Our vision is to create a safe and sustainable world.

Ricardo plc is a global strategic, environmental, and engineering consulting company. With over 100 years of engineering excellence and employing close to 3,000 employees in more than 20 countries, we provide exceptional levels of expertise in delivering leading-edge and innovative cross-sector sustainable products and solutions. Every day, we enable our customers to solve the most complex and dynamic challenges to help achieve a safe and sustainable world.

The Global BD Director leads the sales team in their sector, driving growth strategies to meet OI revenue targets. They execute the business development plan in line with Ricardo’s strategic goals, focusing on strategic planning, team leadership, client relationships, and internal collaboration. This role involves working closely with Growth Solution leads and other Ricardo Business Units, ensuring a unified "One Ricardo" approach to business development and sales.

Key Responsibilities

• Coordinate the Ricardo sales team in their sector, including direct reports, Marketing, Growth Solutions, SMEs, and stakeholders from across the business.
• Collaborate with the SVP of Business Development & Sales, Growth Solution Leaders, and Marketing to develop and execute strategic sales plans to meet or exceed pipeline and sales targets.
• Lead, motivate, and mentor the sales team to maximize performance and achieve personal quotas.
• Work with the SVP and Sales Enablement team to set quotas, forecast, manage lead qualification, and drive order intake to meet and exceed sales goals.
• Serve as the “voice of the customer” to identify market gaps and communicate them to Growth Solutions to enhance value propositions.
• Define and sell the unique benefits of Ricardo’s offerings to differentiate from competitors and drive pipeline growth.
• Act as a sector expert, maintaining and sharing deep market knowledge and converting insights into strategic actions.
• Represent Ricardo at industry events to promote the company and establish credibility as a market leader.
• Support marketing efforts with value selling, competitive differentiation, market analysis, promotional materials, and events.
• Ensure timely and accurate report generation, CRM updates, and understanding their importance for business success.
• Travel as needed to support sector growth ambitions.

Key Competencies and Experience

• Proven experience in business development within the relevant industry sector, with a track record of achieving or exceeding sales targets.
• Strong business and commercial skills, including an understanding of financial drivers, contracts, NDAs, IP, payment terms, proposals, pricing, and margins.
• High sense of ownership and accountability for achieving sector pipeline and OI targets, with an entrepreneurial mindset.
• Established network in the relevant sector.
• Effective leadership and teamwork abilities with strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Professional demeanor, exuding expertise and credibility.
• Strategic thinking with the ability to identify opportunities and initiate improvements.
• Strong negotiation skills and a history of building high-performing teams.
• Ability to effectively multi-task and condense complex issues into succinct messages.
• Excellent problem-solving, analytical, and listening skills.
• Ability to handle confidential information and excel in a fast-paced, matrix organization.
• Master’s degree in engineering or business is a plus.

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.