What exactly does Corp Dev do?

Depends on the company.

Usually - from deal origination to execution.

Includes sourcing from bankers as well as from the business directly, networking outside the company.

Helping c-suite on decision making

Managing deal process (due diligence & governance).

1. Follow market developments - Who might be open to sell. Also, reach out to the target's management and maintain relationships with banks

2. In-house smaller tuck-in acquisitions

3. Pitch to the IC & the board about large investments/acquisitions

4. Conduct preliminary due diligence on potential targets before the deal starts

5. Create in-house M&A model for the first round 

6. Clear risk registry in the process

In addition to the other comments, it's a lot of project management work. Even if you hire bankers, they cannot help you get consensus within your org. So you typically spend a lot of time with various functional teams throughout the diligence process, ensuring they get the data they need, helping shape post-close decisions and workstreams, as well as prepare internal presentations for your approval committees.

Would also add that unless you are doing mega deals, if your company has a robust corp dev team, they may not hire bankers at all. 

To echo everyone else, it will vary by company and by industry. 

For us....typically we will get pitches 3-4 times a month from a variety of banker relationships. Of those, if we find any of them interesting, we will typically do our own diligence, modeling, etc. We haven't yet used an advisor on the buy-side, but we've also stayed on the lower end of the market. I can't imagine a scenario where we would actually engage a buy-side advisor, so to answer your question succinctly, internally we are the buy-side group. 

Comments above do a great job of highlighting deal responsibilities. Our deals fall on the smaller end, so we don’t use buy side advisors. I do have a unique experience in my company where we do more than just deals.

My work broadly fits underneath the “corporate finance” umbrella where it’s not just M&A on our team. There’s companies out there where your work will be almost all M&A, while some like mine also have the team working on other strategic investments and initiatives. If any project within the company is going to the board/executive team and has financial impacts to the company, we do the analysis.

Prep and interview for sell-side jobs

Pretty much the same as everyone else is saying here but I will say if you can find a highly-acquisitive team its actually pretty fun.  You get to be on a ton of different things all the time and it's also nice to have a lot of the deals you're on close rather than just 1-2 a year.  We do a pretty wide range of deals from EBITDA in the 1-5mm range to large deals that require a banker led process.  So it's a pretty cool variety of work.  

Can someone provide some color on the Comp for CorpDev at a f500? Browsing the WSO it appears that max you could reasonably make is ~200k Total Comp unless you get to EVP/C-Suite, which seems to be dwarfed by Comp proffered by the investment banks as early as AN2. Obviously WLB is a major factor, but here I'm specifically looking at Comp.

Thanks.

One of our B school alums joined corp dev after a 5 year stint in IB. Had C-suite exposure / got to work at a MFPE backed portco. Eventually joined the family fund of the founder after the sale (founder made about half a billion and hired him on to run the investment strategy). Thought that was kind of cool. The alum went more into the operational side and eventually sold a company in the same industry for 9 figures.

The answer is destroy shareholder value typically via value destructive M&A.

For Salaries I would say 120-150k for Associates, 150-180k for Managers, 180-220k for Director and 220-250k for VP. Usually Director or above have a decent bonus plus equity tied to their comp as well.