Business Development Manager - Missiles & Fire Control Systems

About the Role

We are looking for a Business Development Manager – Missiles and Fire Control Systems to join our team based from Ampthill, Bedfordshire. This role offers a blended working pattern with time spent in the office, client site meetings across the UK, and some home working, with occasional travel to the US. This position benefits from our 4xFlex working pattern, offering a 4-day working week (Monday - Thursday).

This highly influential role is critical in delivering the Missiles and Fire Control International strategy in the UK across the MFC portfolio of programmes, with a strong emphasis on LM weapon systems and associated equipment platforms. The objective is to align the UK with NATO and other European nations to maximise market position and revenue streams, engaging effectively with a diverse stakeholder community including, but not limited to, the British Army, NADG, the wider MoD, Industry, and Academia.

This will require regular and frequent engagement with US colleagues and teams to represent the UK MoD position and provide UK political and defence-specific market knowledge to inform Corporate strategy. The role is predominantly UK-focused whilst working in complete alignment with US counterparts.

We are seeking a self-starter with strong domain knowledge, evidenced business development capability, and tangible success. The incumbent will take responsibility for owning the business development process to shape and influence the market, generating, growing, and managing a robust pipeline of opportunities. Working alongside the capture team, the successful candidate will demonstrate understanding and experience of campaign planning and execution, position-to-win strategies, and strategic stakeholder engagement. The ability to work both individually and as part of diverse teams is essential, recognising the differing demands of the Corporation.

This role requires resilience and proactivity to engage and position Lockheed Martin capability to meet both current and future capability requirements, shaping thinking, informing decision-makers, and driving the UK engineering and technology agenda.

The ideal candidate will be tenacious yet considered, able to operate and deliver within a complex enterprise to balance customer and corporate demands and expectations. They will possess an ability to match technical solutions and capability to customer needs and be an effective communicator, comfortable presenting robust business cases with impact at the executive level, both within the Customer organisation and to achieve buy-in with internal leadership.

Specifically responsible for:

• Understanding and shaping the marketplace as the domain Point of Contact (POC) and Voice of the Customer back into the business.
• Identifying and engaging key external stakeholders to position LM value propositions and influence customer procurements.
• Identifying, qualifying, and maturing pipeline opportunities, both organic and ‘new’, efficiently and effectively, aligned to business strategies.
• Managing and growing the personal pipeline to meet quantitative Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) whilst assuring high-quality opportunities.
• Leading opportunities through the early corporate governance process and providing subject matter expertise for Capture and Programme teams to secure orders.

The incumbent shall be able to demonstrate:

• Ability to understand the business's technology roadmap, capabilities, and value propositions, applying these to meet customer requirement sets that leverage market differentiation.
• Strong commercial acumen with experience of novel constructs to facilitate innovative business models.
• Ability to understand the political, technical, commercial, and financial aspects of a sensitive market, engaging effectively with the stakeholder community.

Required skills, qualifications and experience:

• Proven Business Development experience selling into the UK MoD across multiple domains.
• Strong senior-level professional network within target markets, encompassing industry peers and customer representatives.
• Demonstrated ability to rapidly develop new trusted relationships.
• Demonstrable experience and understanding of engineering design and related services, spiral development, and through-life support.
• Ability to exert influence in the development of overall objectives and long-range goals of the organisation.
• Ability to operate as a key team player in developing new business plans and operationalising market strategies, identifying and executing new Go-To-Market plans.
• Ability to effectively work within a multi-functional team.
• Clear and impactful communication skills with effective interpersonal skills.