October 31, 2023 |

Sales/Business Development Analyst, Impact Investing and Verification

Guest Author

..

Full Time
UK (London or able to commute to London 1-2 days/week)
Posted 1 month ago
£40,000 - £62,000 (GBP) USD / Year

Website BlueMark

Strengthening trust in impact investing

Business Development Analyst, Impact Investing
Experience level: Early-career (0-2 years post-Bachelor’s degree work experience or equivalent)
Location: London, UK (or UK based with the ability to commute into London)

About BlueMark:
BlueMark was founded with a mission to strengthen trust in impact and sustainable investing, and to help bring more transparency and accountability to the impact investment market. We believe third-party impact verification is a key ingredient for establishing and maintaining trust between impact investors and their stakeholders. By providing a reliable resource for independent, third-party assurance of impact claims and practices, BlueMark plays an important role in advancing best practices and ensuring the impact investing industry scales with integrity.

Founded in early 2020, BlueMark has quickly become the leading provider of independent impact verification and intelligence for the impact and sustainable investing market. BlueMark closed its Series A funding round in April 2023, and has grown its team this year to 27 FTEs, with significant additional growth planned for 2024 and beyond. Our team brings unparalleled expertise in impact investing along with high commitment to excellence and integrity in everything we do. We value compassion, emotional awareness, a sense of humor, and an entrepreneurial drive in every new hire.

About the position:
This is a unique opportunity to help drive revenue growth and build out the business development function at an early-stage company in a dynamic, impactful industry. The Business Development (BD) Analyst will play a key role in driving new relationships and business for BlueMark (with an emphasis on the UK and European markets) through building and maintaining systems for business development activities, supporting outreach and follow-up with prospects, conducting outreach, and supporting relationship management. The role will provide opportunities to work with diverse impact investing stakeholders and help grow a new pioneering business.

You might be a great fit for this role if you are interested in both the people and the process sides of business development. The right candidate will be organized, flexible, and solutions-oriented, and will have some exposure to or a keen interest in learning about Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and/or impact investing.

This position is based in the UK, and candidates must have the ability to commute to the London office 1-2 days per week as well as authorization to work in the UK now and for the foreseeable future.

Primary responsibilities for this role include:

Support research to identify new prospects and organize target lists
Drive outreach to prospects, in collaboration with several other members of the team, through coordination of meetings, drafting of communications and prospect follow-up, synthesis of BD meeting notes, and generally oversight and project management of the steps in the BD process
Support drafting of proposals and refinement of client-facing materials
Maintain updates to the CRM system (Insightly, Salesforce) and other BD-related analysis and tools
Continue the build-out of BD-related systems and processes and support ongoing improvements
Identify and support implementation of enhancements to BlueMark’s end-to-end sales processes
Contribute to BlueMark’s BD strategy, including defining and working towards key business targets
Liaising with BlueMark’s other departments (marketing, R&D, etc.) to ensure BD efforts are integrated across teams
Manage client data and support revenue tracking
Collaborate with other teams to ensure that BlueMark is well-represented at conferences and other industry events
Support closing agreements with clients and facilitating handover to client service teams, including reviewing and finalizing contracts and building process for smooth transitions from sales to service delivery

Desired qualifications and experience:

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent
Experience or exposure to a sales or business development role, preferably in a startup environment
Familiarity with Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and impact investing and/or financial services preferred — but not required, as long as you bring an eagerness and aptitude for learning!
Ability to conduct market research and develop outreach strategies
Aptitude for working in a small business environment
Ability to manage multiple tasks with high attention to detail and organization
High level of personal and professional integrity
Strong written and verbal communication skills
Entrepreneurial and collaborative disposition, with a bias towards action
Demonstrated ability to exercise sound judgment and discretion
Strong interpersonal and relationship-building skills
Sense of humor and self-awareness
Experience using CRM systems would be an asset, but is not required

**To learn more about the benefits and hiring process, please click on the link to apply (the application link includes more information!)**

To apply for this job please visit app.beapplied.com.

Stay up to date with what matters to you...

Choose beats that you're interested in, and we'll show you more of them as you explore...

Guest Author

..

December 4, 2023

The Brief

Featured: COP Watch

The antitrust theories are weak, but the effects can be chilling on corporate collaboration for climate action. The Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, or GFANZ, launched with fanfare at COP26 by Brookfield Asset Management’s Mark Carney and Bloomberg’s Michael Bloomberg, aimed to align banks, asset managers and financial institutions with a combined $130 trillion in assets under management with the goal of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. Two years later, as COP28 gets underway in Dubai, many of those financial institutions have dropped out, gone quiet and otherwise gotten cold feet. Behind the chill: a coordinated attack by Republican politicians in the US on efforts to fight climate change. In recent letters and subpoenas, the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee charged that financial industry alliances like GFANZ “appear to facilitate collusion that may violate U.S. antitrust law,” and represent “ESG cartels” (see, “With subpoenas, Rep. Jim Jordan seeks to chill shareholder action on climate”). The antitrust claims have little legal basis and “should be evaluated in the context of the deep anti-climate interests of the campaign’s funders,” argue Cynthia Hanawalt of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and Denise Hearn of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment. Their guest post on ImpactAlpha breaks down the legal issues.

Dealflow: Pay for Performance

Investors earn a return on a ‘forest resilience bond’ in California. Nonprofit Blue Forest partnered with World Resources Institute, the US Forest Service, and the National Forest Foundation five years ago to pilot a financing mechanism for proven techniques to protect forests from devastating wildfires and other climate risks. The “forest resilience bond” raised $4 million from investors to restore and protect 15,000 acres in the Yuba watershed in the Tahoe National Forest. Blue Forest says the intervention, completed more than five years ahead of schedule, provided an “adequate” return to investors “in line with expectations.” Investors were repaid by the Yuba Water Agency, the US Forest Service, and California’s Climate Investment Program. The project “exemplifies how investments in nature can successfully accelerate solutions, benefit public lands and return capital,” Blue Forest said in a statement.

Impact Voices: Emerging Fund Managers

Funds of funds provide more than capital for local investors in small and growing businesses. Impact funds that invest in other aligned funds are common in private equity and microfinance. Funds of funds are now emerging in the global small business finance sector as a means of mobilizing the roughly $5 trillion a year needed by small and growing businesses, writes Susan de Witt of the Collaborative for Frontier Finance, which hosted annual gathering of small business-focused fund managers and investors last week in Cape Town. Funds of funds like the Dutch Good Growth Fund, Mastercard Foundation’s Africa Growth Fund and Kuramo Capital are proving to be a critical early supply of capital for fund managers in Africa and the Middle East, according to a new survey from CFF. “All employ a range of strategies to evaluate local fund managers’ risk,” such as creative risk assessments, anchor capital and back-office services, de Witt says. Such support, she adds, is “helping fund managers transition from raising from angel and high-net worth investors, family offices and foundations to institutional investors.”

Agents of Impact: Follow the Talent

Cornelius Lee, ex- of Promise54, joins Equitable Facilities Fund as vice president of talent… Overdeck Family Foundation appoints Katelyn Fletcher, ex- of the Brookings Institution, as portfolio associate… Impact Capital Managers seeks a talent and diversity director in New York… Also in New York, Blue Meridian Partners seeks two directors… Pollination has an opening for a nature and agriculture executive director in Washington, DC.

Read today's brief