Business Development Experts
Here’s a bunch of great people who know a shit load about BD!
Join one of our monthly Meet-Ups and get answers to your challenges from an experienced group of advisors and mentors, alongside others who have walked in your shoes.
Ask questions, share challenges and experiences, and build your network…
Claire Hutchings
Founder - Chime Agency
Claire is on a mission to solve the challenge all agencies face – their own marketing.
Chime Agency helps the UK's best independent agencies find their voice and shout it from the rooftops.
Claire has 15 years’ of experience spanning boutique independents like We Are Collider, HLabs, Climbing Trees, and Quickfire Digital to global networked agencies Publicis Groupe, Hotwire, and Fleishman Hillard.
She has a passion for content, bridging strategy and delivery seamlessly bringing her extensive agency knowledge to all of Chime Agency’s clients. Claire won Best New Business at the 2022 Women’s Business Awards and was Commended at the Global Women in Marketing awards 2022.
Lucia Piseddu
Founder - The BD School
Lucia Piseddu is the Founder of The BD School. With 15 years in business development, she experienced first-hand the pain and gains of working in this field. That's exactly the reason why she decided to build The BD School, to shed a light on business development and help professionals be more effective in their jobs!
Katy Howell
CEO - immediate future
Often called in as the UK expert on social by TV, Radio and the press, Katy appears regularly on BBC news, Victoria Derbyshire, and Reuters, as well in The Telegraph, FT and Guardian. She’s considered the 4th most influential social media marketing expert, named one of the 25 women who have made an outstanding contribution to digital by the Drum, and was honoured to be amongst the Top 100 Asian tech entrepreneurs in the UK.
She speaks at conferences, runs masterclasses, and guest lectures at two universities. She’s co-authored 4 books on social, and is a regular contributor to the press.
Her expertise lies in helping brands deliver significant impact by breaking the social boring: using social data to springboard creative that delivers growth to business. Her agency works with brands including; lastminute.com, Princess Cruises, Selfridges, Mission Foods, Google, Diageo, OnBuy, Fujitsu, Sony Music, and many more. They win industry awards every year for their smarts and innovation in social media.
Zoe Mitchell
Global New Business Lead - Wunderman Thompson
As a new business professional with almost a decade of industry experience, I have helped to grow different shaped agencies in very different ways.
New Business (the salesy bit), Marketing (the agency brand bit) and PR (the agency reputation bit) all combine to make someone good at this gig and I'd like to think I'm pretty decent at it.
Incredibly passionate about refining my agency's proposition; being confident in the opportunities we accept and decline; and celebrating some of the great work that we produce. That's what gets my professional fires burning.
I will always be my agency's biggest cheerleader and bring the energy and enthusiasm to the role that makes it so addictive and exciting.
Ellie Ring
New Business Director & Partner - BBH
A dynamic new business and marketing leader at top creative agency BBH, with excellent interpersonal skills, a strong creative flair and an impressive new business record. Responsible for shaping the new business agenda and providing growth for the agency.
Previously she ran the new business team at the UK’s fastest growing and largest independent media agency the7stars. As a key member of the management team, she set the new business and marketing strategy across the7stars Group, driving prospecting strategies, both the group and individual agency positionings, was responsible for delivering strong billings growth and leading the agency into the top 10 in the media agency league table. She also helped launch and win clients for start up agency Bountiful Cow and was instrumental in securing several industry awards.
Kim French
Head of Marketing - Preen
Kim French is Head of Marketing at Preen, a video production agency based in East London. She has worked with global brands like LUSH Cosmetics, The North Face, Guinness and the Tokyo Olympics. Kim values strong and authentic client relationships and believes in the power of community when it comes to marketing. She is a mother to a charismatic 4 year old called Yoyo and is an avid reader, particularly partial to a gothic horror novel.
Anna Stone
Global New Business & Marketing Director at Ogilvy
Anna started her career at a lead gen agency spending 5 years selling the services of agencies from TBWA to Cogent Elliott, including the launch campaign for The Engine Group. After 5 years working across a full spectrum of agencies including integrated, advertising, brand, shopper, digital and sponsorship she moved to an in-agency role to expand her skills.
Over the next 5 years she worked at a number of small independent agencies including 23red where she led the agency’s new business strategy. In 2015 she moved to Ogilvy initially to drive growth for their new B2B division, then later working across OgilvyOne as part of the teams winning F1, EY and TK Maxx. She has recently taken on a global role working directly into Ogilvy’s Global Chief Growth Officer.
Alongside her work she has always maintained a keen interest in promoting business development as a hugely rewarding career choice, and a discipline that should be respected as much for sales ability as for strategic thinking. This has included working with The Art of New Business and the IPAs New Business and Marketing Group and now with BD Matters.
Oli Richards
CMO - The Beyond Collective
Oli’s career has spanned over 15 years, working with some of the world’s top brands to create creative campaigns in Sports, Entertainment and Culture.
During his time in the industry, he's helped United Airlines promote their unrivalled service to the US, Coca-Cola to showcase their ground-breaking Rugby World Cup 2015 sponsorship internally, Canterbury to bring their brand to life for rugby players across the UK and worked closely with the MERCEDES AMG PETRONAS F1 Team to bring their fans closer to the team they love.
He’s worked in marketing and new business roles across multiple disciplines including events, sports marketing, creative, media and brand strategy. For agencies including Engine, Synergy, Dentsu and Mcgarrybowen. Now working at The Beyond Collective, he is responsible for Marketing and New Business across Above+Beyond (creative), Yonder (media) and Frontier (brand strategy) - maintaining the group’s already solid reputation and helping win new clients.
Nathan Anibaba
Founder and Managing Director - Bridge & Host of Agency Dealmasters Podcast
As founder and managing director of Bridge, Nathan helps agencies connect with their clients through the power of podcasting.
In just 18 months, they have grown their podcast Agency Dealmasters into one of the leading marketing agency podcasts in the world, with hundreds of thousands of downloads, listeners from over 141 countries and a guest list from leading agencies from MediCom, Ogilvy, WPP, Havas and more.
Nathan and his team have a talent for helping agencies connect with their perfect accounts even if these brands often feel out of reach.
Brad Smith
Founder of Succeed Digital
Brad has 20 years of Agency and software sales experience and has honed the art of pitching enabling him to win great clients for his own agency and others alike. Brad’s desire is to always help and guide others to making better sales, convert more business, to think up stronger strategies and ultimately make better commercial decisions within their business.
He loves to deliver great work and excellent results and help businesses of all shapes and sizes to ‘Succeed’ and leaves a trail of doing just that wherever he goes.
Nearly 4 years ago he also founded his own agency Succeed.Digital as well as new business consultancy Succeed.Agency dedicated to helping agency owners to find more leads, build better pipelines and most importantly close more business!
As an agency Succeed are dedicated to helping other agency owners and working on their own digital projects along the way to constantly refine and hone the quality of their own work, focused on delivering ‘Big Agency Thinking, with Micro Agency Pricing.’
In the last 2.5 years Brad’s won work with over 80 brands and has the full mix of working with top brands, great start-ups, innovative scale ups as well as enterprise organisations. He’s also written for the latest book by world renowned marketer ‘Damian Ryan’ ‘Understanding Digital Strategy’ and created 18 different agency propositions in the last year alone.
If you need something answered truthfully and backed by real world experience – he’s here to assist
Want to hear from these guys every month?