Business Development Manager

WHO WE ARE
Notion is the collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents think together https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkpYpWfEK5s. We're building one place where your knowledge, projects, meetings, and AI tools live side by side, so work is faster, clearer, and less fragmented. Millions of individuals, small teams, and large companies run their work on Notion.
Notinos (our employees) are customer zero in bringing this future of work to life. We care about craft, building things that last, and the belief that great work is still fundamentally human. Our goal isn’t to ship the next feature. Each and every team of Notinos is working to set the standard for how humans work together in the AI era. From building a business’s system of record to making and managing AI agents to automating away the busy work, we care deeply about giving our customers more time for their life’s work.
ABOUT US:
Notion helps you build beautiful tools for your life’s work. In today's world of endless apps and tabs, Notion provides one place for teams to get everything done, seamlessly connecting docs, notes, projects, calendar, and email—with AI built in to find answers and automate work. Millions of users, from individuals to large organizations like Toyota, Figma, and OpenAI, love Notion for its flexibility and choose it because it helps them save time and money.
In-person collaboration is essential to Notion's culture. We require all team members to work from our offices on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, our designated Anchor Days. Certain teams or positions may require additional in-office workdays.
ABOUT THE ROLE:
Notion is looking for a Business Development Manager to recruit, develop, and lead a high-performing team of Business Development Representatives in Japan. The BDR team is often the first human interaction prospective customers have with Notion and plays a critical role in creating qualified pipeline, expanding our market presence, and developing the next generation of Notion sellers.
You will own the Japan BDR business end to end: setting strategy, building the operating cadence, hiring and developing talent, and delivering predictable pipeline outcomes. You will partner closely with Japan Sales leadership, Marketing, Revenue Operations, Solutions Consultants, Outcomes Architects, and regional peers to build a locally relevant, AI-enabled prospecting and qualification motion.
The ideal candidate is both a leader and a builder. You can translate regional priorities into clear territory and pipeline plans, coach BDRs to run high-quality first meetings and technical discovery, and stay hands-on enough to demonstrate what great looks like. You bring urgency, agency, learning velocity, and curiosity about AI to a fast-moving environment.
WHAT YOU'LL ACHIEVE:
1. Own the Japan BDR strategy and operating system: Build and run a rigorous weekly cadence across pipeline, conversion, forecast, talent, and hiring; turn business insights into clear priorities, owners, and actions.
2. Deliver predictable pipeline outcomes: Consistently achieve team pipeline targets by improving account prioritization, outbound execution, inbound qualification, meeting quality, and conversion to qualified opportunities.
3. Build and develop a winning team: Attract, assess, hire, onboard, coach, retain, and promote exceptional BDR talent while raising the performance bar with every hire.
4. Coach modern discovery and qualification: Enable BDRs to understand customer workflows, technology stacks, developer tools, AI priorities, and commercial context; ensure clear documentation and high-quality handoffs to Solutions Consultants and Sales.
5. Raise the quality of first customer interactions: Establish standards for research, point of view, executive presence, active listening, facilitation, follow-up, and clear next steps so prospects receive a first-class experience.
6. Lead an AI-enabled BDR motion: Encourage experimentation with Notion AI, Custom Agents, Developer Platform workflows, coding agents, and other AI tools to improve research, prospecting, meeting preparation, coaching, and team productivity.
7. Partner cross-functionally: Work with Marketing, Revenue Operations, Solutions Consultants, Outcomes Architects, and regional leaders on territory design, campaigns, events, pipeline programs, qualification standards, and feedback loops.
8. Operate as a player-coach: Stay close to the work by joining customer calls, reviewing messaging and account plans, unblocking difficult opportunities, and creating reusable examples that show the team what good looks like.
9. Lead through change: Communicate the why, what, and next steps clearly; model new behaviors; address resistance directly; and reinforce standards until new ways of working become durable.
10. Shape Notion’s go-to-market motion in Japan: Bring customer, market, and team insights back to SC, Marketing, Product, and regional leadership to improve our playbooks, programs, and product strategy.
SKILLS YOU'LL NEED TO BRING:
- Experience managing and developing a high-performing BDR or Sales Development team in Japan, with a strong track record against pipeline and revenue goals.
- Ability to run the business end to end: set targets, inspect pipeline and conversion, forecast accurately, allocate resources, hire to plan, and take decisive action on performance gaps.
- Demonstrated success coaching early-career sellers across account prioritization, outbound prospecting, qualification, discovery, phone skills, executive communication, and cross-functional handoffs.
- Strong talent judgment and a consistent approach to hiring, onboarding, coaching, feedback, career development, promotion, and performance management.
- A player-coach mentality and the credibility to demonstrate high-quality customer engagement, opportunity strategy, and operational execution firsthand.
- Strong commercial judgment and an understanding of recurring-revenue business models, pipeline creation, value selling, and the connection between qualified customer problems and revenue outcomes.
- The technical curiosity to understand customer workflows, technology stacks, developer tools, AI use cases, integrations, security considerations, and where Notion fits.
- Hands-on interest in AI. You do not need to be an engineer, but you should actively test AI tools, build useful internal workflows, and help the team apply them to real work.
- High urgency and agency: you create momentum without waiting for perfect information, take ownership through ambiguity, and learn quickly from setbacks.
- High EQ, strong executive presence, and the ability to influence through empathy, persuasion, negotiation, and clear decision-making.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to translate data and qualitative signals into focused action.
- Fluency in Japanese and business-level English, with the ability to lead locally and collaborate effectively across regional and global teams.
NICE TO HAVES:
- Experience building or scaling a BDR function, sales playbook, qualification framework, or new-market go-to-market motion in Japan.
- Experience partnering closely with Account Executives, Solutions Consultants, Marketing, Revenue Operations, and post-sales teams.
- Familiarity with selling AI, collaboration, developer-platform, productivity, or workflow solutions to mid-market and enterprise customers.
- Experience designing enablement programs and reusable coaching systems that improve team learning velocity.
- Experience using Notion, Notion AI, Custom Agents, coding agents, or other AI tools to improve sales workflows.
- Experience working in a high-growth, rapidly evolving global technology company.
A NOTE ON AI
You don’t need deep AI expertise for every role, but we do expect every Notino to be intellectually curious, drawn to tinkering and discovery, and excited to use AI as a real collaborator in their work. For some roles, AI fluency is a core requirement — when that’s the case, we'll say so explicitly in the qualifications. People who thrive here don’t treat AI as a novelty. They use it to think better, and make their work easier for others to build on.
EQUAL OPPORTUNITY & ACCOMMODATIONS
We hire talented people from a wide range of backgrounds. If you’re excited about this role but don’t meet every bullet, we still encourage you to apply. Notion is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of any legally protected characteristic. Consistent with applicable law, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. Notion provides reasonable accommodations during the application process; if you need one, please let your recruiter know.
Notion is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or any employment decision based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. Notion considers qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Notion is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, please let your recruiter know.

Employment type
FullTime

Work arrangement
Yes