Business Development, Strategic Partnerships
Gusto is a modern, online people platform that helps small businesses take care of their teams. On top of full-service payroll, Gusto offers health insurance, 401(k)s, expert HR, and team management tools. Today, Gusto offices in Denver, San Francisco, and New York serve more than 100,000 businesses nationwide.
Gusto’s Business Development team focuses on evaluating and executing strategic partnerships in focused categories. This role will assess, plan, build, and execute on a strategy to drive new customer acquisition with net new business segment and partnerships. An emphasized focus will be on co-developing large distribution opportunities for new customer acquisitions. You’ll lead all business development activities through to execution on how Gusto should partner to optimize the value of the partnership jointly solving for our SMB customers for the short and long-term. A few of our partners we have partnerships with today include Clover, Xero, Freshbooks to name a few. You’ll be great in this role if you have an Entrepreneurial mind-set, find passion in building things from the ground up, can develop structure in an un-structured environment, are self-motivated, are an outside of the box thinker and someone with a start-up mentality. You should have a proven track record of influencing at the executive level to the individual contributor all creating exceptional relationships along the way.
Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:
- Develop a methodology that calculates markets and assesses opportunities
- Manage and nurture a category of accounts from prospect to close
- Evaluate and assess the strategic and economic impact of potential opportunities with prospective partners
- Map the market of prospective partners and manage the partner acquisition cycle from initial contract to close
- Lead all aspects of deal execution from: identifying and developing accounts, meeting with partners, business case development, to deal structuring, negotiating contracts, and closing
- Nurture partners from networking, executing the opportunity and on-going for continued partner success and support
- Develop GTM plans in conjunction with our team with an understanding of the possible GTM levers to pull and an ability to guide and direct how to train the partner and drive on-going success
- Communicate and report to leadership the forecast of future deals, business impact, communicate strategy and resolve prospect questions and issues during the deal process
- Educate partners on the Gusto value proposition for their clients through presentations and demos
- Collaborate with the BD Account Management, Sales, Marketing, Finance and Biz Tech orgs
- Become a domain expert in your partner category to provide valuable feedback to Product, Marketing, and Sales on our partner value propositions and positioning
- Travel 30-40% of time to conferences and cities where your partners exist for in-person new partner activities
Here’s what we’re looking for:
- 7+ years of experience managing partnerships in a high growth environment
- Proven track record of hitting and exceeding quotas, including delivering accurate partner forecasts
- Analytical ability to drive strong commercial outcomes for both Gusto and our partners
- Expertise developing business cases, financial analysis and modeling, and familiarity of partnerships legal agreements
- Experience developing co-marketing / co-selling strategies with large partnerships
- Strong internal and external communication abilities, and interpersonal skills
- Comfort with a fast-paced environment and changing requirements
- Experience with 4+ month long sales cycles, identifying decision makers and in-person selling
Our customers come from all walks of life and so do we. We hire people from a wide variety of backgrounds, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it makes our company stronger. If you share our values and our enthusiasm for small businesses, you will find a home at Gusto.