Manager, Business Development

Business Development Manager, Enterprise BDR

Chicago · Hybrid (minimum 3 days/week in-office) · Business Development

About The Role

The Business Development team shapes Braze's future revenue every day. It's the team at the forefront of identifying, understanding, and helping prospective customers build, enhance, or transform their customer engagement strategy  and it's one of the most energetic, fast-paced teams at Braze.

We're looking for a proven business development leader to manage and coach our highly ambitious Financial Services (FINS) BDR team in Chicago, driving outbound pipeline growth through hands-on coaching, disciplined operations, and a genuinely collaborative, performance-minded culture. You'll join a group of Business Development leaders who take action, share what's working, and hold each other to a high bar.

What You'll Do

Business Development is a high impact, highly visible team. Attention to detail, pace and energy are crucial. BDRs at Braze don’t just hunt to deliver meetings, they are also responsible for actively selling to prospects and qualifying opportunities against qualification criteria. Delivering a day-to-day structure and accountability, coaching cadences and value selling methodology is core to the role.

Coach and quality-check the daily activity and quota performance of a mixed team of BDRs to ensure key metrics are consistently met.

Hire and efficiently ramp new BDRs, delivering onboarding across product knowledge, buyer personas, competitive positioning, tools, and role-play practice.

Run a regular coaching cadence covering time management, objection handling, prospecting tactics, and active listening.

Partner with Sales, Marketing, and Partnerships leaders to strategize on pipeline and prospecting initiatives that support company-wide objectives, and to ensure the team has quality market coverage and penetration.

Build and maintain a library of prospecting resources the team can draw on, and look for ways to run outbound with greater efficiency, including where AI and automation can reduce manual workload.

Maintain a high-performance, team-oriented culture and morale, including performance management and succession planning as BDRs are promoted internally.

Own accurate management reporting, deal forecast and commit, hiring pipeline, and project updates, using tools like Salesforce, Tableau, and Looker.

Manage individual and team quota performance in real time, stepping in proactively rather than after the fact.

Maintain strong written and verbal alignment with your regional Director and cross-functional stakeholders.

Success in this role means enabling your team to generate the volume and value of pipeline required to meet or exceed your team and individual BDR quotas. Managers are evaluated on three things: quota attainment (including performance management of individual BDR quotas), operational excellence (reporting, forecasting, process, and headcount planning), and personal brand (collaboration, innovation, and thought leadership). Consistently successful Managers have a clear, coached path to their next role at Braze.

What Success Looks Like in Your First 90 Days

You've completed BDR onboarding yourself, living a day in the life of the rep and have a working command of Braze's messaging, pipeline strategy, and team performance metrics.

You've established your operating rhythm: 1:1 cadences, reporting rhythms, and a real relationship with each person on your team.

You're already adding tactical value, coaching, prospecting ideas, process feedback, so your team is equipped to hit their number and the team is on track for its segment quota.

You're building fluency in the FinS narrative and its sub-segments (banking, insurance, mortgage/real estate, fintech) . You don't need to walk in an expert, but you're visibly building toward it.

You've started sharing informed perspectives upward: what's working, what needs to change, and where you see opportunity in process or coverage.

Who You Are

You've done this before. You've carried an outbound number yourself, you've led people who carry one, and you know the difference between a team that's busy and a team that's productive. You bring:

Must-Haves

4+ years of B2B sales experience, including meaningful time in an outbound, SaaS environment.

2+ years leading a sales or business development team (Team Lead, Manager, or Director).

A track record of quota over-performance — both what you personally carried and what the people you led delivered.

Comfort managing multiple types of territories at once (high-volume outbound patches alongside higher-touch strategic ones), and across multiple strategies (breadth, persona-based, events, etc).

Salesforce fluency and hands-on familiarity with modern prospecting tooling (Outreach, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Gong, DemandBase, 6sense, ZoomInfo, or similar).

Strong cross-functional relationship-building skills this role only works if you can align Marketing, Partnerships, Solutions Consulting, and Sales Leadership around a shared strategy.

Nice to Have

Financial services or fintech industry experience — helpful for speaking the customer's language faster, but not required.

Experience selling across multiple verticals over your career, which builds the same muscle.

How You Operate

Genuinely people-first: you believe leadership means taking the blame and sharing the credit, and you take real ownership of your team's number.

Action-oriented and relentlessly tenacious, with a player/coach mindset.

Data-driven about KPIs, but equally attentive to the individual coaching and career conversations that keep a team motivated.

Comfortable operating in ambiguity; FINS' go-to-market strategy is still being built, and you'll help shape it rather than inherit a finished playbook.

For candidates based in the United States, the pay range for this position at the start of employment is expected to be between $76,000 and $96,000/year, with an expected On Target Earnings (OTE) between $126,000 and $160,000/year (including bonus or commission). Your exact offer may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. In addition to cash compensation, this role qualifies for a comprehensive Total Rewards package that includes equity grants of restricted stock (RSUs) so that you will own a piece of our company.