Position: Sales Director - Africa

Preferred location: Johannesburg

Position Description

The Africa Commercial Leader creates the strategic direction for the LSG business. The Leader ensures a focus on people and partner selection, performance management, growth, continuous improvement and compliance with standardized practices. This role drives the local direct sales team and sets forth the channel and business strategy and business model for Africa. The Commercial leader builds strong relationships with the channel partners to drive business growth, manage opportunities and drive efficiency in highly complex marketplaces. The Commercial Leader is accountable for delivering agreed sales and financial targets, leveraging the LSG matrix organization to support and drive the indirect business with LSG partners.

This role has responsibility for driving the sales in BID, GSD and CSD, whilst supporting the sales activities through workflow selling for BPD and LPD. In addition, this role has a secondary responsibility to deliver sales revenue at a country level through influence, support and direct involvement with multiple EMEA business areas, e.g. HID, Oncology, Reproductive Health, Service, LCS, Genotyping, Genetic Testing Solutions etc.

Skills and Capabilities

• Directs and manages the local direct sales team
• Builds and develops highly motivated and powerful teams.
• Develops strategies for the channels, appoints and dismisses channel partners to drive growth and customer satisfaction.
• Ensures best teamwork cross-functional practices to support channel partners and end-users.
• Strong cultural awareness and an ability to build successful relationships
• Engages resources from across the organisation to support growth in the markets.
• Leads, mentors, coaches and drives engagement in the commercial teams (own and distributors’).
• Implements and monitors effective performance management of channel partners, including compliance with financial & regulatory management practices
• Addresses and resolves channel partner issues
• Drives actions and solutions to completion
• Manages relationships with customers, distributors and global partners

• Excellent interpersonal skills and an ability to influence across multiple cultures, regions, and functions, and operate at all levels in the business
• Must have the presence, visibility and personality to quickly establish credibility with customers, channel partners, industry Key Opinion Leaders and related authorities.
• Must be highly collaborative and engaging, a strong relationship builder and comfortable in highly matrixed and complex environments.
• Must be self-confident and possess the right balance of both strategic and tactical thinking.
• Drives employee engagement as a manager, coach, mentor and thought leader
• Excellent influencing, communication, leadership & presentation skills
• Ability to establish short & long-term business objectives.

Problem Solving

• Strong cultural awareness and an ability to build successful relationships
• Capability to create, read and understand complex data in order to manage financial targets and ensure metrics are being tracked and reported appropriately.
• Consistently monitors results of sales processes, including sales forecasting, pipeline management, and sales tracking through the use of the CRM system and other designated IT tools.
• Strong influencing skills and ability to work in a highly matrixed organisation
• Ability to work across multiple geographies and network cross-divisionally to leverage scale across the entire business
• Develops and maintains an up to date knowledge of the LSG portfolio and understands markets and buying practices required to effectively compete in the global Life sciences market
• Ensures that comprehensive product and application knowledge is used to successfully conduct effective consultative and strategic selling presentations

Please send in your application, including a cover letter in English via our careers website http://jobs.thermofisher.com/ Reference: 133696BR. Please apply as soon as possible, the position will be filled as soon as suitable candidate is found.

About us:

Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. is the world leader in serving science, with annual revenue exceeding $25 billion. Our Mission is to enable our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer. Whether our customers are accelerating life sciences research, solving complex analytical challenges, improving patient diagnostics and therapies or increasing productivity in their laboratories, we are here to support them. Our global team of more than 80,000 colleagues delivers an unrivalled combination of innovative technologies, purchasing convenience and pharmaceutical services through our industry-leading brands, including Thermo Scientific, Applied Biosystems, Invitrogen, Fisher Scientific, Unity Lab Services and Patheon. For more information, please visit www.thermofisher.com.