Business Development Lead (Community & Emerging Markets)

We are looking for a high-impact Business Development Lead for Community and Emerging Markets serve as the primary commercial and sales engine behind our growth strategy.

This critical, hands-on role is new to our business and is required to demonstrate tangible growth in transaction volume within our 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 us achieve our ambitious 2026 targets.

This role fills a material organisational gap between Marketing, Onboarding, and Customer Experience. Our 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.

• 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.
• Taking control of our 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 and drive technical improvements.

• 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:
  • owning end-to-end sales cycles and hitting clear numerical targets.
  • building relationships with community-based organisations (e.g., NPOs, schools, churches, sports clubs).
• In addition to English, you are fluent in multiple official South African languages. isiXhosa would be a significant advantage, particularly for engagement in informal and township-based markets.

Note: This role is highly field-based and involves regular, in-person engagement with community organisations. We are open to candidates at different levels of fluency, provided they are confident in 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 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
• Pursue excellence. Whether it's refining a pitch or improving merchant onboarding, you set and meet exceptionally high standards.
• You enjoy problem-solving. You can solve problems by analysing situations and applying critical thinking. You can 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. When things change, you know how to with the punches
• You are technically inclined and comfortable learning new systems
• Basically, you will blow us away with your work ethic, your passion, your integrity, your attitude and your energy!
The benefits of joining our team:
• 30 days of annual leave
• A medical aid contribution/fringe benefit of up to R2,000 per month
• An Apple MacBook and the necessary gear
• Discretionary annual bonus
• Lots of opportunities to learn
• Paid parking (when working from the office)
• The opportunity to be part of a great team and culture!

Would you be a good fit? If you're interested in applying for this position and you meet the necessary requirements, please submit your CV and completed application using the link below.