HeyJobs Master in Business Development
Growing the B2B sales leaders of tomorrow in Berlin, Germany
There is a heated discussion on what German/European start-ups are missing to compete with their American counterparts. Is it seed funding, late stage venture capital, employee option programs, engineering talent, repeat entrepreneurs or access to the tech giants?
My personal view is that we have made significant progress on all of those. However, we often neglect that the real growth hurdle for many Berlin-based B2B (SaaS) companies is a lack of modern educated sales talent.
Having interviewed 100s of experienced sales candidates for a role at HeyJobs, our finding is that a majority is stuck in a mode that we call Sales v1.0 — focusing on pushing customers, pitching aggressively, speaking rather than listening, extroversion as a virtue.
However, we believe that the HeyJobs customers deserve better.
We believe modern sales should be a pleasant customer experience centred around the customer needs. For that we train a methodology that we dub Business Development v2.0 — solution selling, deep customer understanding, listening rather than speaking, employing a fact-based consultative approach.
Internally, we use the analogy of being a good “doctor” who empathically interviews patients, runs tests, forms a diagnosis based on historical evidence and comes up with a treatment plan for each individual patient/customer. To stay true to the analogy: We will only recommend using HeyJobs if it is the right pill as part of the treatment plan for said customer.
As this is a very fresh approach to sales and business development, we decided to do the education in-house. We are now looking for graduates and young professionals who want to make a career in business development.
For them, we have introduced the HeyJobs Master in Business Development (MBD) Programme.
We offer an exciting 2-year program during which participants work full-time in 2 roles for 1 year each and receive special training, coaching, mentoring and many other benefits.
Our goal is to be able to grow the next generation of sales leaders to master our growth trajectory but also to give back to the ecosystem what they need most: masters of business development.
