaller firms, agencies, manufacturing and professional services the same title often means you own the whole process yourself - prospecting, meeting, quoting and closing - with far less structure and training. Recruitment agencies use the title too, where it usually means winning new client companies rather than placing candidates. Field sales roles involve driving a territory and visiting customers; inside sales roles are desk-based. There is also a geographic split: dense clusters of graduate tech-sales roles exist in London, Manchester, Leeds, Bristol, Edinburgh and Reading, whereas elsewhere the roles are more likely to be in industrial, logistics or services businesses with a different rhythm and less formal onboarding.