Business Development Manager vs Customer Success Manager

On pay, business development managers come out ahead by about $38k a year at the midpoint of posted bands: $62k–$165k against $52k–$100k for customer success managers. These are advertised figures from postings that state a salary, not estimates. By seniority and country: business development manager salary and customer success manager salary.

On skills, they are related jobs with a real gap between them. There is a shared core, and then each side asks for things the other rarely does. The skills both sets of postings want most are Account Management, SaaS, CRM, B2B, Data Analysis.

Yes, and the numbers say how far along you already are: a typical business development manager profile covers 60% of what customer success manager postings ask for. Our estimate for the move is 9–16 mo. The instrument lists the exact skills that make up the rest.

Going the other way, a typical customer success manager profile covers 34% of what business development manager postings ask for. The two directions are not symmetric: business development manager to customer success manager is the easier move, 60% against 34%.

Right now our board has 560 business development manager openings and 560 customer success manager openings, each linking to the original posting. The board refreshes every night, so the counts move with the market. Hiring the most business development managers at the moment: Ebury (12), OpenAI (8), Shieldai (8). For customer success managers: Harvey (13), ServiceNow (9), Datadog (7).