Business Development Executive- West Africa, Middle East, and North Africa at ABT Associates

As a Business Development Executive, you will be a senior leader driving Abt’s growth strategy for Abt's West Africa, Middle East, and North Africa (WAMENA) portfolio. You will have extensive experience driving new business in the global development marketplace with clients particularly USAID and other development agencies and institutions. You should have superlative client relationship development skills and experience that includes pipeline creation and qualification, business development capture, proposal management and writing, win theme definition, teaming and partnering, and competitive positioning. You will partner with the WAMENA region VP to identify, qualify, assess, and win business opportunities with both existing and new clients. You will meet with clients across the portfolio, build relationships with key partners, develop winning bid strategies, including crafting key inputs into solutioning, pricing, teaming, and staffing, and identify resources and requirements to pursue, bid and win. In this role you will also collaborate with other business development executives who support other Abt market geographies in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Core Responsibilities

• Identify opportunities through client engagement, client and partner networks, and market intelligence tools and data.
• Align opportunity pursuit to company criteria and strategic priorities.
• Drive opportunity qualification, including win theme validation and solutioning, resulting in an optimized qualified pipeline that yields higher PWin pursuits.
• Partner with the WAMENA VP to develop and execute Account Plan and Strategy.
• Secure new client relationships and expand existing relationships through creation of relationship maps and call plans and identifying client decision makers and influencers.
• Identify and support up-sell/cross-sell opportunities from existing contracts.
• Identify and negotiate with partners and prepare input for NDAs and TAs (working with Contracts)
• Conceptualize and support creation of sales materials and presentations.
• Develop business development skills of WAMENA home office staff; and implement processes (in collaboration with other BDEs) to drive the early phases of capture including:
• Identifying customers’ strategic priorities, goals, pain points, needs
• Liaising with Abt technical capability lines to identify and shape high level solutions 
• Defining competitive landscape and Abt positioning relative to competition
• Defining the initial “Why Abt” rationale, teaming strategy
• Generating materials for WAMENA and International Development Division leadership, Bid Board for go/no-go determinations
• Support and drive later stages of capture, including:
• Supporting more detailed solutioning, pricing, price-to-win activities
• Providing support to proposal management process, including providing key inputs into written response.
• Participating in color team reviews
• Leading/participating in Black Hat/competitive assessments
• Lead or contribute content to high priority proposals.

What We Value

• Bachelor’s Degree and 15 years of experience in international development, or Master’s Degree and minimum of 12 years of experience
• Minimum of 8 years’ experience in business development roles, including opportunity capture and proposal efforts as well as client facing/relationship development responsibilities
• Demonstrated success in identifying, initiating, and nurturing new business opportunities with USAID
• Demonstrated business development success securing large contracts ($10 million and above) in one or more of the following areas: health systems and service delivery, agriculture and food security, economic growth, energy and climate resilience.
• Strong working knowledge of USAID bureaus, programs and special initiatives.
• Deep understanding of the trends in the global development industry and an understanding of cross-cutting themes such as digital solutions and gender equity and social inclusion.
• Exceptional communication and interpersonal skills including verbal and presentation skills to individuals and groups, internally and externally
• Writing skills to include development of proposal content incorporating key win themes in a clear and concise manner
• Superior proficiency with Microsoft Office tools (e.g., Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Teams, etc.)
• Experience with CRM tools
• French and/or Arabic language skills preferred, but not required
• Willingness to travel internationally up to 30% of the time