Lead Business Development Manager - Advisory & Large Loads

About us:

At Gridcog, we're on a mission to accelerate investment in the clean energy transition. We are a SaaS start-up of energy nerds on a mission to accelerate the energy transition by building the best project modelling software to enable our users to make intelligent energy decisions.

We recently raised a US$10m Series A led by ABB Electrification Ventures, alongside Axpo Ventures, DNV Ventures, Verbund Ventures and AlbionVC, and we are growing our commercial team accordingly.

Who we're looking for:

We're looking to accelerate our growth in two of our strongest client segments, Advisory and Large Loads (primarily data centres), and we are seeking an experienced business development professional to lead both. This is a role for someone with real initiative who is comfortable with ambiguity, happy to decide what needs doing and get on with it, maturing our playbooks as they go.

Our software enables professionals in renewable energy to make informed investments into energy projects that deliver economic and environmental value. In this role you will focus on Advisory, the global consulting and engineering firms who model energy projects on behalf of their own clients, where our clients include PwC, ABB, Accenture and Stantec, and on Large Loads, the organisations on the demand side of electrification such as data centres, heavy industry and logistics, where our clients include Amazon, Southern Water and Prologis. We are looking for a senior person to lead our growth in these segments, working alongside our excellent existing business development team and building on our go-to-market playbook and maturing it for these two ICPs. Both segments are global, so the playbooks you mature will be picked up by our teams across Europe and Australia, and you will be involved in multi-region opportunities.

These are complex deals that often bring commercial requirements that a standard subscription model does not answer neatly, so a significant part of this role is listening carefully to what clients need, forming a view and challenging our internal pricing and proposals where the evidence supports it. The judgement we are looking for is about structure rather than price, so you will need to be comfortable owning the commercial conversation with Partners and other senior stakeholders and holding a firm position on the value of what we do while shaping a deal that works for the client. This is also not a role about closing a high volume of small deals, and we will look to you to identify the target accounts capable of making a material difference to our ARR and to run the multi-faceted sales processes needed to win them.

We are looking for an energy native rather than a generalist software seller, someone who understands how energy projects are developed and financed and who can hold their own on the technical substance with a client's own analysts. Much of our success here has come from being in the tent with clients, understanding the problems they are trying to solve and articulating clearly where Gridcog helps, rather than from anything that feels outwardly salesy, and we would expect you to work the same way. You will also need to have worked closely with advisory and engineering firms, whether as clients or as partners.

You'll also have a passion for the Gridcog mission, be happy to work at pace in a fast growing startup and enjoy collaborating with your colleagues globally. If this sounds like you, please read on!

What you'll do as part of our team:

• Be responsible for winning new customer accounts in the Advisory and Large Loads segments in line with agreed company and individual targets. This includes identifying the target accounts capable of delivering a significant lift in ARR and prioritising your time accordingly, managing and qualifying a pipeline of opportunities and managing client demo processes. You will lead the complex deals that follow, coordinating input from our Product and Industry teams and our CCO across sales cycles that can run six to twelve months.
• Build and manage a robust sales pipeline through a combination of self-generated opportunities, marketing-generated leads, industry events and outbound activity from our BDR.
• Mature our go-to-market playbook for these segments, building on what already works and developing it further, covering how we qualify opportunities, what we lead with, which evidence matters most and how a deal typically progresses, so that colleagues selling into these segments across our global teams can work from it.
• Improve and develop our sales collateral for these segments, including slide decks and proposal templates.
• Bring client commercial requirements back into the business and challenge our commercial model where it is not serving those requirements. Where a deal calls for a structure we have not offered before, bring our CCO a clear recommendation, and record the reasoning so that we build a consistent approach over time.
• Become an expert in the Gridcog software and lead client demos, showing senior audiences how the platform addresses the problems their teams are working on.
• Identify the partnership and other channel opportunities that will help us win more within these segments, and make the case for the ones worth pursuing.
• Manage customer contracting processes including procurement and security reviews, and keep your deals and our CRM up to date. Gridcog will rely on your read of where pipeline for the Advisory and Large Loads segments actually sits, so that we can forecast ARR and budget accurately.
• Use AI to accelerate and improve how you work.
• Share customer and market insights with the wider Gridcog team, including where the platform needs to develop for us to win in these segments.
• Act as part of a global team, supporting your colleagues in Europe and Australia in pursuit of company-wide goals and leading opportunities that cross our regions.

To be successful in this role you will have:

• A career built in energy. This could be a senior commercial role in energy software, data or research, or a background in power markets, origination, project development or analytics that you have taken into a commercial role.
• Experience working directly with advisory and engineering firms, whether selling to them, partnering with them or delivering work alongside them. You understand how practice budgets and chargeability work and how partners make buying decisions.
• A consistent record of hitting and exceeding sales targets, and the motivation to take a leading role in a segment. You will be joining colleagues who already sell to these clients, and bring the seniority to mature how we go to market and to lead our largest and most complex opportunities.
• Rigorous qualification discipline, and the judgement to concentrate effort on significant opportunities.
• A track record of structuring non-standard commercial deals. We will ask you to talk through an example in detail, including what the client asked for, what you proposed instead, and how you got it agreed internally.
• Sound commercial judgement in ambiguous situations, and the confidence to put a position to our CCO, explaining your reasoning and backing it up with evidence.
• Technical depth in one or more of the areas that matter to these clients, such as PPAs, flexibility revenue or behind-the-meter economics, and the intellect and curiosity to build depth across the others, which is what gives you credibility with a client's own analysts and modellers as well as with Partners and senior executives.
• An interest in mentoring more junior members of our business development team and helping them develop.
• Ambition, energy and commercial drive. You will be comfortable in ambiguity and willing to get stuck in, Gridcog is a dynamic startup environment.
• Exceptional communication skills with a strong sense of customer empathy; you build strong and enduring relationships with your clients.
• A willingness to become an expert in the Gridcog software.

We'd also love it if you have:

• Time spent working inside a global consultancy, engineering firm or advisory practice.
• Experience with large energy users, industrial load or data centres.
• Hands-on experience of techno-economic modelling, whether in Gridcog, a competing tool or your own spreadsheets.
• Demonstrated success closing multi-year software contracts with six figure ARR values.
• Experience in a fast growing startup.
• A strong personal brand in the GB energy industry.
• Fluency in a second European language.

Benefits:

• Competitive remuneration package aligned with experience and skills, including equity.
• Opportunity to work as part of our social London based team with flexible working arrangements.
• Be part of a high-performing team that values innovation and creative problem-solving.
• Contribute to the decarbonisation of the world's energy system.
• Support for ongoing professional and personal development.
• An annual all company retreat, our previous retreats were in Bali and Bintan Island.

Diversity and Inclusion:

We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team at Gridcog. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds, as we believe an inclusive environment and diversity of perspective leads to innovation and success.