Head of Commercial Capability

Role Overview

This role owns the regional commercial capability agenda across multiple markets — the strategies, standards and learning architecture that determine how sales and customer-facing teams sell, develop customers, manage distributors and execute in trade. Operating without a direct team, the job holder sets direction and then works through capability managers in each market to make sure new skills, tools and ways of working actually take hold in the field. It matters because commercial growth targets stand or fall on whether the people executing in-market have the capability, coaching and confidence to deliver them.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and continually refresh the multi-year regional commercial capability strategy, aligning it to growth ambitions and making deliberate choices about where capability investment will have the greatest strategic return given organisational readiness.
• Own the regional frameworks and standards spanning sales, customer development, distributor management, route-to-market, commercial leadership and execution excellence — including selling standards, commercial competencies, proficiency expectations and certification criteria.
• Design the regional capability architecture: curricula, learning pathways and capability journeys for priority commercial populations, supported by clear design principles and methodologies for coaching, field immersion and accreditation.
• Keep governance tight — define assessment approaches, consistency checks and operating rhythms so standards hold steady from one market to the next.
• Look ahead at the skills digital commerce, data-led decision making and evolving route-to-market models will require, then build the frameworks that help markets adopt new commercial tools, technologies and ways of working.
• Establish capability scorecards, success measures, reporting frameworks and maturity indicators, and use them to track organisational readiness across the region.
• Interrogate capability performance data, assessment results and business outcomes to spot improvement opportunities, recommend enhancements to existing frameworks, and drive best-practice exchange between markets.
• Maintain the regional repository of capability assets, standards and learning intellectual property so markets adapt proven material rather than rebuilding it.

Requirements & Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent professional experience in finance, business, commercial, legal, operations or a related discipline.
• A recognised learning, instructional-design or change qualification is an advantage, as are facilitation or train-the-trainer credentials.
• Broad commercial and customer-operations understanding, with the ability to translate subjects such as CLM, pricing, customer investment, M&E, cash collection, order-to-cash, and data and digital tools into clear process and learning outcomes.
• Demonstrated experience defining and applying learning and adoption measures — proficiency, confidence, application and business-impact indicators.
• Proven ownership of end-to-end learning programmes across multiple workstreams or markets: needs analysis, curriculum architecture, content development, facilitation, train-the-trainer, certification, deployment and reinforcement, with strong instructional-design and facilitation capability across blended learning solutions.
• A consultative delivery style: diagnosing the real problem, building the case, securing commitment from senior stakeholders who do not report to you, and converting that commitment into genuine adoption. Comfortable being measured on whether the business changed rather than whether the deliverable shipped.
• Comfortable translating market requirements into scalable regional process and product design, and familiar with the supporting tools — CLM and Trace-type tooling, global learning platforms, content governance and localisation.
• No direct reports: influence, coaching and collaboration with capability managers in the markets is the primary mechanism for delivery.