Background

CIL is looking for a bright and motivated Business Development Associate to join our Chicago office. CIL is an independent international management consulting firm that provides strategy consulting and due diligence support to management teams and investors. This new position will play a key role in supporting our sales and marketing efforts to grow our presence in North America. 

Role overview

The Business Development Associate will perform key activities to help us identify, target, and penetrate new clients, working closely with the senior team to develop and execute sales campaigns.  In addition, the candidate will collaborate with our global marketing team to develop and coordinate North America marketing campaigns. The role with report into the lead partner for CIL’s North America office.

 Primary responsibilities

• Build sales and marketing intelligence

• Identify target firms

• Perform research on target firms

• Develop briefing packs on target firms

• Enter and maintain key information on clients and target firms in CRM and sales tools

• Maintain up to date information on our credentials and relevant experience

• Track target firm’s activity and identify potential sales outreach opportunities

• Manage relationships and subscriptions with providers of North American business intelligence

Drive sales activity

• Define approach for penetrating target firms

• Identify, build, and manage sales campaigns

• Develop outreach messaging

• Manage outreach conducted by senior team

• Perform follow up outreach and coordinate scheduling of meetings

• Prepare meeting briefing packs for senior team

• Track notes and actions from meetings and capture in CRM

• Support development of pitches and marketing documents

Sales reporting

• Develop KPIs and track sales activity and results

• Attend weekly update calls and provide information on sales activity and market intelligence

• Build regular reports for local performance, including sales activity, pipeline conversion, account share of wallet etc.

• Produce report on North American sales activity to feed into the global monthly accounts

Coordinate marketing activity

• Coordinate US marketing activity with global marketing team

• Identify events to attend and organize participation/attendance, coordinate setting meetings at events

• Participate in identifying and planning thought leadership production

• Manage US thought leadership production

• Collaborate with global marketing team on reviewing and finalizing thought leadership

• Identify US targets for marketing campaigns and create and coordinate marketing outreach by Partners and Principals

 Alignment with global operations

• Regular interaction with sales capability team from other countries to share best practice and ensure consistency of approach (e.g. input into central pitch document template)

• Link with marketing and K&C to ensure sales and marketing documents align with global design structures

• Support company-wide sales and marketing initiatives

 Other

• Link with global training team to coordinate sales capability training

• Manage post-project client feedback programme for North American projects (link with global team to ensure consistency of reporting)

• Manage the project closure process for North American projects including updating the projects and uploading files onto K&C repository

• Build detailed sales budget to feed into US P&L and keep track of spend

• Provide ad-hoc support for other business development activity and special projects

• Support with other operational activities and initiatives as required
  

Candidate requirements

Successful CIL team members share several key attributes – we are supportive, non-hierarchical, hard-working, unpretentious, and direct. The successful candidate for this role will:

• Have a bachelor’s degree

• Have 1+ years’ experience in a business development or inside sales role, preferably in professional services

• Have experience in performing company research and developing sales campaigns

• Have experience in utilizing a CRM and Microsoft Office (Outlook, Excel, Powerpoint)

• Possess strong written and oral communication skills

• Have an impeccable attention to detail

• Be exceptionally organised with the ability to create and manage their own to-do list

• Have an ability to juggle multiple projects at once

• Be proactive in pushing initiatives forward and managing upward

• Display a ‘growth mindset’ in everything they do – i.e. looks to use past mistakes as a springboard for future learning & development

• Be passionate about helping CIL continuously improve

• Demonstrate a high level of energy and enthusiasm

• Be located in or willing to locate to the Chicago area