Sales Director – Southern and Eastern Africa

SUMMARY:

Sales Director – Southern and Eastern Africa

Role Purpose

POSITION INFO:

Key Responsibilities

• Lead, coach, and performance-manage the sales team, application sales resources, and channel or regional sales managers where applicable.
• Maintain strong frontline engagement with customers and drive new business development, key account growth, and strategic opportunity conversion.
• Develop and execute the sales strategy for industrial vacuum, blower, engineered system, and aftermarket offerings across target sectors and territories.
• Own pipeline quality, forecasting accuracy, deal reviews, and CRM discipline to improve conversion, visibility, and execution.
• Drive pricing discipline and value-based selling, ensuring bids, tenders, and major quotations protect margin while remaining commercially competitive.
• Grow aftermarket revenue through spare parts, repairs, field service, retrofits, audits, controls upgrades, monitoring, and service agreements.
• Develop and manage distributors, agents, and channel partners, including coverage models, account ownership, training, and performance management.
• Lead commercial input into strategic quotations, contracts, and negotiations, and ensure effective handover to project execution and service teams.
• Work closely with engineering, service, operations, finance, and supply chain teams to align commercial commitments with operational capability.
• Provide leadership with clear reporting on order intake, revenue, gross margin, market share, pipeline health, and key commercial risks.

Key Accountabilities

• Order intake, revenue growth, and gross margin performance.
• Customer-facing revenue generation through key accounts and new business development.
• Building, coaching, and leading a high-performing sales operation.
• Market share growth in priority segments across Southern and Eastern Africa.
• Installed-base penetration, replacement capture, and aftermarket growth.
• Forecast accuracy, pipeline quality, and commercial execution discipline.
• Distributor performance and route-to-market effectiveness.
• Bid discipline, pricing governance, and commercial risk management.

Candidate Profile

Experience

• Minimum 3 years’ experience in a senior sales management role, with 5 years preferred, within an international OEM or comparable industrial equipment environment.
• Proven success in selling industrial equipment, engineered solutions, or aftermarket services into industrial and process markets.
• Strong experience managing long-cycle sales involving multiple decision-makers, technical evaluation, and procurement processes.
• Demonstrated success leading direct sales teams and, ideally, distributor or channel networks.
• Experience in sectors such as food processing, packaging, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, plastics, metals, power, automotive, paper, wastewater, medical, research and development, oil and gas, or general industry is highly desirable.
• Experience handling major quotations, tenders, contract negotiations, and strategic accounts.

Technical and Commercial Knowledge

• Familiarity with vacuum, blower, or related industrial system applications would be advantageous, although deep product-specific knowledge is not essential.
• Strong understanding of lifecycle cost, total cost of ownership, energy efficiency, uptime, reliability, and operating cost reduction.
• Commercial understanding of installed-base strategy, aftermarket economics, pricing, margin management, and service-led revenue models.

Leadership Capabilities

• Ability to build and lead a high-performing sales operation.
• Commercially disciplined, data-driven, and decisive.
• Ability to coach teams in consultative and value-based selling.
• Confident in executive-level customer engagement and negotiation.
• Strong cross-functional leadership and stakeholder management capability.
• Ability to operate effectively in both strategic and hands-on sales environments.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Business, or a related discipline.
• An MBA or relevant commercial qualification would be advantageous.
• Valid driver’s license and willingness to travel extensively across the region.

Personal Attributes

• Commercially rigorous and margin-aware
• Structured, analytical, and highly disciplined
• Customer-focused but not price-led
• Credible with both technical and executive stakeholders
• Resilient in competitive, long-cycle selling environments
• Able to balance short-term delivery with long-term strategic positioning