About the position
Our Client in the Digital / Electronic Payments Industry is looking for a high-impact Business Development Lead for Community and Emerging Markets, to serve as the primary commercial and sales engine behind their growth strategy.
This critical, hands-on role is new to our Client's business and is required to demonstrate tangible growth in transaction volume within their community-based segments. It demands a highly driven relationship builder who can actively prospect, negotiate, and close deals with high-value community organisations and grassroots institutions to help the organisation achieve their ambitious 2026 targets.
This role fills a material organisational gap between Marketing, Onboarding, and Customer Experience. The ideal candidate will operate as a specialist individual contributor with a singular focus on unlocking transaction volume across high-potential community sectors in South Africa's informal and formal economies. Success in these markets requires high-touch, on-the-ground activation and community engagement.
If you are a commercially driven hunter who thrives on turning strategy into revenue through real-world execution, this role is for you.
Key responsibilities will include:
Direct Sales & Acquisition:
- Owning the end-to-end sales cycle: sourcing, pitching, negotiating, and closing deals with key community sectors
- Delivering measurable acquisition outcomes, successfully growing customer base and transaction volume in schools, churches and sports clubs in informal settlements
Pipeline Management:
- Taking control of the organisation's current pipeline, including optimising inbound leads, cold sign-ups, and dormant accounts to turn them into active, revenue-generating merchants
Growth & Insight Velocity:
- Executing commercial experiments and funnel optimisations to improve transaction growth, while delivering regular customer insights and opportunity reports to operations and development teams that quantify friction points and drive technical improvements.
Ideal candidate:
- You have a degree in Business, Commerce, Marketing, or related fields (not essential if you have deep, relevant experience in community sales and growth roles)
- You have a proven track record in sales or business development, ideally in South African SME, community, or informal market sectors
- You have experience in owning end-to-end sales cycles and hitting clear numerical targets and building relationships with community-based organisations (e.g., NPOs, schools, churches, sports clubs)
- You have excellent communication skills: This role is highly field-based and involves regular, in-person engagement with community organisations. They are open to candidates at different levels of fluency in official South African Languages (in addition to English), provided that the candidates are confident in conducting real-world conversations with merchants and community leaders
- You have strong negotiation and closing skills and thrive in environments with clear numerical targets and accountability
- You are comfortable with technical tools for managing leads, capturing sales, data analysis and reporting
- Love engaging with customers face-to-face to solve real-world problems
- You have a bias for action and are motivated by achieving results
This job may be for you if:
- You have high commercial energy and resilience
- You can operate autonomously while collaborating with teams
- You have a strong sense of ownership and accountability
- You pursue excellence relentlessly; whether it's refining a pitch or improving merchant onboarding, you set and meet exceptionally high standards
- You enjoy problem-solving by analysing situations and applying critical thinking and you are ble to decide on courses of action, and implement the solutions developed to overcome problems and constraints
- You are particular about details and can easily spot anomalies
- You are agile and flexible in your approach and can switch between tasks easily
- You're level-headed and cool under pressure
- You are technically inclined and comfortable learning new systems
Desired Skills:
- Business Development
- Sales
- New Logo
- Fintech
- Payments
- Informal Sector Key Account Management
- New Business Development
- Relationship building
- Solution Selling
- New Business Opportunities
- Sales Process
- Market Intelligence
- B2B Sales
Desired Work Experience:
Desired Qualification Level:
