Business Development Manager

There is an enormous amount of hydraulic equipment in New South Wales, and we're in front of a small fraction of it. Quarries, tunnelling, ports, waste and recycling, councils, food and beverage, sawmills, mobile plant fleets, the mines around Mudgee and the Hunter - every one of them runs cylinders, pumps and motors, and every one of them has somebody looking after it. Often that somebody is whoever answered the phone.

Nobody at our end is currently going out to find them.

That's the job. You get Sydney, the Hunter and the Central West, a vehicle, a real list of existing and lapsed accounts to hold and grow - and an open map beyond it. You decide where the rest of the work is. You go and get it.

This is a genuinely new seat, so there's no script to follow. What there is: a database with genuine value sitting in it, and a territory nobody has properly worked.

Metropolitan Hydraulic Services repairs, rebuilds and services hydraulic equipment - cylinders, pumps, motors, valves, hose reels - from a Sydney workshop and out in the field. We're part of a group that also owns APT Training, which teaches the fitters and engineers who run that equipment, and Mackay Fluid Power in the Bowen Basin coalfields.

We don't win on price and we don't try to. We're not the cheapest supplier of a part and we never will be. We win when something has failed, it matters, and someone needs it diagnosed properly and turned around fast. Fix It Properly isn't on a poster here - it's the reason a customer rings us instead of the place down the road that's forty dollars cheaper.

Carrying the training brand alongside the service brand is a real advantage in this role. Walking into a site and offering to make their fitters better is a much easier first conversation than asking for their maintenance spend.

• Working the account list properly - existing customers, lapsed ones, and businesses we've quoted but never converted. There's real revenue sitting in it.

• Working out who else runs hydraulics across your territory, who services them now, and where the openings are. That picture doesn't exist yet - you build it.

• Getting in front of businesses that have never heard of us. Cold, warm, referred, whatever works.

• Scoping the problem properly - photos, detail, system information - and getting it to the right person to price.

• Following up. Quotes, POs, the customer who's gone silent. It's roughly a third of the week and it's where the revenue lands.

• Opening training conversations where they fit and bringing our APT people in at the right moment.

• Sydney at least twice a week, the Hunter weekly, Mudgee weekly, with occasional nights away as the territory grows.

You don't quote. Our technical sales people price parts and kit; our operations manager prices project and service work. You own the customer and the information going in, and you own that the quote goes out and gets followed up. You keep the account permanently - it doesn't get handed to an internal desk once it's transacting.

On day one

• A track record of winning customers who'd never bought from your company before. Not managing accounts someone else opened - actually opening them.

• Industrial, mechanical or technical B2B sales experience. You need to be able to hold a conversation on a plant floor without looking like a fool.

• A licence and a genuine willingness to cover the territory properly.

Would help

• Hydraulics or fluid power background.

• Existing relationships in mining, quarrying, construction, ports, tunnelling or heavy industry in NSW.

• Experience selling both a service and a training or capability offer.

We'll teach you

• The hydraulics. You'll have a technical sales specialist and an operations manager behind you, and time in the workshop to get grounded. We'd rather have someone who can open a door and learn the product than someone who knows the product and can't.

• Our systems, our pricing, and the training side of the business.

• $110,000 – $130,000 base plus 12% superannuation, depending on experience.

• Fully maintained dual cab, bull bar, branded - yours, not a pool car.

• The whole territory. No one else is covering it. What NSW looks like in three years is largely down to what you build now.

• A short line to the decision maker. You report to our Operations Manager and work directly with our Chief Commercial Officer on territory strategy. Two people, no layers. When something needs deciding, it gets decided.

• Real backup. Technical sales, internal sales and operations all exist to take the quoting and delivery load off this seat, so your week stays in front of customers.

Most of this market has never heard of us. In Sydney we're one of many; in parts of the Central West and Hunter we're unknown. The account list will get you moving, but it won't get you to the number on its own - you'll have a lot of cold conversations that go nowhere before the pattern emerges. Building the picture of who's out there is a real part of the job and it takes months before it pays.

The driving is significant. Sydney, the Hunter and Mudgee in the same week, with nights away sometimes.

And we can't take on unlimited work. There are weeks when the workshop is full, and checking before you promise is part of the job rather than an obstacle to it.

If you read that and it sounds like the problem you want, you're the person we're describing.