Client Engagement Specialist at GIBS Business School (Gordon Institute of Business Science)

ROLE PURPOSE:

• The Client Engagement Specialist at GIBS is tasked with expanding the institutional customer base by actively seeking new prospects and responding to generated leads. This role entails adhering to a structured sales approach, starting from qualifying prospects to fostering engagement, driving sales, securing new business, and facilitating the handover to GIBS delivery teams.
• Responsibilities include evaluating prospects for suitability, initiating contact, introducing GIBS, stimulating interest, establishing credibility, pinpointing solutions, innovatively crafting proposals, collaborating with relevant stakeholders on technical aspects, presenting solutions, and finalizing agreements with institutional clients.

Responsibilities and requirements include but are not limited to:

Reaching pre-determined targets plus stretch by following the GIBS sales process which includes:

Qualifying prospects:

• Review and prospect new/lapsed institutional clients
• Research, understand, and build deep expertise in allocated industries
• Use insights to build trust with institutional clients to anticipate, pre-empt, and effectively solve their learning and development needs
• Cultivate growth opportunities to expand the institutional clients’ team active engagements
• Identify and apply relevant techniques to improve contact success rate with qualified prospects
• Verify and define the major decision makers and power map within prospected organizations
• Understand the prospective clients' key buying criteria and their institutional procurement processes
• Employ data to assess and decide on the viability of the prospective clients and their ability to procure from GIBS from an affordability point of view and make a strategic decision as to whether and when to pursue the opportunity
• Apply excellent judgement in deciding which RFPs/ RFQs/ RFIs to pursue or not in conjunction with marketing and other internal stakeholders, develop campaigns to generate leads of corporate institutional clients in order to build potential pipeline
• Attend conferences, exhibitions, institutional clients’ events and other networking events to canvass prospective corporate institutional clients and draw relevant insights

Selling to prospects:

• Innovate and improve techniques to secure engagements with qualified prospects
• Bring insight and creativity to presentations delivered to qualified prospects
• Build strong, value-adding relationships with agreed-upon prospective institutional clients and leveraging the GIBS network to find ways to add value to them
• Consult with institutional clients and demonstrate understanding of their needs
• Develop expertise to advise on major industry and learning and development trends that clients should be aware of
• Continuously develop relevant leverage points for use during engagements with qualified prospects
• Provide institutional clients with a high-level overview of GIBS school-wide capabilities and solutions that could potentially help meet their needs
• Gauge and ascertain the clients’ interest in the proposed solution
• Identify major objections that need to be overcome before the institutional clients indicate their intent to engage further
• Understand the prospective clients’ current suppliers that service their learning and development needs and neutralize competitors by providing them with a compelling reason and accompanying proof as to why GIBS is a superior provider
• Scope the high-level needs of the institutional client and gain their approval to develop a detailed proposal
• In conjunction with subject matter experts and other stakeholders who will provide input on the technical elements of the proposal and the sales support team who will project manage and track the development of the proposal, lead and develop all other elements of the proposal that effectively demonstrate how GIBS will meet the institutional client’s needs.
• Lead and improve pricing and proposal development for all proposed solutions

Closing the deal:

• Apply foresight and proactively navigate all possible client issues with high-quality decisions
• Secure internal sign-off and approval on proposals and costings prepared
• Lead, coordinate, and facilitate all activities and stakeholders involved in the solution presentation to clients
• In conjunction with the clients and relevant internal stakeholders, ensure that there is a process to measure the return on learning investment
• Negotiate pricing with institutional clients in conjunction with the relevant internal stakeholders
• Advocate for the clients’ business and secure verbal approval from institutional clients to proceed with contracting
• Lead and manage the contracting process with institutional clients
• Effectively hand over accounts to delivery teams and the account management team to ensure that institutional clients feel a smooth transition between acquisition, delivery, and retention teams

Targets:

• Achieve revenue targets for new/lapsed institutional clients based on allocated industries and clients both in South Africa and across the rest of the continent
• Grow GIBS' share of potential wallet in allocated institutional client organizations and across the school’s ecosystem
• Achieve experimental targets based on non-traditional offerings
• Provide client services according to requests from other institutional clients not proactively prospected

Administration:

• Continuously brief client engagement support team around types of industry data needed, potential sources of data, company-specific research that needs to be conducted, and additional data points to help move institutional clients through each stage of the sales funnel
• Maintain client records on CRM through continuous updates on the system in real-time
• Provide accurate weekly reporting of sales figures, pipelines, leads, and planned sales calls to the client engagement support team
• Continuously improve and ensure that sales figures and pipeline data are accurate for weekly reports
• Contribute to content repositories of industry thought leadership through well-crafted reports on insights gained from research
• Contribute to the generation of qualified leads through referrals, telephone canvassing, direct mail, email, and networking
• Perform any ad hoc duties to support the wider client engagement team, which may include the completion of RFP/ RFQ/ RFI documents, presentations, and creative work as well as attending other team member’s client engagement meetings.

Relationships with internal stakeholders:

• Build strong relationships with internal stakeholders (subject matter experts, learning designers, programme delivery teams) to ensure deep knowledge of various solutions across the school and collaborative creation of strong value propositions
• Provide feedback from market sensing activities to internal stakeholders (subject matter experts, learning designers, programme delivery teams) to ensure that they are kept abreast of evolving institutional client needs in order for them to adapt value propositions accordingly
• Build relationships with subject matter experts who can provide intel around industry and subject area trends, as well as attend client engagement meetings.

EDUCATIONAL AND EXPERIENCE REQUIREMENTS

Ideal Profile

• An undergraduate degree is essential;
• Business Development or Sales and Marketing experience, including copywriting;
• Experience in leadership development programme proposal writing and development;
• Ability to review, analyze, and summarize complex information.

COMPETENCIES

Knowledge

• Knowledge of the business development process
• The knowledge to assess learning needs
• Understanding of adult learning principles and learning methodology
• Programme design knowledge and frameworks
• Project management
• Knowledge of the higher education sector

Skills

• Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal
• High attention to detail
• Excellent time management skills and ability to prioritize within a busy workload
• Proficiency in Microsoft Office products (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio)
• Project team leadership skills
• Analytical thinking ability
• Budgeting skills
• Interpersonal skills and collaborative style

Attributes

• Ability to work under pressure
• Resilience in the face of change and increasing complexity
• Able to work independently with a minimum of supervision
• Team orientation and willingness to collaborate
• Achievement orientated
• Valuing high standards of excellence
• Customer service orientated
• High organizational commitment