Business Development Associate

Business Development Associates qualify inbound demand generated by marketing efforts via inbound calls, chats and other methods. The Business Development Associate primarily qualifies demand and assigns individuals as sales qualified leads to Insides Sales or Territory or sector Sales Directors.
**Overview**
The BD Associate is responsible for qualifying new opportunities for the inside, field/territory and/or channel sales teams. BD Associates qualify marketing-generated demand identified thru engagement with marketing campaigns, specific actions or meeting the scoring threshold set by a marketing automation platform (MAP).
BD Associates should also be responsible for reaching out to other members of the buying group, individuals who have not yet scored fully, in a cold-calling effort to further qualify the potential opportunity associated with that group.
**Tasks & Responsibilities**
- Process inbound demand responses (e.g. inbound calls, chats, form fills) from buying groups that are generated, activated or nurtured by marketing, and qualify potential opportunities for the sales organization to pursue.
- Use established criteria to qualify demand from buying groups for potential opportunities before passing it to inside reps, field territory reps or channel partners.
- Discover, validate and reach out to additional personas typically involved in a buying decision to identify possible buying groups for field sales.
- Provide product information to prospects.
- Comply with all demand-management
- related service-level agreements.
- Provide weekly forecasts to marketing and sales on the volume of demand expected to reach the qualified demand stage.
- Pursue meaningful and productive conversations with individuals representing the buyer personas targeted by the organization.
- Track and manage qualification and nurture activities in the company’s sales force automation (SFA) system.

**Organizational Interlocks**
- Inside sales.
- Field / Territory sales.
- Channel & partner sales.
- Marketing.
- Sales operations
- Product marketing.

**Technologies Supporting the Role**
- Marketing Automation Platform (MAP).
- Market/account intelligence tools.
- Content Management.
- Social media tools.
- Sales Force Automation system.
- Account Based Marketing (ABM) tools.

**Success Metrics**
- Qualified demand passed and accepted.
- Opportunity value generated from demand passed.
- Number of appointments set, percentage of set appointments that are accepted by sales resources, percentage converted to opportunities.
- Revenue value achieved from demand passed.

**Education & Language**
- Bachelor’s degree desired.
- English fluency required.

**Background/ Experience**
- One year of prospecting and/or experience interfacing with customers.
- Experience in an industry with a significant volume of customer/prospect interaction.
- B2B experience selling a similar type of offering into a similar type of market preferred.

**Skills**
- Strong verbal and written communication skills.
- Active listening to assess prospect needs and opportunities.
- Ability to articulate a reasonable value proposition on every call.
- Ability to perform prospect and account research to prepare for calls.
- Ability to use existing and emerging social media tools to monitor targeted accounts and buying groups and identify trigger events for follow-up.

**Behaviors**
- Comfort with ambiguity; highly adaptable to new circumstances.
- Natural curiosity to motivate engagement with others; comfortable asking open-ended questions.
- Confidence despite a potential lack of knowledge or seniority compared to the prospect.
- Competitive and motivated.
- Self-starter who takes initiative to achieve goals.
- Team player who is coachable and eager to learn.
- Desire to continue learning, whether to advance a career in inside sales or transition to field sales.

**Knowledge**
- Telephone selling techniques.
- Auto-dialer technologies.
- Social media usage and social selling techniques.
- Common demand management processes.