Business Development Manager
The Role of Business Development Manager requires the ability to understand, interpret and deploy in the field, go-to-market strategies that have been created by others, with the objective of the company entering new markets, expanding coverage across less familiar areas of existing markets, or launching new offerings. This requires the skills of a senior sales person, together with a well developed ability to adapt positioning, negotiating, objection handling, closing and customer engagement approaches dynamically, during the ‘trial and error’ phase of developing the go-to-market strategy.
The purpose of this role is to proactively develop new business streams in markets or market areas that are less familiar to the company currently, or for new offerings, while meeting profit, service and other company objectives. Skills are required to be at a level above and beyond those of a senior sales person (typically a Solution Sales person) and, to enable success in this role, would particularly include increased skill levels, awareness and understanding of: positioning; negotiating; communicating; presenting; adapting approach to meet customer needs; overcoming objections; reporting; and closing. Further skills would be required to analyze the findings from these engagements and provide input towards developing and evolving the approaches defined in the go-to-market strategy for winning additional business.
Candidates for a Business Development Manager role require a range of capabilities to enable them to successfully perform this role, including:
- Evidence a strong set of Solution Sales skills, but with specific skill areas of customer engagement and communication being shown to be at an advanced stage of development
- Demonstrate a strong ability to think on their feet
- Capitalize on their good knowledge of the company’s current marketplace and offering set
- Evidence a natural ability to take onboard new ideas, easily able to integrate them into their current sales approach
- Analyze results from each customer engagement and structure the output to enable the adaptation of existing or formulation of new business winning strategies
- Display effective management skills
- Show excellent presentation skills, as well as verbal and non-verbal communication skills
