Business Development Manager, Life Sciences

About this role

About us CF is a leading consultancy dedicated to making an enduring positive impact on health and healthcare. Our purpose is to have enduring positive impact on health and healthcare. Our mission is to be invaluable to our clients, supporting them to innovate and make lasting improvements — and to build an exceptional company that attracts, develops and retains a trusted team. CF serves the entire healthcare sector — from health systems, life sciences companies, and health tech to investors and the voluntary sector. Our Life Sciences practice helps pharma, biotech, and medtech clients drive rapid adoption of innovation, enabled by our deep health systems expertise and unmatched access to health data. We combine rigorous analytical problem-solving with genuine knowledge of how health systems work — not as an external observer, but as trusted advisors who work with NHS leaders and life sciences companies from the same integrated team. As an inclusive and values-driven organisation, we are committed to excellence. With unmatched access to UK healthcare data and specialist data science expertise, our consultants are a driving force for enduring, positive change. About the role CF is seeking a Business Development Manager for its Life Sciences practice. Our practice is built on cultivating relationships grounded in trust combined with demonstrating genuine insight into their challenges. Business development at CF is both relational and substantive: it requires the ability to engage as a peer with senior client stakeholders combined with domain expertise, structured thinking, and collaborative problem solving. We do not use outbound origination and prospecting. But you will only succeed in this role if you enjoy meeting new people, taking initiative, and working as a team squad to pursue a set of proactive priorities and responding with agility to inbound requests. The BD Manager works alongside the practice’s Managing Partner and Director as a domain-expert contributor — deepening client relationships, shaping bespoke propositions, and ensuring that CF’s intellectual offer reaches the people who need it most. This is a player-manager role. The BD Manager has line management responsibility for two roles: the BD Consultant (a full time BD role at consultant level) and the BD Digital and AI-Enabled Intelligence Coordinator (a role shared with the Health Investing practice). The BD Manager leads by example rather than by delegation alone, remaining personally active in client relationships, proposal development, and thought leadership, while directing, supporting, and developing a small team. It demands someone who can contribute to client conversations as a credible expert, develop compelling proposals, build CF’s presence in the life sciences market, and bring out the best in the people around them. The practice CF's Life Sciences practice serves pharma, biotech, and medtech clients focused primarily on accelerating the adoption of innovation, supporting clients to embed products and innovations in health systems, with a focus on market access, launch strategy, and adoption pathways. CF’s distinctive proposition is drive prove the uptake of population health medicines which can deliver a triple win for patients, health systems and pharma. We support life sciences to  partner with the health system to lift adoption, measure the effect end to end with CF’s access to data, and publish it. This rests on an inside-out understanding of health systems and on leveraging data, digital and AI, focused on population health, where a triple win exists of better outcomes, lower system costs and stronger returns for life sciences. The agreed direction is to shift increasingly from the UK to the global level and to engage earlier in the product life cycle. We are seeking to be at the forefront of efforts to integrate and adopt our rich access to data and use of AI into a disruptor in the market based. In addition there are two supporting service lines related to this theme: Data, Digital, AI and Evidence: leveraging CF's unmatched access to NHS data, real-world evidence capability, and health analytics expertise to generate insights that drive commercial and clinical decisions Policy and Influencing: shaping the conditions in which innovations succeed through evidence-based engagement with regulators, HTA bodies, health systems, data infrastructure and government Our clients include market access leads, medical affairs directors, commercial strategy heads, and health economics functions — alongside critical roles in regulators and health systems related to regulation, policy, and engagement with life sciences. Requirements What you will do 1. Build and sustain client relationships The primary purpose of this role is to cultivate the relationships that lead to consulting engagements. CF's model is relational and collaborative — engagements are earned through demonstrated expertise and genuine understanding of client challenges. You will: Maintain and develop a portfolio of senior relationships across priority pharma, biotech, and medtech accounts, with a focus on market access, medical affairs, and commercial functions Engage clients in genuine problem-solving conversations — bringing insight, asking the right questions, and helping clients to articulate challenges that CF is positioned to address Support the practice leadership in preparing for and following up on client meetings, ensuring that every interaction advances the relationship Represent CF at industry events, conferences, and roundtables — contributing intellectually, not just attending Identify emerging opportunities and bring them to the practice leadership with a clear view of relevance and potential approach 2. Lead proposition and proposal development Working alongside the Director and BD Consultant, you will play an active and substantive role in developing CF's propositions and proposals. This is collaborative intellectual work. You…