Role Title: Senior Business Development Manager - Chemical Sector 

Location: London, Oxford

Job ID: 2025-2688

Our vision is to create a safe and sustainable world. 

Ricardo has a strong pedigree within the chemical sector. We have a growing focus on sustainability and decarbonisation solutions, and a 50-year legacy through operating the National Chemical Emergency Centre (NCEC) of response, chemical safety and compliance solutions. These combine to create a strong track record in our ability to make a meaningful difference within the sector and influence their journey to create a safe and sustainable world. 

We are looking to recruit a disciplined and outbound prospecting focused product sales professional to deliver our chemical risk productised services into the chemical industry. This is a mid-volume role, looking to engage with and convert 60-80 accounts per annum, self-generated through mostly prospecting activity. 

The key objective of this role is to provide strong, primarily outbound based, sales capability to identify and convert new accounts within our chemical profile. This senior level role is to maximise the opportunity in the market, particularly for Emergency Response services but also our regulatory compliance capability.  

This role will form part of Ricardo’s Chemical Sector sales team 

Key Accountabilities 

• Create and own your new business activity plan, deliver on the strategy, and build a healthy pipeline of around 60-80 quality opportunities per annum to hit quarterly and annual sales targets.

• Develop a deep understanding of target persona's, their industry vertical, and the role and impact of chemical safety and emerging regulations on their business operations. 

• Manage and take full ownership of all aspects of the sales process by successfully converting inbound and outbound leads with a high level of responsiveness and proactively building your own pipeline of new opportunities. 

• Using a value-selling based approach create needs-based solutions and deliver high-quality scoping discussions and proposals as well as responses to RFPs – from contextual understanding of business challenges through to solution design and pricing. 

• Be consistently disciplined with sales forecasting and track all sales opportunities through Microsoft Dynamics CRM to build a healthy and sustainable pipeline. 

• Work out and build a scalable, repeatable sales formula taking advantage of all tools available so you can leverage data and client intelligence to sell consistently, and predictably. 

• Work collaboratively with adjacent teams such as Marketing, Product and Customer Success to exchange knowledge, and design new ways to influence buying decisions and better serve clients across the full range of Ricardo’s offerings. 

Key Competencies and Experience 

• Demonstrable experience and track record in new business development (and associated high levels of prospecting to achieve this). 

• Succeed in New Business and selling Consultancy or Saas (long term, recurring revenue programmes) to Mid-Market and Enterprise segments with fluency prospecting in a range of industry verticals. 

• In-depth knowledge of the full sales cycle from prospecting to closing, and a track record building pipeline, closing and hitting sales goals. 

• Ability to use a data and an insight-first approach to stimulate prospects thinking and create meaningful impact-driven stories to promote offerings all the way through the sales cycle. 

• Start-up or scale-up experience, comfortable operating in a fast-changing environment, working with maturing but limited resources, and delivering high-quality work at speed. 

Desirable Experience 

• Experience of working within a consultative sales environment, for example within a consultancy, software, or similar environment. 

• Experience in working within a sustainability, risk management, chemical response, regulatory or safety business area. 

• Fluency in a major European language would be advantageous, but not required. 

• Experience working with a CRM system, especially MS Dynamics, would be an advantage. 

Skills and Behaviours 

• An organised, commercially aware, target focused sales professional who appreciates excellent self awareness, discipline and rigour are critical to the achieving this. 

• High levels of personal drive, commitment and tenacity to create a prospecting and outbound sales programme. 

• Disciplined in your approach to preparation and research, to ensure you are fully prepared for any sales meeting opportunity and/or challenge. 

• Be an excellent communicator and presenter to build rapport and strategic client relationships as well as excellent engagement with colleagues to optimize effective team dynamics and support. 

• Enthusiastic about sharing knowledge and expertise with the team to encourage improvement in the function of the go to market function within the team. 

• Comfortable working in a dynamic operational environment, occasionally involving elements of quick decision-making. 

Working here 

You will be warmly welcomed into our workplace where every voice matters. We are diverse thinkers and doers, coming together to create a culture of inclusion. We will support you to find your place. 

We will encourage you to use your passion and expertise to make a positive impact through the projects you work on.  Your knowledge and desire to bring about change will be invaluable in helping deliver innovative solutions that support communities across the globe in becoming safer and more sustainable. 

Work life balance  

We offer flexible approaches to work, whether that is working from home, being in the office, or as a hybrid worker. We're happy to discuss flexible working arrangements. Wellbeing is at the core to our culture, allowing employees to flourish and to achieve their full potential. 

Benefits 

We want you to know how much you are valued. Your remuneration and benefits package will reflect that. You will receive a range of benefits which include support for your physical and mental health.  

Our core benefits include 25 days' annual leave, plus 8 flexible bank holidays, a competitive company pension scheme, life assurance and professional subscriptions reimbursement. We also offer a wide range of flexible benefits to suit your lifestyle. 

Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion statement 

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer, we believe in each person's potential, and we'll help you reach yours. We have an ambitious diversity, equality, and inclusion approach as explained here. We value diversity; recognising that a more diverse workforce creates a richer and more varied working environment. Diversity also drives innovation, by allowing us to offer our clients the best consultancy service that we can. As part of our commitment to engage positively and pro-actively with all our employees and to ensure an inclusive culture, we are a recognised as a 'disability confident' employer. 

Next steps 

Once you have submitted your application a member of our Recruitment Team will be in touch. Please be aware that the timing can vary dependent on the volume of applications that we receive for each role and in some cases, we may start to review applications prior to the closing date. 

Ricardo is a Disability confident employer please advise the recruitment team via recruit@ricardo.com if you require any adjustments to support you throughout the recruitment process. 

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