Sales Lead - IN, SL & PK

Role Purpose

The Sales Lead needs to be a proven leader, exhibiting an entrepreneurial mindset, with a strong track record in sales delivery, a history of building and leading teams and excellent interpersonal skills to take a hands on approach in ensuring that the strategic drivers from the global plan are executed in country, across marketing, sales, Coats and partner led initiatives. 

The Sales Lead is fully responsible for the revenue contribution of the region, covering software and services to new and existing customers. The role requires the direct management of the senior and junior sales reports, and the ability to collaborate cross functionally with the technology and VAR partners, professional services, customer success and solution consulting teams to ensure a consistent, profitable and exceptional customer experience is delivered.

The Sales Lead should be a highly competent sales executive who consistently converts complex opportunities within new and existing customers into sales. He or she should be comfortable presenting both internally and externally to senior stake holders and drive collaboration across the business to drive excellence in the customer experience.

Principal Accountabilities and Key Activities

• Recruiting, training, developing, retaining and leading a successful regional sales team, ensuring that all staff have clear and measurable objectives, follow SOPs and company policy, and consistently deliver sales targets.
• Directly and with your team, manage the entire end to end business development process from lead generation through to close, including:
• Lead generation activities, including the identification and qualification of prospects, key decision makers and influencers, via research, cold calling and email follow up; feeding information into CRM database
• Identify and develop rapport with the decision makers at key customers and channel partners.
• Quickly getting up to speed on Coats Digital products and sales processes / plays.
• Represent Coats Digital at trade exhibitions, events and shows
• Maintain a sales pipeline of sufficient value to ensure that the sales target is achieved.
• Ensure that the team maintains detail of all sales activities and prospect status (sales stage, visit reports, proposal documents, likely value of each sale, probability and expected ‘closing’ date) in the CRM system.
• Conduct sales meetings / presentations to build credibility, understand prospect needs and demonstrate our capabilities.
• Conduct discovery sessions with prospect to understand current process and identify problems/ issues with existing processes (Pain Chain/ business process analysis).
• Review findings of discovery sessions and agree structure/ scope of custom demo, building custom demos (with pre-sales support) and presenting them to prospects as required.
• Partake in client proposals, prospect follow up, negotiation and close. Completion of sales contracts and other required documentation.
• Ensure all issues discovered during the pre-sales cycle are effectively documented in pre-sales notes. To ensure that any potential issues can be communicated to the ops team.
• Brief operations team with proposed client solution during Internal Kick Off meeting, ensure that the summary pre-sales notes are fully understood, for a ‘fast-start’ to the project.
• Attend External Kick Off meeting to ensure continuity between sales and operations.
• Any other reasonable duties that may be deemed appropriate to this role.

Collaboration and Advisory responsibilities

In addition to the main duties and responsibilities, the Sales Lead will assume an increasingly active role in contributing to the regional company-wide growth strategy, where appropriate. This will include a strong contribution to the monthly and quarterly business development plan. This will also include multi-year growth projections, strategic priorities, investment recommendations, suitable business case submissions etc., plus the preparation and submission of annual sales and cost budgets for review and approval by the Coats Senior Sales Lead.

The Sales Lead will be supported in the market by the other functional teams and will be required to collaborate with them to achieve Coats Digitals’ overall goals

• Marketing – provide feedback to the Coats Digital marketing team for any changes required on the marketing strategy and content for your local market.
• The Strategic Sales team are working with the major Brands to position our new solutions and where possible the entire portfolio.  Where needed you will collaborate by providing the necessary information and assistance.
• Work with HR to effectively manage your team, succession plan and bench of resources to ensure consistent sales delivery.

Ensure compliance with Coats Group policy

Essential

• Fluent in English as a first language
• 15 years’ Experience of consultative, B2B software and solutions sales up to C-Suite and in large, complex global businesses.
• 10years+ Experience of building, developing and leading successful sales/business development teams, including managing people, involvement in business development strategy, setting and managing of budgets etc
• A proven and consistent track record of success delivering >20% YoY revenue growth in multi-company software sales
• Superior commercial, strategic and negotiation skills.
• Best in class sales operating model and sales process management.
• Excellent communication and people skills, including face to face, over the telephone and in writing; confident in dealing with individuals at all levels of an organisation.
• Hunter mentality, proactive and independent, willing to go the extra mile.
• Strong desire to excel in a dynamic and challenging environment.
• Able to work and stay organised in a fast paced environment.
• Technically adept and capable of learning new software.
• A capable and independent operator, with a high level of personal ‘drive’ and ‘ownership’, but also the ability to work effectively as part of a team.
• Systematic and process driven with an analytical approach to problem solving / overcoming barriers. Ability to listen and interpret user needs (apart from user wants) and provide workable solutions to problems
• Able to combine strategic and ‘hands on’ approaches with the ability and willingness to learn technical detail and present/demonstrate software effectively.
• High personal standards, integrity and attention to detail, able to demonstrate effective judgement and decision making.
• A willingness to travel throughout the territory and beyond as required.

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in a business-related field, MBA preferred

Desirable

• Background knowledge and / or direct of the fashion industry, including current market dynamics, also the positioning and value of supply chain solutions (and/or similar) solutions in this environment.
• Knowledge and experience of relevant supply chain software solutions e.g. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) / Merchandise Planning, ERP, Production Planning, 3D, CAD, Quality.
• Experience of using Microsoft Solutions including Dynamics CRM.