The posting
Senior Business Development Associate
In a Nutshell
Senior Business Development Associates bring ideas, initiatives, and activities that help grow our business day in and day out. They join, support, and collaborate with teams focused on specific opportunities, ensuring that the pursuit of new business is rigorous, disciplined, and ethical. They collaborate closely to craft strategies and plans and set the standard for creative excellence in business development.
About IDEO London
We're a global design consultancy where curiosity, empathy, and solving complex challenges drive us. For over 40 years, we've partnered with clients to innovate in healthcare, mobility, education, retail, and beyond. Here, every challenge is a chance to grow, connect, and create impact.
Why is this role important for IDEO's work?
Business Development is at the heart of connecting IDEO's creative capabilities with the people and organisations who need them. It's about more than winning new work. It's about understanding our clients' challenges, building trusted relationships, and helping shape opportunities where human-centred design can make a meaningful difference.
Once Here You Will
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
- Prioritize your time to collaborate and support the London Studio in landing project work - with new and returning clients.
- Run pipeline meetings.
- Act as an IDEO ambassador and be the first touch point for new potential clients, ensuring a positive initial experience with IDEO.
- Lead and manage opportunity qualification, owning continuity of the BD process.
- Involve internal leadership and designers as needed for boosts and to help determine strategic fit, frame opportunities, scope programs and articulate next steps.
- Pull in director-level support as needed for advocating for client needs and negotiation support.
- Finalize pitch decks, learn the industries of our client leads by conducting research and editing proposal decks, and brainstorm client deliverable options and consulting solutions.
- Conduct client due diligence to help BD teams get smart and prepare for calls, creating intelligent discussion guides that help us start to build a relationship with potential clients from Day One.
- Monitor and communicate market trends and themes to teams on a monthly basis that can be used to help shape our thinking and offer.
REPORTING
- Track quarterly goals pertaining to recognized revenue, monthly profit and yield marks, time to close, conversion rate, qualification rate, and win rate KPIs within the London Hub. Report back in the pipeline meetings, looking for ways to engage the team in the information and how they need to apply it.
- Be familiar with metrics that point towards the health of the business and be able to assist with ad-hoc reporting needs as assigned.
- Prepare a monthly summary of insights and thought leadership (from IDEO and beyond), including how it applies to day-to-day business, to share with key clients as a value add.
DATA INTEGRITY
- Work with the Director/Enterprise team to ensure the CRM system is kept up to date, including our pipeline and pre-pipeline in Hubspot.
- Ensure that relevant documents related to BD are being stored and filed accordingly in the BD section of Google Drive (not on personal drives or Slack!).
- Appropriately loop in Legal, Marketing, Finance, and other functions as needed to progress an ongoing BD process.
- Build and maintain lists in Hubspot and LinkedIn Sales Navigator: who are our key clients, our lapsed clients, our warm contacts, the cold contacts we want to reach? Who’s engaging with our newsletters, with our LinkedIn, etc? Provide recommendations on how we might reach out to these folks.
PROGRAM MANAGEMENT
- Exercise project management tactical skills by effectively steering the BD process for new and existing work.
- Proactively identify and take action on the business development process and client needs based on what we’re hearing and seeing in the pipeline meetings.
- Coordinate meetings with potential leads, ensure prompt and adequate follow-ups, manage legal agreement workflows, coordinate proposal research across teams, and ensure continual progress to meet client deadlines.
- Help the team balance meeting the needs of existing clientele with prioritizing time for proactive outreach to land new clients.
- Own and project manage lead generation activities, such as BD-specific mailers to LON Hub mailing lists.
- Support account planning activities to drive a proactive, consistent approach to client investment and development.
- Support the deployment of the right expertise and experience from within the hub team towards client pursuits
COMMUNICATION
- Demonstrate persuasive and effective communication and presentation skills along with the confidence to command a room for the client and network-building meetings or events.
- Contribute to providing excellent team and client communication and collaboration that shows an understanding of leading with empathy, openness, and curiosity.
- Empower other team members to consistently gather and share inspiration, work, and learnings with teams and clients. This should come through leading by example as well as having a knowledge management system where folks can exchange and store content.
- Strengthen existing assets and develop new ones in collaboration with subject matter experts.
- Work with LON Hub Marketing to stay abreast of competitors and any impact that industry and economic changes and movements might have on our go to market positioning and offer.
NETWORK BUILDING
- Demonstrate knowledge of the different approaches across each of our three offer sets, and understand the different areas of expertise of our design disciplines to confidently speak to our capabilities in the market.
- Build cross-discipline relationships across IDEO in order to effectively help generate and capture written, verbal and visual input from IDEO leadership and design teams to potential client leads.
- Cultivate your internal networks as well as you professional networks virtually on social media channels and live at education and industry-related associations.
- Support top-of-funnel growth activity including working with the Executive Director of Growth, Marketing and portfolio teams to translate targeting priorities into actionable prospect audiences and lists for campaigns, events, roadshows and other market-facing activity.
EXPLORE
- Strengthen your foundational BD skills and capabilities, using your learning budget intentionally to build on growth opportunities identified with your business lead.
- Gain an understanding of GenAI and how it can support and improve the BD process, from generating client intelligence to scoring our RFP responses.
- Support special projects as needed and provide support on other processes and projects outside the immediate area of responsibilities as required.
- Assist with internal programs and initiatives to improve organizational BD efforts, as required.
- Be an active member of the London community, coming into the office as needed, playing a role in our core rituals, such as Tuesday Morning Meetings, participating in SASU, and attending Hub gatherings.
We're looking for someone with
SKILLS
- Minimum of 3-5 years of relevant experience in client relationship management and business development, preferably within a creative environment and/or design consultancy.
- Project management skills with proven ability to prioritize tasks, keep momentum and develop timelines, involve and engage stakeholders, and maintain empathy for both internal and client teams.
- The ability to create and deliver presentations, proposals, and other assets.
- Data literacy: fluent in G-suite (slides, docs, and sheets), Workday, CRM, and translating quantitative outputs into actionable qualitative insights for the business.
- Exceptional writing and communication skills to effectively and efficiently bridge between IDEO and its clients.
- Strong presentation and writing skills
- Ability to conduct and synthesize research
- Attention to Detail: Demonstrates concern for the details and their impact on the larger picture.
- Familiarity with a wide range of market analysis tools, data sets, and benchmarks.
- Comfort determining next steps in ambiguous situations with limited direction.
- Ready to pitch in on tasks, big or small. Volunteer and helper mindset.
- Desire to collaborate across various design disciplines
- Take chances without being afraid to fail and learn along the way
- Insatiable curiosity to learn more about businesses, industries, markets, and what drives them
MINDSET
- Ground in Self-Awareness: Reflect on your biases and lenses to be more inclusive.
- Show Curiosity: Question accepted norms to make room to learn from more diverse voices.
- Lean into Vulnerability: Build trust by being open.
- Ask for and give consistent and timely feedback on personal performance.
- Be optimistic
- Collaborate
- Embrace ambiguity
- Talk Less, Do more
- Learn from failure
- Make others successful
- Take ownership
What does IDEO offer you?
Innovation and creativity: Dive into a variety of projects from creating breakthrough digital products and experiences, to designing new customer interactions, to building innovation capabilities – working alongside talented individuals across disciplines.
Learning and growth: Whether it’s strengthening your project leadership, deepening your interaction design craft or exploring new technologies, we’re here to support your journey.
Community and well-being: Collaboration and community are central to what we do. We foster moments for creativity, connection, and reflection, respecting the need for work-life balance.
Projects with purpose: We partner with clients to use design as a means of realising their purpose and making a positive impact. We work 'upstream,' from defining the problem, designing possible solutions, and exploring what, why and how they might be brought to life.
Compensation
£55,000 - 60,000 GBP, depending on experience
Location
London, UK
Some Previous Projects To Check Out
To get a flavour of the work we do in London, take a look at these case studies:
Climate action for SMBs – Designing a strategy and experience to help Sage’s SMB customers transition to net zero.
Redefining retail with FEMSA – Designing Spin Premia, a digital loyalty experience connecting everyday shopping at OXXO with rewards and services.
Sustainable packaging system – Helping H&M increase their sustainability and growth, by designing and scaling a universal packaging system for all of their brands.
Commitment to Diversity
At IDEO, we are committed to the work of advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion within our organisation and in the world. Our purpose of having disproportionate, world-changing impact through design is directly connected to our ability to bring many different perspectives to the table. This applies to our candidates, the people we hire, the clients and customers we serve, and the communities we learn from in our research.
As a human-centred organisation, we are committed to working with and designing for people of every race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, socio-economic status, physical ability or attribute, religion, national origin, or political belief. We recognize that this commitment requires ongoing work and sustained attention, as well as adaptation to new insights and best practices
Application Requirements And Instructions
If you identify with our values, are excited about great design, and would like to contribute to our community, we would love to see your CV, a cover letter and examples of your work.
