Cbonds
Head of Business Development
“Open the MENA institutional segment for a mature financial data platform — building pipeline from zero through C-level relationships across banks, sovereign funds, and asset managers.”
The situation
Established financial data business with a product focused on fixed income markets, historically concentrated in Russia and CIS. The mandate was international expansion into MENA institutional buyers with no existing regional relationships. Joined as the company was already pivoting toward international markets, which insulated the mandate from the impact of sanctions on the Russian business.
What I did
Designed and executed the MENA market entry personally — prospect research, product demonstrations, institutional webinars, and enterprise contract negotiations — traveling to Dubai and regional financial centers to meet C-level buyers across banks, sovereign wealth funds, family offices, asset managers, and fixed income departments.
Built an AI-assisted lead sourcing and qualification workflow: Apollo for prospect identification and enrichment, n8n and Make for automated verification and data processing, feeding refined, validated leads into Notion and then the CRM — significantly compressing manual research time and improving outreach quality.
Documented and codified the commercial methodology in Notion; introduced the firm's first formal partner program.
Deployed Power BI for pipeline visibility and commercial reporting across the MENA mandate.
Outcomes
~20% total revenue growth; ~15% growth in recurring revenue.
~30% increase in sales output; ~40% reduction in client integration time following automation rollout.
Partner program launched; full MENA institutional pipeline built from zero.
C-level relationships established across banks, sovereign funds, family offices, and asset managers across the Gulf.
Each metric is from period reporting at the time of engagement and verifiable against employer records on request.