Business Development Manager (Remote)

Salary: £50-55,000  (other currencies available) + token allocation from cheqd’s employee pool

Type: Full-time, flexible hours

Start: June 2023 / ASAP

Location: Remote. Our core team is based in London but we welcome applicants from +/-4 hours time zones.

About the role

We’re looking for an experienced and driven Business Development expert with an understanding of scaling start-ups or BD experience at a large tech company / consultancy to join the cheqd team as our Business Development Manager. 

cheqd is an innovative web3 startup building private and secure payment mechanisms for exchanging digital identity and trusted data online, facilitated through a decentralised blockchain network.

The ideal candidate should have a strong desire to learn about open source software, blockchain, web3 payment systems, decentralised finance (DeFi), and self-sovereign identity (SSI) or Decentralised identity.

We’re moving fast. cheqd started in April 2021 and has https://www.uktech.news/news/london-digital-id-startup-cheqd-funding-20210923, backed  by https://outlierventures.io/, https://www.evernym.com/, Cosmos’ Ignite and a consortium of private investors and we’re expanding rapidly with close to 50 partnership in SSI (roughly 70% of the SSI Vendor market) and partnerships growing in web3 (Cosmos, Ethereum), consultancies (tier 2, boutique, payment / identity focused) and large end-customers (multinationals).

You will report directly to the Head of Partnerships and cheqd’s CEO, and your time will be spent in cheqd’s commercial team liaising with our product and marketing teams as required. 

Your mission in your first year at cheqd

Our vision is to become the de-facto network for authentic/trusted data regardless of country, industry and form the advent of Trusted Data Markets. This is all in service of a much greater mission – to give people and companies back their privacy and control of their data.

What you will do

Our team currently consists of a range of skilled operators in engineering, product, finance, marketing, strategy and business development. We are building out this team further, and as Business Development Manager you would take a leading role in managing our fast-growing partnership ecosystem and growing our partnership and customer base to capture more market share in SSI, web2 and web3.

Your responsibilities would include:

Partnerships: 

• Grow cheqd partnerships with Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) vendors from our current \>70% of market share upwards.

• Conduct outreach campaigns via LinkedIn Sales Navigator and other outreach tools.

• Respond to inbound requests and ideate content ideas to increase inbound opportunities and support buyer’s journeys.

• Manage BD processes on Pipedrive for the entire partnership conversion cycle.

• Lead pitches and take the partnership cycle from inception to close.

• Work closely with cheqd Marketing to coordinate SSI partnership announcements and co-marketing releases

• Contribute to partner acquisition strategies and focus on working from our partners / customer backwards..

• Grow cheqd partnerships in web3 ecosystems: initially Cosmos and Ethereum.

Account Management:

• Manage regular communication with our partners through Slack, Discord, telegram, Pipedrive and other platforms in cheqd’s partnership ecosystem. 

• Develop a clear understanding of the needs and wants of new and existing partners (in SSI, End-customers in web2 & web3, Cosmos and Ethereum), and work closely with our product team to feedback on partner requests for features and actively problem-solve to ensure strong business continuity. 

• Ensure PoCs move to production and the customer / partner onboarding process is well-worked and customer satisfaction remains high limiting churn.

Your previous experience and skills

Business Development: 

• Have proven experience excelling with measurable and verifiable results in sales, partnerships and business development for a start-up / scale-up or equivalent, preferably to an exit or late funding round.

• Strong knowledge of CRMs, ideally PipeDrive.

• Experience and proven results in managing partnerships and customer acquisition from inception to close.

• Strong negotiation skills.

• Experience in sales methodologies: consultative selling, strategic partner selling, challenger sales.

• Experience in building sales and partnership models.

• Strong account management pedigree. 

• Excellent and thorough data entry skills and ability to conduct analysis on performance in CRMs.

• Strong research and analytical skills to conduct market analysis to support cheqd leadership’s strategy.

• You can work effectively between departments (product, marketing) to ensure efficiency and continuity with GTM, and other strats

• You are an exceptional communicator and problem solver

• You have a strong technical acumen and can explain technical complexity concisely and remain customer-led and focused on problem solving.

• We’re a company full of operators and you would be expected to contribute to ideas, strategy, planning and then carry out implementation. So demonstrable previous experience of this is important.

• A strong understanding of contributing to culture and working with high-performance BD teams - we’re looking for high energy, passion and motivation regardless of ambiguity or set-backs.

Good to have but not compulsory:

• Experience of SSI: an understanding of DIDs, Verifiable Credentials, SSI applications, and blockchain (cosmos, ethereum)

• Personal experience using identity wallets, cryptocurrencies, crypto wallets, decentralised exchanges, lending protocols, etc

How we’ll measure your success

• Significant growth of our partnerships in SSI, Consultancy, end-customers and web3 which will be measured via milestones and goals in line with company OKRs.

• Your performance will be also assessed via close ratios, partnership acquisition metrics, opportunity win rates etc…

• Efficient delivery of data points to our CRM and knowledge of best practices for CRM upkeep and management of pipelines and accounts.

• Ongoing engagement (account management) with Web 3 partners, end-customers, consulting partners and cheqd SSI partners measured via satisfaction surveys.

• Constructive input to strategy meetings with the Head of Partnerships and CEO.

• Most importantly will be your understanding and obsession with partners, process and improving the bd efforts of the company.

About us

Co-founded and led by Chief Executive Officer Fraser Edwards and Chief Technology Officer Ankur Banerjee, cheqd’s mission is to give people and organisations the ability to control and understand the value of their own data. 

Through its network for SSI vendors, cheqd disrupts established identity paradigms and creates new trusted data marketplaces. The scale of distribution in the SSI space is unmatched - through its strong community of partners, cheqd engages with companies in various different industries, which further demonstrates the endless areas of opportunity for the application of SSI technology. 

Its native utility token - $CHEQ - enables individuals to interact with organisations globally and for businesses to reap commercial benefits. In addition to data ownership, cheqd provides individuals and companies with a real-world financial incentive to share their data.

Key investors include Outlier Ventures, Evernym (acquired by Avast), Tendermint Ventures (the venture arm of Ignite, a core contributor to the Cosmos Network). 

* Trusted data is information, which source can be proven. 

We have published a great deal of content through our https://cheqd.io/blog, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBUGvvH6t3BAYo5u41hJPzw, https://twitter.com/cheqd_io, and http://t.me/cheqd. We are eager to engage with people who are serious about the space and as such expect someone to have dedicated some time to understand what we’re about when applying. 

Diversity & Inclusion

At cheqd, we are committed to nurturing and upholding a culture of openness and inclusion. We are proud to have an international and diverse team, which has been crucial to the progress and success of our business. We strongly believe that creating a diverse team gives us the opportunity to grow and learn from each other’s individual experiences and differences, talents and perspectives; that is why we welcome individuals with different educational backgrounds, opinions, cultures, ethnicities, races, sex and gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, disabilities, colour, veteran status and beliefs. If you require any accommodations during the recruitment process, please let us know. We are open to supporting candidates working remotely anywhere in the world, as long as it can be satisfied under applicable employment laws. 

Job Type: Full-time

Salary: £50,000.00-£55,000.00 per year