The posting
Senior Business Development Manager – Canada
New Sales Business | Walnut Insurance | Remote, Canada | Reports to the COO
The role
You'll bring in Walnut's next enterprise partners in Canada, and you'll start with the relationships you already have. This is a pure new-business role. You source your own leads, open the doors, qualify hard, and convert the right ones into signed partners on both sides of our platform: distribution partners such as banks, credit unions, lenders, fintechs, telcos and consumer brands that should be offering insurance inside their products, and insurance carriers looking for new embedded distribution. You'll run your own territory, plan and pipeline with very little oversight. You'll report directly to our COO and work alongside our founders, who still sell with the team. Once a partner signs, our account management and implementation teams take it from there, so your time goes on finding and winning the next one.
About Walnut
Walnut is Canada's leading embedded insurance platform. Partners like Wealthsimple, BMO, KOHO and TELUS use us to launch insurance inside their products in 90 days, compared with nine months or more going direct to a carrier. We hold the carrier relationships, the licenses and the compliance; our partners keep the customer. We're nationally licensed in P&C and life and health across every province, including Quebec.
What you'll do
- Source your own leads. Start with your network, then build out from it. Work your contacts, referrals, events, associations and outbound to create a steady flow of conversations with decision-makers at Canadian financial institutions, telcos, digital brands and insurance carriers. Nobody hands you a lead list. You build the pipeline.
- Open doors at the senior level. Get meetings with the people who can say yes: heads of product, partnerships, digital, lending and insurance at distribution partners, and heads of distribution, partnerships and product at carriers. Use warm introductions wherever you have them, and cold outreach that gets answered where you don't.
- Qualify fast and manage the pipeline. Separate real opportunities from interest early. Keep every lead, contact and next step current in HubSpot, and run a forecast you'd stand behind in front of the board.
- Convert. Run discovery, build the business case for an embedded program, and take deals through proposal, security review, procurement and legal to signature. Our solutioning, legal and carrier teams back you along the way.
- Hand off and move on. Pass signed partners to account management and implementation with a clear scope, then go back to sourcing.
- Run yourself. Set your own territory plan, activity targets and priorities. Report progress weekly and flag what you need before it slows a deal.
- Bring back what you hear in market. Tell us which segments are buying, which messages land and which products prospects keep asking for.
What you bring
- A real Canadian network. You have relationships you can call this week at banks, credit unions, lenders, fintechs, telcos, large consumer brands or insurance carriers. We'll ask you to show us where.
- Seven or more years in B2B sales or business development, with a track record of sourcing and closing new enterprise business yourself, not inheriting it.
- Proven lead-to-close skill. You can show us pipeline you built from nothing, how it converted, and the revenue it produced.
- A self-starter who doesn't need managing. You've worked as a one-person team or the first seller in a market and built your own momentum.
- Comfort with long, complex cycles of six to twelve months or more, with several stakeholders and procurement, legal and compliance review.
- Commercial fluency. You can talk about premium, commission, attach rate and partner economics with a CFO, a head of product or a carrier's head of distribution. Insurance, creditor insurance, payments or banking-SaaS experience is a strong plus.
- AI as part of how you sell. You use tools like Claude, Apollo.io and HubSpot to research prospects, personalize outreach and prep for meetings.
- Bilingual in English and French is a strong asset for Quebec and national accounts.
Your first 90 days
By day 30, you know our products, partners and carriers, have mapped your network against our target segments with the COO, and are booking first meetings. By day 60, you've held at least ten senior conversations and moved three or more into active opportunities. By day 90, you have [$X] of qualified pipeline in HubSpot that you sourced yourself, and at least one deal at proposal stage.
How to apply
Send us three things:
- Your resume and a link to your LinkedIn profile.
- A short cover letter about an enterprise deal you sourced and closed yourself. Tell us how you found it, who you knew, what nearly killed it, and the outcome.
- Ten Canadian organizations (distribution partners, carriers or both) you could get a meeting with in your first 60 days, with the role of the person you'd call at each. Names aren't required at this stage.
Our process includes a review of your past pipeline and results, a conversation about your network, and a mock first meeting with a real Walnut target.
What we offer
A base salary of CAD $110,000 - $150,000 based on background and experience, plus commission under Walnut's sales compensation plan, equity and benefits. Fully remote in Canada, with travel to prospect meetings and industry events. You'll report directly to the COO at a scaling fintech.
