Job Description

Job Overview

Our ideal candidate is obsessed by storytelling excellence, with a passion for finding new ways to go to market and win. You enjoy communicating with and motivating people, setting an agenda, and then rolling up your sleeves to deliver that agenda.

You are driven to help Mindshare achieve its mission, and you epitomize a “can-do” attitude. You are bullish on Mindshare, GroupM and the work we do for our clients, but you are not a bulldozer. You inspire others to join you on a journey, and then you make sure they get to the destination. You are ambitious, competitive, tenacious, and unable to settle for second-best while also recognizing how to share responsibilities when it benefits the collective good of the group. You thrive on understanding our prospective clients’ businesses, and you are skilled at figuring out exactly how Mindshare can add value to a client and tell a story about how we can accelerate growth in a way that is compelling. You understand how to balance and combine agency resource and talent into teams that can deliver value for prospective clients, with fresh ideas and renewed passion for each project. You are also able to exert soft influence on internal and external stakeholders and resources, aligning them to our vision and agenda and converting them as required into active advocates for Mindshare.

You will build upon a revamped, globally consistent business development machine that provides customized yet scalable solutions for prospects. You will work closely with the Chief Growth Officer, APAC and local and regional CEOs to ensure that the agency delivers against prospective client needs, while helping to accelerate the development of new solutions to position the agency for future success. You will work with other GroupM and WPP agencies to build solutions that integrate capabilities across the group.

Corporate communications (PR) will play an integral role in marketing, and in this role, you will collaborate closely with Mindshare and GroupM corporate comms to ensure that efforts are complementary.

Mindshare will become famous within WPP and the industry for the progressiveness of our marketing and pitches, our pitch conversion rate and our ability to partner flexibly with others. We will win not just clients from among our traditional prospect pool, but we will accelerate conversion of ambitious, fast-growing “new economy” clients who are more performance oriented.

You will have a minimum of 10 years of experience in a media agency, advertising agency or other marketing services provider. Functional experience, like media planning, media implementation or marketing analytics in one of the top 10 global advertising markets is desired but not mandatory. This role is based in Mindshare’s Singapore office.

Reporting Structure

You will report to the Mindshare Chief Growth Officer, APAC, partnering with global, regional and local leadership. You will work closely with all leadership teams across WPP, GroupM and Mindshare accordingly. The global business development team will report to you.

Job Responsibilities: This Role Is About Generating Sustainable, Profitable Growth

Lead New Business:

• Leading the new business prospecting effort across APAC with a particular focus on prospects based in Singapore and South East Asia more generally.
• Contribute to the evolution of Mindshare’s Good Growth narrative in partnership with regional leadership, local market leadership and Global Marketing.
• Drive the pitch story development, alongside Practice leads and Pitch leads, ensuring that we are not only answering the brief, but that we are bringing Good Growth solutions to the table, and applying the best thinking and creativity in a simple, powerful story.
• Cultivate enduring relationships with agency pitch consultants, auditors, and other third-party agency assignment decision influencers.
• Work with WPP’s and GroupM’s business development teams to expand our opportunities, making Mindshare top-of-mind for the biggest prospects and placing us more at the forefront of integrated team models.
• Identify key players and build pitch teams, coordinating talent and resources both within Mindshare and across GroupM and WPP partners, and quickly build a winning team culture and positive pitch experiences.

Contribute to a Business Development Community:

• Expand a world-class new business practice, by building upon and re-imagining Mindshare’s current new business approach and capabilities, with an eye towards driving global consistency.
• Identify and build relationships with agency category thought leaders. Partner with agency leadership to identify Mindshare category experts to leverage for global and local pitches: CPG, financial services, QSR, retail, healthcare, technology, B2B, etc.
• Oversee proper implementation of WPP’s new business tracker for global and regional new business efforts.
• You will expand our established relationships with WPP growth teams across levels and geographies.

Personal Leadership:

• You will become a passionate champion of Mindshare’s culture of innovation, purpose-built on our values, and you will actively support our efforts in DE&I.
• For our wider teams and WPP, you’ll establish yourself as a leader with a point of view and the ability to get things done and bring people on a journey in a matrixed organization. When others want to give up, you persevere.
• Emphasize people development via mentoring and developing the larger business development community, pitch team participants, and your direct reports, to make new business a desired career destination.

What Success Looks Like

After 3 months:

• Successful leadership of the existing Business Development team, including engagement of regional and local market new business leads
• Input and partnership with Global Growth leadership to build and update prospecting plans by client or category for 2022.
• Quality control for perfect implementation and use of existing WPP New Business Tracker, to be delivered by the Business Development team
• Alignment on KPIs and success measurement for the Business Development team

After 6 months:

• Creation of connections with top WPP and GroupM company business development leads
• Effective pitch management, partnering with agency global or regional leaders
• Pitch process audit and recommendations around gaps in strategy, storytelling, packaging and process
• Identification of category thought leaders, pitch Client leaders and key players by practice, with their active engagement across pitches as needed

After 12 months:

• Refined, documented and published pitch process, that is consistently followed
• Deliver against Mindshare Growth KPIs: billings growth, organic growth, COMvergence ranking, with 50% pitch conversion rate