Head of Sales - SIX UK at Thales

• The Secure Communications and Information Systems (SIX) team in the UK is seeking an entrepreneurial, creative and collaborative Head of Sales, to lead strategic growth initiatives for both the domestic market and our product exports. These solutions span the military secure communications and information systems market segment; from tactical communications through to complex integrated Naval communications, SATCOM, Cyber solutions & Crypto and CEMA (Cyber Electro Magnetic Activities). The successful candidate will be capable of driving market leading growth, through team leadership and the ability to run complex and strategic campaigns.

Primary Purpose of the Role:

• Accountable and responsible for achieving or exceeding the budgeted Order Intake for SIX (Secure Communications & Information Systems) Domain.
• Sales and Capture Leadership in the SIX.
• Where required, leading on a critical/complex capture.
• Strategic business development and setting the growth vision for SIX, by working in cooperation with the Business Line Sales leads, the Managing Director and the Portfolio Managers.
• Management and growth of pipeline, ensuring GMOI meets /exceeds multiyear budgets.
• Ensuring proactive customer relationships are made and maintained.
• Adherence to governance and quality management of all Capture Campaigns in the domain.
• Team leadership including developing the professional capability of his / her sales & product team.
• Manage Sales budgets as approved in the MYB process, and collaborate with the Portfolio Leads to manage SFRD.
• Ensuring appropriate sales governance is implemented and data integrity maintained.

Principal Relationships:

• The jobholder reports to MD SIX and with a dotted line to the Chief Growth Officer Thales UK. Annual objective setting and performance against those objectives will be jointly undertaken but led by MD SIX.
• The jobholder will need to develop significant networks & build key relationships built on trust and credibility externally with customers, partners, front line commands, DE&S, the NAD and other key government departments
• The jobholder will need to develop significant internal networks with peers and senior managers at UK, Domain, Group and Country of destination / Country of origin level.

Key Responsibilities and Tasks:

• Responsible for achieving annual order intake targets for the SIX business unit.
• Responsible for maintaining SIX opportunity data integrity within the Thales360 CRM tool, ensuring appropriate order intake targets are set by the CBU and GBU.
• Responsible for keeping an accurate pipeline of opportunities in T360, growing the pipeline and using the governance rules effectively to ensure a credible weighted value of the pipe.
• Setting the strategic business development objectives for the business and agreeing them with VP Sales UK and the MD SIX.
• Responsible for leading, developing and organising a team of individual sales contributors, Sales Managers, Capture Leaders, Business Development Managers and Sales Operations to achieve the strategic and operational objectives.
• Leads, appropriately delegates activities, coordinates and motivates the team for performance, efficiency and timeliness.
• Responsible for the day to day relationship and management of the key internal sales stakeholders, such as BL Sales Directors, the GBU VP of Sales and the UK Key Account Management Team
• Utilising the Competitive & Marketing Intelligence team and the Market segment analysis of worldwide trends, customer needs, and competitor analysis, to drive relevant product line strategies
• A significant contributor to the generation of the SIX UK Strategic Business Plan, working closely with the Product Strategy Director, the MD, central marketing team and Portfolio Leads.

Behavioural Competencies, Technical Skills And Experience
Competencies
The Head of Sales will demonstrate the following:

• Comfortable operating in complex and matrixed organization and drive results out of ambiguity.
• Builds and orchestrates complex multifunctional teams across organizational boundaries.
• Seeks out responsibility for the most challenging and high profile assignments.
• Always delivers what is promised; takes extraordinary steps to achieve major goals; pursues objectives with energy, drive and need to finish.
• Leads with humility and supports his/her team to overcome challenges.
• Creates a highly accountable, high performance culture at all levels.
• Is an entrepreneurial risk taker; prepared to take calculated risks to achieve significant outcomes.
• Collaborative style which builds close and trustful relationships both internally and externally.
• Able to finely balance entrepreneurial spirit and drive for growth, with business acumen and awareness of budgets.
• Quickly understand how organisations operate and can read complex political environments; leverages relationships to optimum effect.
• Has a track record of shaping the thinking of top management and the most senior customers.
• Handles highly sensitive situations assertively, prepared to push back and challenge at senior levels and customers.
• Enables others to maintain perspective in difficult circumstances; avoids passing own stress to others.

Experience

• Proven track record of building key customer relationships.
• Proven track record of winning large orders and delivering complex bids within Defence and Aerospace.
• Strong experience in Defence, preferably in the C4i and Cyber domains.
• Proven track record in implementing a step change in organisational capability.
• An awareness of the Product Lifecycles.
• Experienced in using sound judgement to apply a broad range of key commercial principles to improve the viability of bids e.g. margin, costs, pricing (including for inflation over time), funding, discounting, payments, hedging, export finance etc.