Sales Director

We are seeking a dynamic and strategic leader to drive the growth and success of the pet food business across the North America. This role is pivotal in defining and executing the regional commercial strategy in alignment with global objectives. The Sales Director will be supporting and accountable to the end-to-end P&L, ensuring top-line and bottom-line performance while fostering commercial excellence through new account penetration, cross-category growth, and strategic client relationships. Collaboration with demand planning, project management teams, and supply chain teams will be essential to optimize operations and productivity. Additionally, the role includes leading and inspiring a high-performing team, driving engagement, building succession plans, and championing a cohesive, positive culture that embodies USPN / i-Tail / Thai Union’s global vision.

Key Responsibilities :

Set strategic direction

• Define and drive execution of sales strategy across all countries / clusters in North America, incl. account prioritization and supporting KAMs on relationship management and key negotiations at the regional level (e.g., for cross-market accounts)
• Define customer-level sales KPIs across countries / clusters, monitor performance and proactively intervene to close gaps vs. targets
• Review and make recommendations to VP Sales & Marketing | Head of USPN on proposed initiatives, projects, and investments

Lead E2E P&L growth

• Drive and be accountable for topline and bottom-line performance and growing list of customers for the North America
• Be accountable for E2E profitability for the North America within agreed GPM baseline
• Support VP Sales & Marketing | Head of USPN on yearly financial targets for the North America
• Identify any financial risk that may impact achieving P&L targets, and work directly with KAMs to mitigate any issues
• Drive customer account pipeline growth and new account penetration
• Strengthen customer relationships with existing accounts, including directly managing high-priority account relationships
• Develop accounts from transactional relationships to strategic relationships
• Develop and drive implementation of initiatives to grow share of wallet, including driving cross-category sales
• Drive improvements in service levels and customer satisfaction
• Drive deployment of commercial excellence capabilities and best practices throughout North America sales and sales support teams
• Grow and maintain industry knowledge at the account level, focusing on competitor development, price levels, developments around raw materials and other cost drivers, and sustainability developments

Operational Collaboration

• Ensure that demand planning team has necessary inputs (e.g. sales forecasts) to seamlessly coordinate with Manufacturing & Supply Chain through S&OP process; share feedback on production service levels
• Jointly drive cross-country/cluster productivity improvement projects, including improving shared KPIs and accountabilities with Manufacturing & Supply Chain
• Collaborate with demand planning team to enrich demand planning baseline and provide insights on new / discontinued accounts
• Collaborate with Manufacturing & Supply Chain and other leads as needed to identify issues in production / planning (e.g., high inventory, short raw material supply) and propose joint solutions
• Collaborate with peer Commercial Leads (i.e. i-Tail Thailand, i-Tail Europe) to share market insights and adopt best practices
• Work with relevant commercial teams on joint go-to-market approaches for global / shared customers across different regions
• Work with Chicken of the Sea commercial teams on approach to shared customers (i.e., customers where we sell both human food and pet food products to)
• Drive coordination with the R&D teams to ensure seamless process for both customer development projects and new product development projects, including supporting right prioritization of projects and productivity improvements
• Oversee North America innovation pipeline for new product development projects with the R&D lead, ensuring right products are being developed, clear pipeline in place and aligned with account managers / customers, and that costs are within targets
• Work with sales support leads to track status of all running projects and provide mitigating action where needed

People and leadership

• Motivate, lead, and challenge team members to reach / exceed business unit targets and objectives
• Build/Complete the new cohesive and collaborative North America team comprising members based in different countries; drive a positive sharing culture across North America team and with other teams across Thai Union
• Create a positive working culture to attract, develop and retain talent as well as drive employee satisfaction within the scope, in collaboration with HR
• Coach teams on daily activities to fully leverage talent of the team; proactively identify high-potential talents in the team
• Be the role model on Thai Union’s 6 values and actively promotes and embeds the “One Thai Union” ethos
• Actively coach and lead teams through change and ensure that BU leadership team do the same
• Drive to improve career development paths & performance mgmt. through mentorship to enhance team motivation and retain quality talent
• Foster a culture of continuous learning and development to enhance employee skills and competencies
• Build longer term view/ plan around people, prepare succession plans at different levels
• Manage people budget for the BU, in collaboration with HR
• Be available to support and guide KAMs and other team members for day to day activities

Requirements:

• Ability to lead and motivate country / cluster teams, build a diverse and trust-based leadership team, and develop talent across country clusters within North America region
• Strong proficiency in B2B OEM sales, regional sales, business strategy, and P&L ownership with the ability to identify and analyze complex problems and develop effective solutions and develop long-term strategic plans
• Demonstrates strong relationship management skills, able to develop long-term customer relationships
• Excellent communication skills to effectively convey commercial and technicalinformation to team members, internal, and external stakeholders
• Strong interpersonal skills to foster a culture of collaboration and effectively drive cross-functional collaboration
• Proven international experience across commercial setting, and people leadership
• Experience in building new virtual teams

USPN is committed to providing equality of opportunity. If you require any reasonable adjustments to help support your application, please let us know.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer of Minorities, Females, Protected Veterans, and Individuals with Disabilities.

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