Client Development Manager – Boards Practice

Client Development Manager – Boards Practice

Requirements

• Approximately 5-10 years of work experience in a corporate environment, ideally within executive search, management consulting, other professional services, or market research.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills in English.
• Strong business acumen and commitment to exceptional client service with internal and external audiences.
• Advanced research, analysis, and synthesis skills and experience.
• Proficiency with MS Office applications (Excel, PowerPoint, and Word), with ability to create client-ready presentations in PowerPoint.
• Undergraduate degree required, master’s degree a plus.

Responsibilities

• Serve as go-to resource and the ‘face’ of client development for the NA Board Practice, partnering with consultants and client development colleagues on BD efforts (e.g., driving competitive pursuits, launching strategic campaigns to grow the practice, etc.).
• Partner closely with Board Practice and relevant industry consultants to design pitch strategies and create supporting materials.
• Quarterback pursuit teams in preparing for client meetings, ensuring preparation and rehearsal meetings are scheduled, meeting objectives and timelines are shared and well understood, and content-plan is co-created in a manner that satisfies the internal stakeholders and ultimately the external stakeholders.
• Create insightful, customized qualifications packs and pitch materials for new business development opportunities. Orchestrate regular updates of key materials with the support of the practice team.
• Manage the workflow and quality of deliverables of the Board Analysts leading and/or contributing to quals development.
• Partner closely with Board Practice Leaders and Consultants across practices doing board work to develop content/materials for specific strategic client situations/meetings (e.g., pitch, annual/quarterly review, relationship-building).
• Identify opportunities to leverage and build knowledge/insights/ data/analytics to enable BD and pursuit activities.
• In partnership with Practice Leadership and the Client Development team, redefine and continuously improve the Board go-to-market narrative – incorporating new service lines and evolving solutions.
• Translate and tailor firm-level intellectual capital strategy/ themes being driven by Marketing and other client development teams, ensuring dots are connected.
• Gather learnings from pitches and business development to share internally to ensure we are continuously refining and improving our processes, responsiveness, and pitch effectiveness.
• Actively contribute and participate in the global client development community by sharing insights, ideas and best practices with fellow CDMs.
• Create approach and direct Board Analyst team to maintain, curate, and regularly update practice templates for pitch content/materials on Ampler, SharePoint and the Board Practice Connect site.
• Create and identify best-practice pitch content/materials to regularly share with Practices and firm.
• In close collaboration with Practice Leadership, develop communication strategy for syndicating pitch content to/across Practice and Firm.
• Develop approaches, leveraging Quest tools as possible, to assess the board opportunity pipeline and analyze win/loss outcomes and stats on a regular basis.
• In close collaboration with the Board Analyst team, maintain tools to support search execution and current data/statistics related to the practice; oversee specialized research for F500/F1000 CEO and CFO mappings, priority/emerging director archetypes, BD target lists and other KPIs.
• Work with initiative teams to leverage new technologies and evolve processes.
• Identify new sources of data that are easily integrated into our daily operations and tools.
• Provide oversight of and develop Board Analysts when partnering with them on tasks and/or projects.
• Guide Board Analysts as needed on creation of BD deliverables, including training and quality control.

Preferred Qualifications

• Establish fluency in writing complex proposal decks, bringing the firm’s breadth of offering to client situations, in particular with new and compelling ways of talking about the Boards offering in the market.
• Propose improvements of process design and technology tools and identify best practices for opportunity identification, work intake and assignment, and content development/management.
• Enable the team’s capacity and capability to support Board specific projects and pursuits to keep pace with the practice’s current and growing volume and scope of work.
• Develop and lead a strong team of Analysts who are able to meaningfully contribute to deliverables and initiatives.
• Develop a broad, strong cross-functional firmwide network.