Company overview:
With an uncompromising commitment to British manufacturing, Soane Britain's mission is to design and make enduring and life-enhancing furniture, lighting, fabrics and wallpapers through collaborations with a network of the finest craftspeople in Britain. Soane combines responsibly sourced, high-quality materials and superb workmanship to ensure our designs endure for generations.
Our talented team is based in offices and workshops in Leicester and the West Country and showrooms in London and New York. For more information, please visit www.soane.com or join our social media platforms Pinterest and Instagram.
Purpose of the position:
This is a newly created position with opportunities for growth for the right candidate. You will coach, lead and manage our UK & Export Client Development and global Sales Operations teams who are based in London and Leicester.
Reporting to the Managing Director, you will also have dotted line support from and reporting to our Global Sales Director, who is based in New York.
Our UK & Export Client Development team manages the relationships and trade accounts for 3000 global interior designers, architects and specifiers. We are lucky to work with most firms in the House & Carden Top 100, as well as on globally anticipated hotel and restaurant openings.
Offering fabrics, wallpapers, furniture, lighting, bespoke and commercial capabilities our business is complex but highly rewarding. Our continued sales growth requires deep levels of passion for our mission and a relentless desire to build relationships, increase the number of buying clients and deepen existing clients' breadth and frequency of purchasing.
Our Sales Operations team, based in London and Leicester, provides a pivotal link between our clients and client-facing sales team with other pillars of the business, most notably Manufacturing, Product and logistics. Sales Operations provides a framework of excellence for the sales process, from opening trade accounts, quoting and invoicing through to in-production queries which as far as possible is consistent across product categories and sales territories.
Key Skills:
- Delivering consistent sales growth by identifying market needs and providing quantitative feedback to a business that is passionate about quality and consistency.
- Leading a team to exceed activity and sales targets and establish a repeatable, profitable sales process.
- H2H sales expertise with a proven ability to build relationships and communicate effectively with high-level contacts, including in key export markets
- Strong leadership which is values driven and low ego. You will have a talent for motivating and inspiring teams without compromising our personal relationships and service.
- Great presentation and organizational skills.
- Peer engagement to find constant improvements, solve problems and gain a deep knowledge of our design process, launch strategy and workshop capabilities.
- Hand-on approach. Thrives in a collaborative office setting, dedicated to being present and leading by example.
- Data driven to provide KPis to the team, including the senior management team.
Skills:
- At lea t 5 years of demonstrable success in a business-to-business sales or business development role, ideally in the interiors or hospitality industry
- Ideally you will be interested in sustainability in design and design integrity and some knowledge of design influences will be an advantage
- You should be able to provide examples of how your leadership has inspired others to sales success We would like excellent references from people we can speak to!
- Confidence using Microsoft Office, Excel and Power Point to deliver commercial strategies and analysis A working knowledge of SAP Business 1 and/or Power BI an advantage
- Languages an advantage
- You will need a car and driving licence to visit clients and workshops Some international travel will be required to develop key export markets