As a Business Development Manager, your goal is to drive revenue influenced by alliance partners that are assigned to you. You are responsible for building relationships with assigned alliance partners that will result in increased leads, and/or revenue. In addition, you will work to source, qualify and onboard new partners. You'll capture what motivates and drives them, what their focus is and build a better together story. You'll enable them to be more successful in recommending KnowBe4 products. You'll work with partner leadership to gain executive buy-in and leverage KnowBe4 leadership to continue to build it. You'll collaborate with your partner via regular business reviews to build joint business plans with agreed upon metrics and drive customer acquisition through demand generation campaigns.
Responsibilities:
- Build and maintain strong relationships with key alliance partners recommending KnowBe4 products
- Conduct deep discovery to understand the partners’ organizational structure, goals and objectives as well as motivators for partner personnel
- Develop a comprehensive understanding of your partners business and operations
- Conduct initial onboarding with assigned partners
- Collaborate with partners to develop mutually beneficial, strategic business plans to achieve targets
- Enable partners to equip them with positioning, product knowledge, marketing best practices and demand generation tools
- Communicate the value of referring KnowBe4 to increase partner investment
- Engage partner leadership and KnowBe4 leadership to gain executive buy-in and commitment
- Maintain clear and consistent communication with various stakeholders and teams at partner organizations
- Drive partners to the portal to utilize marketing campaigns and demand generation tools and assist them in implementing marketing campaigns
- Coordinate and collaborate on joint marketing efforts and tie it into business goals to deliver ROI
- Collaborate with and support direct sales and customer success teams where needed to manage the overall partner relationship
- Monitor partner performance and track key performance indicators (KPIs)
- Meet and exceed assigned targets for monthly sales volume requirements and objectives in assigned partner accounts and maintain a healthy pipeline/accurate forecasting
- Maintain accurate and thorough records in Salesforce and other workflow tools
- Ensure partner compliance with partner agreements
- Drive adoption of company programs among assigned partners
- Set clear expectations with partners so that they understand rules of engagement, best practices and overall expectations of the partnership
Requirements:
- Bachelor’s Degree in a relevant field required
- Familiarity with standard concepts, practices and procedures within the IT Security Field
- Familiarity with cybersecurity field preferred
- Minimum 3 years of sales experience (exceeding quota on a consistent basis)
- Alliance Sales and Business Development experience strongly preferred
- Must be able to demonstrate sales aptitude while being assertive, persistent, consultative, and comfortable working in a highly results oriented company
- Strong understanding of partner ecosystems and channel sales
- Excellent verbal and written communications
- Excellent time management and organization skills
- Strong collaborative and teamwork skills
- Strong analytical, strategic mindset, and negotiation skills
- Persuasive communication skills accompanied with the ability to gain a quick understanding of the needs and pain points of channel partners
- Passionate about business and willing to go the extra mile
