LIFE AS A BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR

‘Life As A’ is all about sharing what it's really like and what it takes to do the job. We feature what a typical day and the reality of it is like, the ugly and the pretty.

Here, John-Paul Hughes, Business Development Director at Absurd shares their take.

What does your job involve?

I’m responsible for the new business target. We have a number we have to hit this year and I need to make sure we’re doing all the things we need to be doing to hit that.

The main parts of my job are meeting with potential new clients to understand their aims and their challenges and working with the experts within the agency to put together proposals that meet those needs. Working with large enterprises like brother, Entain, Umbro, and Vita with often complex problems, and with funded startups like Morning Mindset who want to move at pace, we have some amazing minds in the agency. It’s my job to find more of those clients.

With some clients, it’s about educating them on the value of discovery and research in understanding user needs, and the value of activities like prototyping, or observational research internally in a business to understand internal barriers to making a first-class digital product that meets their users’ needs. With other clients, it might be a conversation about re-designing their design system, or perhaps it will be a technical conversation about developing and re-platforming their Umbraco or Sitecore-based site.

The other part is making sure we’re doing the right things to generate sufficient needs to meet our ambitious growth plans.

What is your background?

I’ve worked in Business Development for marketing, digital and creative agencies, and in tech for the last 25 years or so. I’ve worked for and also run my own business development consultancy, and I’ve freelanced for various agencies. I’m lucky to have worked with many different agencies and tech companies, which has meant I’ve been able to experience a wide range of cultures and disciplines.

What is a typical day like in your role?

No two days are the same and it’s pretty high-paced, but a typical day involves putting something together for tenders or proposals we have ongoing which often involves internal conversations with our designers or developers. I’ll have new business meetings each week sometimes involving travel. I’ll spend time speaking with our partners on joint tenders. Inputting content ideas. And always with an eye on the big picture – is the pipeline healthy and are we doing the right things to keep it that way?

What do you enjoy most about your job?

Meeting new people and hearing from big brands about their digital strategy, understanding their challenges, and helping them find new ways to overcome them. I also love putting these to our Design Director and Technical Director and hearing them come up with amazing stuff, just like that, to solve these problems…always blows my mind.

What’s the hardest part?

The uncertainty. I’m very used to it and I’m very good at constantly looking for ways to move things forward, but business development is innately uncertain – you’re always asked what the chances are of you winning a given client and the truth is, you never know because anything can happen. But that’s also the best thing about it.

Oh and admin…reporting, updating the CRM, etc – but it has to be done.

What makes it your career of choice?

I love working in a small business with big brands because I really see the impact of both the work we do and the impact on our agency of winning a new client. I also love working in digital product and service design. Digital products are only as good as their ability to meet peoples’ needs, and the only way to properly meet users' needs is to understand them through user research, and test and prototype through design research. The companies that understand the value of service design are the ones delivering great digital products.

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