AddressGeneral information
Job Title
Strategic Sales Director - UK&I
City
London
Country
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Division
Commercial
Department
Sales EMEA
Description
Thought Machine’s mission is bold – to properly and permanently rid the world’s banks of legacy technology. To achieve this, we have developed the foundations of modern banking and built core and payments technology which runs natively in the cloud. What we are attempting is hard and means we need great people working together to build great technology.
We have grown rapidly in the past few years – growing our team to more than 550 individuals across offices in London, New York, Singapore and Sydney. We have raised more than $500m in funding and are now valued at $2.7bn. Our investors include Molten Ventures, Eurazeo, Intesa Sanpaolo, Temasek, Nyca Partners, JPMorgan Chase, Standard Chartered, and more. We have created a culture enabling our team to produce the best work in the industry, ensuring we have fun along the way. We're regularly cited as having a fantastic workplace culture and have been recognised by Sifted magazine as having one of the highest Glassdoor ratings for a UK fintech company and the most generous employee share package in the industry. We've been named AltFi's B2B Fintech of the Year, placed in the FinTech50, and named one of Europe’s fastest-growing companies by the Financial Times in 2023.
We are looking for a Strategic Sales Director to be responsible for the UK&I region and own the entire sales cycle for that area. This includes building and forecasting the pipeline, qualifying the leads generated by yourself, the marketing team and our partner organisations, and managing large contracts to close. You need to be tech and business-savvy, but you will also have the full support of the sales and marketing teams. This role is suitable for a candidate who enjoys the opportunity to build a regional footprint from scratch, work autonomously and can work closely together across teams.
Duties
- Develop and deliver proposals that consider customer and prospect priorities and critical needs.
- Build and develop relationships at multiple levels: sponsors, influencers, and decision-makers across the region to generate interest and add to the pipeline.
- Exceed annual regional goals for software licensing and professional services contracts.
- Partnership with sales engineers and delivery and marketing teams to create targeted sales campaigns.
- Manage your time between advancing the "good fit" leads with high odds / short-term wins and stimulating opportunities that will develop over the long term.
- Understand the needs and problems of potential and existing customers and interact with our in-house product and development teams.
- Develop and implement the regional sales plan.
Requirements
Essential
- Proven track record of exceeding software sales targets.
- Experience selling enterprise software or services to Tier 1 and 2 banks/financial institutions.
- Knowledge and experience of banking procurement practices and processes and overall typical sales lifecycle for selling enterprise platforms into banks
- Excellent understanding of the issues facing retail banks, ranging from technological, regulatory and commercial pressures.
- Proven ability to generate leads and show a high conversion rate to completion.
- Able to quickly understand prospective clients' needs to converse competently regarding the proposition's technical and commercial aspects.
- Robust objection handling and negotiation skills. Ability to handle both with grace and professionalism.
- Able to build credible, trustworthy, and lasting relationships and handle and influence key decision-makers, especially at the C-suite level in organisations.
- Experience in fast-paced start-ups and/or selling enterprise software in more established companies.
- Able to demonstrate consistently hitting and exceeding sales targets
- Bring energy, weight and passion into the conversation.
- Knowledge of domain-driven design, BIAN, and modern event-driven system architecture.
Desirable
- Strong experience and understanding of cloud infrastructure technology
- Experience having worked in a global scale-up/ being an early-stage employee in a new market
- Understanding of core banking modernisation and the challenges of moving from mainframe to cloud
Benefits
- Highly competitive salary
- Pension plan (match up to 7%)
- Life insurance - three times annual salary
- Competitive maternity (6 months fully paid) and paternity leave (4 week fully paid)
- Shared parental leave (matched to our maternity leave for the same point in time)
- 25 days holiday and bank holidays
- Private health insurance with Bupa for you and your family
- Health cash plan (including dental and optical)
- Flexible working hours
- Cycle-to-work scheme
- Electric car scheme
- Season ticket loan
- Access to outstanding learning materials and courses
- Sports and hobby clubs, subsidised by Thought Machine
- All the latest tech you need
- Start the day properly with fresh fruit and cereals
- Huge range of healthy (and not-so-healthy) snacks, smoothies and drinks
- A talented and experienced team as your colleagues
- An environment where we encourage learning and progress
- Two charity days a year
- Weekly food pop up
Thought Machine is committed to making a measurable positive impact on people's everyday lives. We are an equal-opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We actively hire candidates who demonstrate technical excellence in their field and welcome people of all ages and backgrounds, providing everyone with equal access to professional development. You are encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn't accurately match the job description. We also encourage applications from those with different abilities, including candidates with ADHD, autism, dyslexia or dyspraxia.
