The Healthcare Business Unit at Cambridge Consultants

The Healthcare Business Unit (BU) specialises in the development of innovative medical devices from concept through prototype manufacture to transfer to production.  Projects often include considerable technical challenge and result in hardware and software-based solutions. We operate across several overlapping sectors including:

• Pharma/drug delivery – novel devices for drug delivery; technology and services for driving adherence and compliance and for enhancing clinical trials.
• The general field of medical devices – advanced surgical tools; digital surgery; smart implants; devices for imaging, acute care and chronic care.
• Life Sciences – enabling better care through molecular diagnostics and life science research.

How this role fits within the business

Consulting is an on-going cycle of being present and active in the world of our customers, growing awareness, building relationships, finding opportunities, selling work, delivering good work and maintaining relationships with clients.

The role is senior and commercial in nature, by which we mean it involves the full consulting cycle, with a greater emphasis on the customer and market than on the delivery of project work.

The primary purpose of this role is to expand our capacity to sell work in Healthcare through a combination of ‘doing’ and helping others to ‘do’.

There’s a tendency within consulting environments to segregate and consider ‘selling’ and ‘operating’ separately, yet they are intertwined. Sustained success in consulting often comes about when people have the mobility to operate across the bits of the consulting cycle where their strengths lie. And when they’re given the training, coaching and opportunity to roaming outside the parts of the cycle where they normally reside. The direction of travel for operating staff tends to be towards customers and the market, whilst predominantly customer / market facing staff are more effective when they better understand the ‘doing’ and the technological capabilities within the business.

What this role involves

• You won’t be responsible for a specific sector or have BU-wide commercial responsibility. Instead you will become an integrated part of the BU by contributing to a mixture of prospecting, selling, delivery and maintaining client relationships.
• You will need to spend time in-front of potential and existing clients (that will involve some travel). You will be involved in triaging potential opportunities, assembling teams to respond to opportunities, guide project planning and proposal writing and negotiate terms with clients.
• You will be expected to pick up some existing client relationships and manage a few existing accounts at a senior level, as well as cultivating and maintaining relationships with new clients.
• You will help the BU leadership identify any new technical capabilities that might be needed for current or future client opportunities.
• You will help cultivate a BU wide understand that selling is a cycle of activities in which everyone plays a part in. You’ll help foster a culture which appreciates the need to continually strike a balance between the short term and the long term.
• You will need to nurture staff from across the BU that have some aptitude to expand out of ‘doing’ and play a greater role in ‘selling’.
• You will network within the wider business to ensure potential client projects draw upon the full breadth of capabilities across the business.
• You will take a lead role in defining projects through proposal generation and have some involvement in delivery of some projects, most commonly in a technical reviewing capacity rather than delivering hands-on engineering / science or managing projects.
• You will contribute to the leadership of the BU via the Extended Leadership team.

Experience and skills required

We need you to have medical device industry experience and specific domain knowledge, we’re not prescriptive about exactly which domain or domains you’ve previously worked in. It would be helpful if it spanned at least one of our main focus areas; surgical, implants, life-science tools, clinical diagnostics or drug delivery devices.

We’d ideally like someone who has experience in professional services (such as technical or strategic consulting) and experience in the commercial word of device development. Since our work covers the spectrum from concepting and innovation through to industrialisation and scale up. The greater breadth of experience a candidate brings, the better.

We’d want someone who has led technical teams and has commercial leadership experience in either big company or start-up company environment. Breadth and adaptability are key. Commercial experience, including project planning and budget management are essential.

People skills are a key aspect of this role. You’ve got to work with people of all kinds, from the deeply technical to the highly commercial. This requires good EQ and an ability influence and lead sideways, upwards and downwards.

We’d like someone who has sufficient market knowledge to help steer the BU towards areas where people will need (and be able to pay for) consulting, and steer us away from areas where the need or ability to pay are less.

Our technical work is often very analytical and data driven, whilst our commercial activities aren’t so easy to measure and put into well-define boxes with tidy edges. You’ll need to be able to straddle those different mind-sets to guide and measure progress in commercial activities but with a recognition that the N is low and the ability to quantify cause and effect are limited.

You will need to pick up and manage a number of clients and accounts, this is something that seniors of all kinds do within the business.

Industry experience and domain knowledge are required such that the person can make informed decisions about which areas in which to prospect and how to prioritise potential client opportunities.

The role requires a person with the gravity, credibility and experience to talk and collaborate with client executive teams about technology , products and business.

A good degree in an engineering or scientific discipline. Post graduate business training would be an advantage.