Transitioning to Business Development

While my background is as a chemist, and my first role in industry was as a bench chemist, for the past 13 years, I’ve been handling business development, sales and marketing for a number of different organizations. I am often asked what I think the most difficult part of the transition from the lab to sales / business development (BD) has been, and usually, I’m at a loss to provide a single incident that I considered the most difficult.  As you can infer, this simply means there are a large number of factors that I considered to be difficult when I made my own transition to a role that focused on selling.