About the role
Reporting to the Chief Commercial Officer, the Senior Director, Commercial Effectiveness is a strategic operator and enterprise integrator for the commercial organization. The role leads commercial effectiveness while enabling the Chief Commercial Officer to maintain focus on the highest-value priorities, decisions, relationships, and business outcomes. The role combines commercial effectiveness leadership, project and business performance management, and organizational accountability. It coordinates incentive compensation, congress planning, promotional and medical review operations, field effectiveness, CRM and commercial technology enhancements, vendor management, and appropriate budgeting.
Key Responsibilities
Congress Planning and Execution
- Coordinate cross-functional congress planning with Sales, Marketing, Medical Affairs, Market Access, Patient Advocacy, Legal, Regulatory, and Compliance.
- Oversee sponsorships, exhibits, promotional activities, materials, logistics, agency support, shipments, expense processes, and post-congress reporting.
- Lead development of the annual commercial congress strategy across national and regional meetings.
- Establish congress prioritization, participation models, budgets, staffing plans and measures of success.
Promotional and Medical Review Operations
- Provide operational leadership for Promotional Review Committee and Medical Review Committee processes, including intake, prioritization, scheduling, routing, review meetings and approvals.
- Partner with Legal, Regulatory and Medical Affairs to maintain efficient, consistent, and compliant review practices.
- Establish service levels and performance metrics for review cycle time, first-pass quality, resubmissions, aging, bottlenecks, and on-time delivery.
- Oversee administration and continuous improvement of Veeva PromoMats, MedComms, and related workflows.
- Ensure promotional labeling, copyediting, proofreading, version control, and materials management processes are clearly governed and executed
Incentive Sales Compensation and Field Force Alignment
- Lead the design, implementation, governance, and ongoing evaluation of incentive compensation plans for customer-facing commercial teams.
- Partner with Sales Leadership, Human Resources, Finance, Legal, and external vendors on incentive philosophy, performance measures, goal setting, payout and plan documentation.
- Oversee incentive calculations, quality control, quarterly reconciliations, reporting, and plan effectiveness reviews.
- Support field force sizing, deployment, territory alignment, workload assessment, and resource optimization.
Marketing Operations and Commercial Enablement
- Lead operational support for marketing execution, including project intake, agency coordination, budget tracking, production, print, inventory, warehousing, fulfillment, and digital asset deployment.
- Oversee Mobile Locker or other field content platforms, including content governance, deployment, user training, and adoption.
- Coordinate National Field Meetings, Plans of Action, launch meetings, workshops, and other commercial forums with business owners and executive administrative support.
- Partner with Sales and Marketing to ensure materials, systems, processes, and field resources are launch-ready and delivered on time.
Organizational Effectiveness and Communications
- Support communication, coordination, role clarity, and accountability across the commercial organization.
- Lead onboarding and training of commercial team members.
- Promote a culture of collaboration, disciplined execution, continuous improvement, ethical decision-making, and patient-centered commercial excellence.
- Serve as a trusted strategic and operational partner to the Chief Commercial Officer, helping translate commercial strategy into priorities, decisions, milestones, and accountable execution.
- Manage the Commercial Leadership Team operating meetings, decision forums, quarterly business reviews, and follow-up actions.
- Maintain an integrated view of commercial priorities, dependencies, risks, resource needs, and decisions; escalate issues and drive timely resolution.
- Work with Commercial Analytics to establish and maintain an enterprise commercial performance framework that links strategy, activities, leading indicators, outcomes, and performance.
Qualifications
Education and Experience
- Bachelor’s degree required; MBA or other advanced degree preferred.
- Minimum of 10 years of progressive experience in commercial operations, sales and marketing operations, or a related function within biotechnology or pharmaceuticals.
- Demonstrated experience working in cross-functional initiatives and operating effectively with executive leadership teams.
- Experience with incentive compensation, field force effectiveness, CRM strategy, commercial analytics, congress planning, and promotional/medical review operations.
- Experience supporting specialty or rare disease commercial models.
- Experience managing budgets, vendors, systems, and operational processes in a highly regulated environment.
Leadership Competencies
- Strategic integrator who can connect enterprise priorities to practical execution.
- Exceptional project, program, and portfolio management skills with strong attention to detail.
- Executive presence and judgment, with ability to handle sensitive information and communicate with clarity and discretion.
- Analytical mindset with the ability to translate data and qualitative insights into decisions and action.
- Strong facilitation, stakeholder management, influence, and conflict-resolution capabilities.
- Commitment to compliance, quality, accountability, and continuous improvement.
- Patient-centered orientation and passion for improving outcomes in rare disease and specialty markets.
Equal Employment Opportunity Statement
Zevra is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to diversity and inclusion in the workplace. We prohibit discrimination and harassment of any kind based on race, color, sex, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, genetic information, pregnancy, or any other protected characteristic as outlined by federal, state, or local laws.
Notice to External Recruiters
Zevra does not accept unsolicited resumes from agencies or search firms. Recruiters are requested not to contact employees or hiring managers. All candidate submissions must be coordinated through our Human Resources team and require a prior written agreement. Any resumes sent without such an agreement will not create any implied obligation.
About Zevra Therapeutics, Inc.
We are a rare disease therapeutics company leading with science to make life-changing therapeutics available to patients with significant unmet needs. We involve key thought leaders, physicians, patients, care partners, and advocacy groups in all of our clinical and regulatory development strategies.
With a keen understanding that drug development often requires creative solutions, we have the insight and expertise to forge new pathways to success that others have missed. By following the data without bias, our transparent narratives and common-sense perspective have successfully overcome complex development challenges to make much-needed therapies available to patients.
Nimble and dauntless, we push boundaries beyond what is thought to be possible and advance new therapies that have the potential to bring meaningful improvement to patients’ lives.