What are the responsibilities and job description for the Business Development & Strategy Associate position at Avant-garde Health?
About Avant-garde Health
Avant-garde provides health systems, surgery centers, and physicians with comprehensive insight into their surgical care through our software and empowers them to improve their finances and deliver the best care possible to their patients. We integrate sophisticated analytics with deep industry knowledge. Avant-garde is a mission-driven company that was started in 2014 from the health care research at Harvard Business School led by Michael Porter and Bob Kaplan. We are thought leaders and our work has been recognized and featured in publications like the Harvard Business Review and The Wall Street Journal. We are well capitalized and backed by leading VCs, including General Catalyst, Founder Collective, Fulcrum Equity Partners and Tectonic Ventures.
The Role
Avant-garde Health is seeking a Business Development & Strategy Associate to to help us create new relationships with health system executives that will transform health care delivery for decades to come. Your job will be to understand what matters to the people we are looking to meet, and then write messages that get them to engage. This is not a high-volume SDR role. You will research each prospect, write tailored outreach, and engage with them across email, LinkedIn, and potentially other channels. Success in this role is measured by how many new qualified conversations you create with target prospects.
Key Responsibilities
1. Personalized Outreach & Follow-Up
- Research hospitals, executives, and recent initiatives before outreach
- Write customized emails and LinkedIn messages to CFOs, COOs, VPs, and Pop Health leaders
- Build thoughtful follow-ups based on new information (not recycled templates)
- Test subject lines, angles, and messaging to improve response rates
2. LinkedIn Engagement
- Identify and track target prospects on LinkedIn
- Engage with their posts in a thoughtful, specific way (not generic comments)
- Use engagement to build familiarity and open the door for outreach
- Continue engaging after initial outreach to increase response likelihood
3. Conversation Generation
- Turn cold prospects into warm conversations
- Book qualified meetings for our team
- Maintain clean tracking of outreach and responses in HubSpot
This role will also potentially involve going to conferences.
Skills & Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree is required.
- Exceptional writing ability — clear, concise, and specific
- 1–3 years in outbound sales, growth, or business writing
- Evidence of writing outreach that gets replies (not just activity)
- Strong research instincts — you know how to quickly understand a company and a person
- Comfort reaching out to senior executives with no prior relationship
- Curiosity to learn about people and thoughtfulness to know how to engage with their writing
- Adept at using AI tools to increase productivity
- Experience with LinkedIn
Helpful if have experience with hospitals or healthcare systems
Bonus
Want to stand out? Write a short outreach message to a health system leader and draft a thoughtful LinkedIn comment on a recent post and share with us.