Senior Business Development Executive
IBM i Private Cloud & Managed Services
About the Opportunity
We are representing a confidential technology services provider that is looking for an experienced Senior Business Development Executive to lead new customer acquisition for IBM i private-cloud hosting and managed services.
This is a true hunter role. The focus is on identifying prospects, creating your own pipeline, developing relationships, leading consultative sales conversations, and personally closing new business.
The ideal candidate has a proven track record of selling IBM i / iSeries / AS/400 / IBM midrange hosting, managed services, infrastructure outsourcing, or private-cloud solutions and has personally won new customers on a recurring-services model.
The company has an established IBM i engineering and technical delivery team, so you will have strong technical support throughout the sales process. Your responsibility will be to bring the commercial expertise, customer relationships, industry credibility, and business-development skills required to win new accounts.
What You’ll Be Selling
The role focuses on recurring technology services, including:
- IBM i private-cloud hosting
- IBM i managed services
- iSeries hosting and management
- AS/400 / AS400 hosting
- IBM Power infrastructure services
- Managed infrastructure
- Infrastructure outsourcing
- Private-cloud solutions
- Ongoing IBM workload management
- Recurring infrastructure and managed-services contracts
This is not a hardware or software licensing sales role.
Candidates whose experience is limited to selling IBM hardware, IBM software licenses, or transactional products without recurring managed-services or hosting sales experience will not be considered a strong fit.
Key Responsibilities
New Business Development
- Identify and target companies running IBM i, iSeries, AS/400, AS400, or IBM midrange environments.
- Build and manage a self-generated pipeline of qualified opportunities.
- Conduct outbound prospecting through phone, email, networking, referrals, and industry relationships.
- Develop new customer relationships and create opportunities from the ground up.
- Identify organizations that may benefit from outsourcing IBM infrastructure hosting or management.
- Develop relationships with business decision-makers, IT leaders, CIOs, infrastructure leaders, and other relevant stakeholders.
- Generate new-logo opportunities rather than relying primarily on inbound leads or inherited accounts.
Consultative Selling
- Lead discovery conversations with prospective customers.
- Understand the customer's existing IBM environment, infrastructure, operational challenges, business priorities, and outsourcing requirements.
- Identify customer pain points and determine whether managed hosting or infrastructure outsourcing is an appropriate solution.
- Develop a compelling business case for moving IBM workloads to a private-cloud or managed-services environment.
- Clearly communicate the business value of outsourcing IBM infrastructure management.
- Understand the customer's buying process, decision criteria, timeline, budget, and stakeholders.
- Build confidence with customers who may be evaluating a specialist service provider rather than a large global technology brand.
Opportunity Management & Closing
- Own opportunities from initial prospecting through discovery, proposal, negotiation, and close.
- Develop accurate opportunity strategies and sales plans.
- Work with technical presales and engineering teams to validate customer requirements.
- Coordinate technical discovery and solution development.
- Help develop proposals and commercial solutions aligned with customer requirements.
- Manage commercial negotiations and contract discussions.
- Ensure customer expectations and contractual commitments remain aligned with delivery capabilities.
- Personally drive opportunities toward successful closure.
Partner & Ecosystem Development
- Develop relationships within the IBM ecosystem.
- Build relationships with IBM business partners, technology partners, consultants, and relevant service providers.
- Identify potential partner-generated opportunities.
- Develop strategic relationships that can contribute to pipeline generation and new customer acquisition.
- Leverage industry relationships to create qualified opportunities.
Account Development
While the primary focus is new-business acquisition, the role may include developing selected strategic customer accounts after acquisition.
The priority remains generating new logos and expanding the overall customer base.
What We're Looking For
The ideal candidate will have:
- Proven experience selling IBM i, iSeries, AS/400, AS400, or IBM midrange services.
- Experience selling hosting, managed services, private cloud, infrastructure outsourcing, or managed infrastructure.
- A demonstrated history of winning new customers.
- Recent, personally attributable new-business wins.
- Experience generating your own pipeline through prospecting and relationship development.
- Experience selling recurring services contracts.
- Strong consultative selling skills.
- Experience working with technical presales, engineering, or delivery teams.
- Familiarity with the IBM customer and business-partner ecosystem.
- Strong communication and presentation skills.
- Commercial credibility with IT and business decision-makers.
- Ability to understand technical customer requirements and translate them into business value.
- Ability to manage the full sales cycle from prospecting through contract execution.
- A hands-on, entrepreneurial approach to business development.
Strong-Fit Backgrounds
Candidates coming from the following types of organizations may be particularly relevant:
- IBM i managed-services providers
- IBM i hosting providers
- IBM i private-cloud providers
- IBM infrastructure outsourcing companies
- IBM-focused managed-service providers
- IBM business partners selling recurring services
- Technology service providers with an IBM Power / IBM i practice
- Infrastructure providers offering IBM i hosting and management