Business Development Officer – London, South East and East of England

Organisation: Leadership Skills Foundation
Salary: 28000 to 35000 per annum
Location: Remote working with travel in London, South East and East of England
Contract type: Permanent (Full time)
Closing date: 22 June 2025
Interview date: 7 July 2025
Job Description: Role purpose:
1. Retain and grow relationships with existing centres through
tailored engagement strategies that drive programme registrations and increase impact.
2. Identify and convert new opportunities through proactive outreach, lead generation, and effective nurture tactics to deliver new business income.
3. Deliver excellent customer service, ensuring a high-quality centre experience that builds trust and long-term loyalty.

Key responsibilities:
Retain and grow existing centre relationships
• Manage a portfolio of existing centres, ensuring regular and meaningful engagement aligned to their needs, delivery patterns, and growth potential.
• Deliver against annual centre income targets by supporting centres to continue and expand programme delivery.
• Develop and implement tailored engagement plans that reflect sector priorities, sector and programme maturity, and centre feedback.
• Analyse Business Intelligence (BI) dashboards to identify retention risks, spot growth opportunities, and respond to trends with proactive support.
• Coordinate requalification conversations and re-engagement activity to sustain long-term partnerships.

Generate and convert new business
• Identify and research high-potential leads across your allocated sectors (e.g., secondary, FE, community) using BI and CRM insights, sector intelligence, and marketing-generated activity.
• Plan and deliver proactive outreach activity via a Sector Development Plans.
• Build and maintain a personal pipeline of prospects and log progress regularly updating conversion insight and forecasts.
• Support new centre onboarding, from initial conversations through to registration and early delivery support.
• Collaborate with Marketing on lead nurture campaigns, sales funnel activities, and content that targets sector-specific priorities.

Deliver outstanding customer experience
• Serve as a primary point of contact for your centres, responding promptly and professionally to queries, issues, and feedback.
• Ensure every interaction reflects the Leadership Skills Foundation’s values.
• Maintain consistent and accurate records of communications, registrations, and engagement history.
• Support customer feedback collection and contribute to the analysis of satisfaction and improvement opportunities.
• Champion a customer-first mindset and share insight to improve performance against our customer experience objectives.

Use data and insight to drive decisions
• Regularly review and report on programme performance, income data, and registration trends for your assigned centres and sectors.
• Use BI dashboards and management reports to inform your planning, prioritisation, and stakeholder engagement.
• Report on your own progress against KPIs and contribute to departmental performance reviews and forecasting activities.

Collaborate across teams and support innovation
• Work closely with key teams to coordinate campaigns, messaging, and respond to customer feedback.
• Feedback insight from centres to inform programme development and sector-specific improvements.
• Contribute to team planning meetings, training sessions, and department-wide initiatives.
• Support the induction of new team members and contribute to a collaborative, learning-focused team culture.

Skills, experience, and knowledge
Essential
• Previous experience in a customer supporting role, with an emphasis on relationship management and customer experience.
• An understanding of education systems in the UK.
• An understanding of initiating prospect engagement, business development strategies and meeting sales targets.
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills.
• Experience of working on own initiative and being a self-starter.
• Confidence in presenting externally to customers and partners.
• Experience of working with sales forecasting tools and Management Information systems.
• Analytical thinking and evaluation skills, with the ability to interpret data and performance metrics to support decision making.
• Ability to present information concisely using Microsoft Office programmes.
• An ability to network, influence and build relationships with key stakeholders and customers.
• An ability to convert external relationships into long standing customers results.

Desired
• Previous experience in a sales environment.
• An understanding and passion for leadership skills development and the value it provides for young people and centres.
• Excellent customer service skills.
• An understanding of awarding bodies and their operating landscape.
How to apply: Please follow the link to apply through the BeApplied platform: https://app.beapplied.com/apply/oaq8jge3ye