The standard BD hiring playbook — look for someone with a strong close rate, a big network, and a track record of hitting quota — works reasonably well in markets where the product is understood, the category is established, and the buyer already knows what they’re buying.
It fails almost completely in technical hardware and connected device companies, where the sales cycle is long, the product is often genuinely new, and the buyer frequently needs to be educated before they can be persuaded. In those environments, the skills that drive quota attainment in a conventional sales role are necessary but nowhere near sufficient.
Sam Miri has hired and built BD teams across sensor hardware, smart building technology, wireless chips, and enterprise software platforms. The profile that works in these environments is specific, harder to find than most job descriptions suggest, and regularly misidentified in the hiring process.
The Profile That Actually Works
The BD leader who succeeds in a technical company has to hold two things at once: enough technical fluency to have a credible conversation with an engineering or product team, and enough commercial instinct to identify a real opportunity, build a business case, and close a deal without an extensive support structure doing it for them.
These two capabilities don’t often show up together naturally. Technically deep candidates frequently struggle with the commercial side — they’re comfortable in product conversations but hesitant to drive toward a decision or uncomfortable with the ambiguity of a long enterprise sales cycle. Commercially strong candidates often lack the technical depth to get past the initial skepticism of an engineering-led buyer and can’t engage meaningfully when the conversation goes below the surface level.
The candidates who have both are worth moving quickly on. They’re rare and they know it.
What to Look for in the Interview
The most useful signal in an interview for a technical BD role is how the candidate talks about deals they’ve worked on that were technically complex. Not just what happened — but specifically what they understood about the technical problem, how they engaged with the customer’s engineering team, and what role their own technical knowledge played in advancing or closing the deal.
Candidates who genuinely have the technical fluency will be specific and accurate. Candidates who are approximating it will be vague about the technical details and pivot quickly to the commercial outcomes. That pivot is a signal worth noting.
Equally useful: ask them about a deal they lost that they learned the most from. How they talk about failure — specifically, whether they analyze it honestly or explain it away — tells you a great deal about whether they’ll report accurately on pipeline and flag problems early. In a long-cycle technical sales environment, that honesty is not optional.
The Red Flags That Get Missed
The most common red flag in technical BD hiring is a candidate who has a strong network but no clear mechanism by which they’ve built it. A large network assembled over a long career in a specific industry is genuinely valuable. A large network that the candidate describes but can’t connect to specific outcomes — deals initiated, partnerships formed, introductions that led somewhere — is a social capability, not a commercial one.
The second most common: candidates who were successful in a previous BD role where the product was well-established and the category was known, who are now applying that experience to a role where the category doesn’t yet exist. The skills don’t transfer as directly as their track record suggests. Selling something the market already understands is a fundamentally different challenge from creating market demand for something it hasn’t asked for yet.
The third: candidates who talk about teamwork in a way that obscures their individual contribution. In a small or early-stage technical company, BD leaders often need to operate with significant autonomy. Understanding what they specifically did — versus what the team did — matters.
Building the Team Over Time
Individual hires matter. So does how the team is structured around them. In technical BD environments, the most effective structures pair commercial BD talent with strong technical presales or solutions engineering support — not because the BD leader can’t have technical conversations, but because there’s a limit to how deep any one person can go across both dimensions simultaneously in a complex deal.
Getting that structure right — knowing when to bring in technical support, how to position it with the customer, and how to keep the commercial thread of the deal moving while the technical conversation happens in parallel — is itself a skill that the best technical BD leaders develop over time. It’s worth asking about directly in the hiring process. How candidates describe their relationship with technical teams in past roles is one of the clearest signals of how they’ll operate in yours.
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