Business Development Manager with Underdog DNA. Sales. (London)

Which would you prefer?

• Selling something boring. Rigid, straight-faced and bound by red tape. Constantly forced to waste good sales-time on admin.
• Selling creative ideas. Freedom to make it your own, where you simply crack on with the job, nobody micro-managing you. A role where you live to sell.

We’re “b”. An ad agency. But we’re not saying, “Join an ad agency”. We’re saying, “Join us”. Because, unlike other ad agencies, you won’t have to put up with the constant internal meetings and guessing how many wins you’ll give us this year, no salesperson with their salt likes being micro-managed.

We go against the grain in the industry. It’s why our clients love us. You’ll present ideas that don’t come around often and rarely land anywhere else. Coming here’s the sales equivalent of going from sailor to pirate. Coder to hacker. You can do things your way.

You don’t even need to have sold for an ad agency before. We’ll teach you that side. Just show us you can sell. Join us and you’ll finally be free to do the best selling you’re capable of.

Top-level details:

• Business Development Manager / Sales Manager
• Full-time or Part-time
• UK (commute to London for 3 days, once a month)
• £40-50k - £100k OTE year 1, £200k OTE year 2

What else you’ll get…

• Training budget. You get a £2k annual training budget to use on whatever helps you improve.
• No evenings or weekends. If someone’s being unreasonable, we’ll back you - no questions asked. If you spot a smarter way to do things, let’s change how we work.
• Extra holidays. Two company-wide holidays; 2 weeks off at Christmas and 1 week off in August. Plus the statutory 28 days.
• Private healthcare. Provided by BUPA.
• Sabbatical. 6 weeks on full pay, on top of holidays, once you’ve been here 4 years.
• Travel. Occasional trips to the French Alps, because Paul lives there and thinks it’s the bee’s knees.

What you'll be doing...

You’ll shape the kinds of clients we bring in, defining how we grow while building your own profile. You’ll manage new business from end to end - identifying prospects, initiating conversations, and converting them into paying clients. Of course, we'll help you, so you won't start from scratch. You’ll specifically:

• Profile and find decision-makers in our target Underdog brands.
• Build and manage a healthy pipeline with tailored, human outreach.
• Lead sales conversations, present the agency and handle objections.
• Take and shape briefs, co-write scopes with the MD and close deals.
• Onboard new clients smoothly, aligning everyone on scope and delivery.

Hybrid or remote? Kinda both... We operate a weird mix. Annoyingly, there isn’t a name for it. As a minimum, we all get together in person 3 days a month in London, when Paul (the MD) is in town. Apart from that, you can work from anywhere within a European time zone. (You need the right to work in the UK, no visas offered).

What you'll need...

• You understand consultative selling. We don’t care if it’s SPIN, Sandler – we like Blair Enns’ Win Without Pitching – as long as you can open dialogues with prospects and reach a clear opportunity to discuss working together. That “next step” potential is what we want to see. A maybe to a no or a yes, nothing in between. We don't need a mile-long pipeline of maybes.
• You’ve closed deals that take 3-9 months to materialize, worth 20-200k. That’s what we do – not transactional selling – so that’s what we need. Doing so, you’ve doubled your wage in commission – or, at least, you should have, because that’s what you’ll be doing here.
• You’ve persuaded prospects to buy the unconventional. And you can demonstrate how those decisions have aligned with a client’s business outcomes.
• You'll have a love and knowledge of sport (and sporty clients), as we've grown a sports client base and are actively chasing Underdog sport brands.

About us...

We're an independent advertising agency with a reputation for making distinctive advertising, specialising in getting Underdog brands noticed. We bring fun, irreverence and chutzpah into our work and culture. A small and friendly team. We unsettle the top dog of the category. Our clients are household names and scrappy wannabes on the way up. But they all have one thing in common: they’re Underdogs with something to say.

How to move things along… Email mitch@mellorandsmith.com with your most recent CV (even if it’s not fully up to date). Everyone gets a response.