Comments on: How Big is the Gap Between Sales and Business Analysis?

By: Bernadette

Bernadette — Mon, 26 Aug 2013 02:14:23 +0000

I have been a BA (Role title) for about 5 years. My background was marketing and sales for about 20 years prior. I fell into BA work as an account manager, because I was passionate about providing my customers with good quality sales data which was lacking where I worked. I investigated what data was available and then what I could do with it and developed my own reports. It grew from there. Every sales role, I was keen to have good data and my skills grew and I became more and more curious (which I think is one of the key skills for a BA). I ended up in a role where I could develop a plan to do data analysis almost full-time. I went back to an Account Manager role whilst continuing with the data analyst duries (because they couldn’t find a replacement). I ended up in a Project role in a new company and then three months later, they advertised for a permanent BA. With the help of another BA, I rewrote my resume and application with a BA slant on it (I had been doing BA type work anyway), business proposals were similar to business cases; Working out how to better sales reporting tools used was like writing requirements. I was successful and still in that same role now looking how to broaden my BA experience. I have spent the last 4 years becoming a ‘proper’ BA and really enjoying the work – I have always been a detective like person, now I am paid to do it!

Back in my sales days, I did an MBA and it added to my transition. I am not technical, and I feel it is a slight disadvantage, but my communication and negotiation skills (from sales) have definitely been key to being a good business analyst and partially make up for the lack of technical skills. If the kind of things a BA does appeals to you, then it doesn’t matter what your background is, like Laura says ‘it all depends on your career goals’ Laura’s suggestion to look at BA roles to see what the various activities are is a good one. I did that when I was out of work (following a retrenchment) and I was attracted to the role – it just took another 10 years to get there, could have been quicker if I realised then what I know now.

By: anand

anand — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 20:11:30 +0000

BA is a generic term. I have seen organzations where the smart techno-managers doing BA work as well as SMEs of typical functional expertise doing BA work. For the sales guy it is obvious coming as a ‘technical BA’ will be a sharp change while he can use his sales analytic experiences combined product knowledge and can definitely be a solid ‘functional BA’. However being in business analysis in both technical and functional I strongly believe successful BA is all about following certain aspects- 1) listening 2) asking right questions at right time 3) documenting the outcomes 4) identifying the challenges 5) reporting them to the proper channel at proper time 6) identifying opportunities and resources to make them successful and recommending them to management. Anybody having these qualities can shine in this area.
Hope that answers the doubts 🙂 Good Luck!

Thanks,
Anand

By: Laura (Brandau) Brandenburg

Laura (Brandau) Brandenburg — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 00:53:21 +0000

As I read through the advice you received from Nayan and Doug (thanks to you both!) it reminded me of someone here in Denver who was making the transition from the sales side of technical recruiter into business analysis. This person had found herself getting more and more involved in defining processes. She did a lot of interviewing to get a deep understanding of the hiring managers needs with a candidate. As Doug suggests, ask yourself if you have these similar tendencies within your current role. I think a process-orientation would be key. If the answer is yes, then it might be worth reading an introductory book on BA or taking a course. Many people transitioning to BA use the courses to find transferable skills.

Best,
Laura

By: DougGtheBA

DougGtheBA — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:42:50 +0000

Being a business analyst doesn’t necessarily have to mean technology, but you will most likely find that the majority of BA roles do interact with technology/technologists these days. If you can find a pure analysis role that maybe defines just business processes or the like, it would be a rarity.

I’m not so sure I agree with Nayan that a sales person is inherently good (or bad) at recognizing processes and states of a vision, but you might find that you are one of these people. Assuming that is the case, the next step might be to determine would you might be able to accomplish with that information. For instance, could you “translate” it from a business user who states, “I need a box” into general specifications for a developer to build that box, widget, process, application? My guess is that you’ve not don’t it before, so there are some starting points for discovering how you might learn to do that.

Your people skills will be incredibly valuable in a jump to being a BA, and you will probably find that you excel at interviewing stakeholders, deeper discussions to elicit requirements, relationship building. You’ll probably also find that those relationships are stronger on the business side than the technology side, due to your lack of familiarity with it…but that should diminish over time.

One thing that you might look into as well could be technical writing. If you have a decent command of sentence structure and grammar and can write relatively well, technical writing is a great profession that often lends itself to aspiring business analysts. This is because TWs use many of the same skills, though at a different degree, when investigating their topic in order to write about it. Functioning as a TW for a while might afford you a lengthier learning curve to get used to technology.

Good Luck with whatever decision you make!

By: Nayan Agarwal

Nayan Agarwal — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 11:52:05 +0000

For a BA its must to

1) understand the current process—which a sales guy can do far better than anyone in. He can identify issues, bottlenecks in that process

2) Must be a visionary person—understand client’s future vision—transfer the same future vision to other stakeholders thru documents (specs), discussions, meetings—-A sales person can understand the vision & also create a vision for the business

3) Can learn basic techi stuff over the period of time…no one has to understand technology from day one in business analysis