What Business Development Taught Me About Research

Most of my career so far has been client acquisition and partnership-building — cold calls, market research, proposals, the unglamorous mechanics of business development. It's not research in the academic sense, but it shares a habit that I didn't appreciate until I started reading more widely outside of work: you learn to distrust a good story that isn't backed by a number.

In sales, an untested pitch fails fast and visibly — a client says no, a deal doesn't close, the pipeline tells you the truth whether you want to hear it or not. That feedback loop is blunt but honest. I've noticed the same discipline is exactly what's missing when people (myself included) get excited about a new idea in research or conservation: it's easy to fall in love with a narrative before checking whether the underlying evidence holds up.

So the muscle I'm trying to build now is applying that same "does the pipeline actually confirm this" instinct to questions further from sales — where the data is thinner, the feedback loop is slower, and it's much easier to fool yourself. I don't think business development makes me a researcher. But it's given me a real bias toward asking what would have to be true for a claim to hold, and I'd rather carry that bias forward than leave it behind.