Strategic Role Expectations
- Translate company strategy into clear commercial priorities, growth plans, and execution rhythms for the North American sales organization.
- Lead the commercial organization with a focus on transparency, scalability, strategic growth, profitable growth, and disciplined execution.
- Create alignment across Sales, Customer Experience Services, CRM, forecasting, pricing, customer management, and organizational processes.
- Continuously assess current state performance, identify gaps and growth blockers, and implement scalable improvements that strengthen commercial effectiveness.
- Analyze market trends, competitive landscape and technological developments to proactively shape the regional strategy.
- Strengthen ODU's positioning as a premium, high-end and solution-oriented provider within target industries.
Key Responsibilities
Commercial Strategy & Market Development
- Develop and execute the North American commercial strategy, including target markets, customer segments, applications, competitive positioning, channel strategy, distribution approach, and growth priorities.
- Identify and prioritize market, industry, customer, and channel opportunities that support sustainable and profitable growth.
- Promote ODU's value proposition as a provider of customer-specific interconnect and system solutions, creating differentiation beyond individual connector products.
- Align sales resources, investments, and organizational focus with the most attractive strategic growth opportunities.
- Evaluate market dynamics, customer trends, competitor activity, industry developments, and emerging applications to inform business strategy.
Sales & Revenue Management
- Assume full ownership of revenue, order intake, margin development and regional profitability.
- Establish and oversee the commercial operating cadence, including pipeline reviews, sales forecasting, account planning, territory management, and performance management.
- Drive accountability for revenue growth, bookings, profitability, forecast accuracy, strategic account performance, and execution of growth initiatives.
- Ensure consistent execution of sales processes, business development activities, customer engagement strategies, and regional performance expectations.
- Develop and manage sales KPIs, incentive/bonus process inputs, performance dashboards, and countermeasures when results are not meeting expectations.
Financial Understanding & Profitable Growth
- Lead commercial decision-making related to pricing strategy, margin optimization, revenue quality, and profitable growth.
- Partner closely with Finance to evaluate business performance, forecast risks, pricing decisions, margin impact, and growth opportunities.
- Ensure the sales organization balances revenue growth with profitability, quality of revenue, and long-term customer value.
CRM, Analytics & Forecasting Discipline
- Establish high standards for CRM utilization, data quality, daily dashboard usage, reporting accuracy, and sales process discipline.
- Leverage analytics, pipeline metrics, forecast trends, customer data, and market intelligence to drive informed decisions and timely action.
- Own the forecasting process and ensure timely, accurate visibility into commercial performance, forecast risk, and future business opportunities.
Customer & Market Knowledge
- Develop a deep understanding of customer needs, buying behavior, application requirements, industry trends, and market challenges.
- Build and maintain executive-level relationships with key customers, strategic accounts, partners, and industry stakeholders.
- Lead engagement on strategic accounts and high-value opportunities that are critical to long-term growth and market position.
- Strengthen ODU’s market presence through customer partnership, industry engagement, and credible commercial leadership.
- Ensure high customer satisfaction and long-term customer retention.
Leadership, Organization & Cross-Functional Alignment
- Build, lead, coach, and develop a high-performing and scalable sales organization, including Regional Sales Managers and commercial team members.
- Define team structure, accountabilities, role clarity, and processes that support growth, responsiveness, and execution consistency.
- Create a culture of accountability, transparency, collaboration, customer focus, innovation, and continuous improvement.
- Develop future sales leaders through coaching, mentoring, talent reviews, succession planning, and leadership development.
- Ensure strong cross-functional alignment across Sales, Customer Experience Services, Marketing, Product Management, Operations, Finance, and global ODU leadership.
Executive Leadership & Corporate Contribution
- Serve as an active member of the Executive Management Committee and contribute to enterprise-wide strategic planning, organizational development, and business performance discussions.
- Partner with executive leadership to identify commercial growth blockers and implement business solutions that improve scalability and performance.
- Champion company initiatives, model ODU values, and support a high-performance culture across the organization.
- Travel domestically and internationally as required to support customers, teams, industry engagement, and global alignment.
Key Performance Indicators
- Revenue and bookings growth
- Strategic account growth and customer expansion
- New customer acquisition and market penetration
- Customer retention and quality of customer relationships
- Gross margin performance and pricing effectiveness
- Forecast accuracy and forecast discipline
- Pipeline quality, conversion rates, and opportunity velocity
- CRM data quality, dashboard usage, and reporting discipline
- Sales process adoption and execution consistency
- Sales team engagement, retention, and leadership bench strength
- Cross-functional collaboration and execution of strategic initiatives
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Qualifications
- 15+ years of progressive sales or commercial leadership experience in a B2B environment.
- Significant experience leading regional, national, or multi-territory sales teams.
- Demonstrated success developing and executing commercial growth strategies across markets, customers, channels, and applications.
- Experience in technical manufacturing, interconnect, connector, cable assembly, industrial, or related engineered-product markets preferred.
- Experience within highly regulated industries such as Medical, Military / Defense, Aerospace or other regulated technology markets strongly preferred.
- Experience selling customer-specific engineered solutions, including complete interconnect systems, cable assemblies and value-added technical solutions.
- Strong understanding of sales operations, CRM systems, forecasting methodologies, commercial analytics, pricing strategy, and account management disciplines.
- Proven ability to drive profitable growth through strategic customer development, market expansion, and disciplined sales execution.
- Bachelor’s degree in Business, Engineering, International Business, or related field preferred; advanced degree a plus.
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Knowledge, Skills & Competencies
- Strategic business and commercial planning
- Executive-level communication, influence, and stakeholder management
- Market development, competitive analysis, and growth strategy
- Experience with solution selling and consultative sales approaches for engineered customer-specific solutions.
- Strategic account management and executive customer engagement
- Financial acumen, margin awareness, pricing discipline, and revenue quality management
- CRM discipline, data analytics, forecasting, and performance dashboard management
- Sales process design, pipeline management, and performance accountability
- Organizational leadership, coaching, and talent development
- Change leadership, process improvement, and organizational scalability
- Cross-functional collaboration across Sales, CES, Marketing, Product Management, Operations, Finance, and global stakeholders
The Vice President of Sales, North America is responsible for defining and executing the commercial growth strategy for North America. As a member of the Executive Management Committee, this leader partners closely with executive leadership, Product Management, Marketing, Operations, Finance, Customer Experience Services, and global stakeholders to identify growth opportunities, strengthen strategic customer relationships, expand market presence, and develop scalable commercial capabilities that support long-term, sustainable growth.
This role serves as a key architect of the company’s growth strategy, balancing near-term business objectives with long-term market development, customer expansion, revenue quality, profitability, and commercial excellence. The Head of Sales is accountable for moving the organization beyond tactical sales management toward strategic growth leadership, disciplined execution, and executive-level customer partnership.
Compensation
The salary range for this role is $230,000 to $275,000 plus bonus potential; however, ODU considers several factors when extending an offer, including but not limited to, the role and associated responsibilities, a candidate’s work experience, location, education/training, and key skills.
