Work Schedule
Standard Office Hours (40/wk)
Environmental Conditions
Office
Job Description
Senior Director, Commercial Operations
Position Summary
The Senior Director, Commercial Operations will lead the advancement of commercial excellence, sales force effectiveness, and data-driven decision-making across the organization. Serving as a proactive, forward-looking strategic partner to senior Sales and Commercial Leadership, this individual will anticipate business needs, identify emerging performance trends, and translate data and market intelligence into actionable recommendations that improve commercial execution and accelerate sustainable growth.
This leader will be expected to look beyond historical reporting to provide leadership with a clear perspective on what is happening, why it is happening, what is likely to happen next, and what actions should be taken. The Senior Director will establish the analytics, operating mechanisms, forecasting capabilities, and leading indicators necessary to identify opportunities and risks early and enable faster, better-informed commercial decisions.
A key mandate for the role will be advancing the use of artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, automation, and modern sales technologies to improve seller productivity, forecasting accuracy, pipeline management, customer and opportunity prioritization, and overall commercial effectiveness.
The Senior Director will lead a diverse, distributed team and collaborate closely with Sales, Marketing, Finance, Digital/IT, and other cross-functional partners to optimize commercial processes and enable disciplined, data-driven decision-making. This leader will oversee key initiatives involving sales planning, performance management, sales compensation, territory alignment, commercial analytics, CRM effectiveness, forecasting, pipeline management, and sales enablement technologies.
Success in this role requires a highly collaborative, commercially minded, and influential leader who can anticipate business needs, translate complex information into clear recommendations, leverage emerging technologies to create competitive advantage, and lead meaningful organizational transformation within a global, matrixed environment.
Key Responsibilities
Strategic Commercial Partnership
- Serve as a trusted, proactive strategic advisor to Sales and Commercial Leadership, bringing a forward-looking perspective to business performance, opportunities, and risks.
- Anticipate leadership needs and proactively identify emerging trends, performance gaps, market dynamics, and commercial opportunities before they become evident through traditional reporting.
- Translate commercial data and market information into clear executive insights and recommendations, articulating what is changing, why it matters, what is likely to happen next, and what leadership should do about it.
- Develop and execute the Commercial Operations strategy in alignment with business objectives, growth priorities, and customer needs.
Commercial Analytics & Performance Management
- Establish comprehensive commercial analytics, dashboards, KPIs, and performance-management frameworks that enable timely, data-driven decision-making.
- Move the organization beyond retrospective reporting toward predictive and prescriptive insights that identify opportunities, risks, and recommended actions.
Forecasting & Pipeline Management
- Lead the continuous improvement of sales forecasting processes, methodologies, tools, and governance to improve forecast accuracy and business predictability.
- Proactively identify pipeline gaps, forecast risks, and emerging opportunities and recommend specific actions to Sales Leadership.
- Partner with Sales Leadership to strengthen accountability for opportunity management, forecast quality, pipeline development, and execution.
- Develop scenario modeling and predictive capabilities that allow leadership to understand potential commercial outcomes and identify actions required to achieve growth objectives.
AI, Automation & Sales Technology
- Champion the responsible application of AI, predictive analytics, automation, and emerging technologies across Commercial Operations and the broader sales organization.
- Identify, prioritize, and implement AI-enabled solutions that improve seller productivity, forecasting, pipeline management, opportunity prioritization, and leadership decision-making.
- Develop and deploy next-generation sales tools that help sellers and managers identify the highest-value opportunities, recognize risk earlier, and determine appropriate next actions.
- Use AI and automation to reduce administrative burden and enable sales teams to spend more time engaging customers and driving growth.
- Partner with Digital/IT, data, and technology teams to translate commercial requirements into scalable, secure, and sustainable solutions.
- Establish appropriate governance and performance measures to ensure AI-enabled tools are responsible, trusted, adopted, and delivering measurable commercial value.
- Maintain awareness of emerging commercial technologies and proactively recommend innovations that can create competitive advantage or materially improve sales effectiveness.
Sales Force Effectiveness & Commercial Excellence
- Lead initiatives to enhance sales force effectiveness, productivity, and accountability across the organization.
- Lead sales planning activities, including territory design and alignment, resource deployment, capacity planning, quota setting, and performance measurement.
- Develop and administer effective sales compensation and incentive programs that align employee behaviors with strategic and financial objectives.
- Identify opportunities to simplify commercial processes, eliminate inefficiencies, and improve the customer and employee experience.
- Promote consistency and scalable best practices across regions, functions, and businesses while adapting programs to local market requirements.
CRM & Sales Enablement
- Optimize CRM systems, sales technology platforms, and enablement tools to improve adoption, data quality, forecasting, pipeline visibility, and commercial execution.
- Ensure sales technologies provide sellers and leaders with actionable insights rather than simply capturing transactional information.
- Establish adoption and effectiveness metrics for commercial tools and continuously improve the seller and sales-leader experience.
- Partner with sales teams to identify friction points and develop technology-enabled solutions that simplify workflows and increase selling time.
Leadership & Organizational Transformation
- Develop a team capable of operating as strategic business partners—not simply providers of reporting, systems, and administrative support.
- Foster a culture of curiosity, innovation, analytical rigor, continuous improvement, and accountability.
- Lead change-management and organizational-transformation initiatives, ensuring effective communication, stakeholder alignment, and sustainable adoption.
- Manage multiple complex strategic initiatives simultaneously while maintaining strong governance, execution discipline, and stakeholder communication.
- Build strong partnerships across Sales, Marketing, Finance, Digital/IT, and other functions to advance enterprise commercial priorities.
Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Business, Science, a related technical discipline, or another relevant field.
- Minimum of 10 years of relevant experience in sales operations, commercial operations, sales effectiveness, commercial excellence, analytics, or a related discipline.
- Significant leadership experience, including responsibility for leading teams and enterprise-level commercial initiatives.
- Demonstrated ability to serve as a strategic and forward-looking advisor to senior Sales and Commercial Leadership, proactively identifying trends, risks, opportunities, and recommended actions.
- Experience with Salesforce.com or a comparable CRM platform.
- Demonstrated experience applying AI, advanced analytics, predictive methodologies, or automation to commercial or sales processes.
- Strong financial acumen, including experience with revenue planning, business performance management, and sales compensation design.
- Advanced analytical and problem-solving capabilities with demonstrated ability to convert complex information into concise, actionable business recommendations.
- Experience optimizing sales processes and leading large-scale change-management or organizational-transformation initiatives.
- Demonstrated ability to lead distributed teams and operate effectively within a global, matrixed organization.
- Strong project and program-management skills, with the ability to manage multiple strategic priorities simultaneously.
- Exceptional communication, presentation, and executive-engagement skills.
- Demonstrated ability to influence senior stakeholders and collaborate effectively across functions, regions, and cultures.
- Ability to travel approximately 20–25%.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience supporting complex scientific, technical, healthcare, life sciences, or similarly regulated markets.
- Experience implementing AI, machine learning, predictive analytics, or automation capabilities within Sales or Commercial Operations.
- Experience leading commercial-transformation initiatives across multiple businesses, regions, or customer segments.
Leadership Expectations
The successful candidate will demonstrate strategic thinking, commercial acumen, operational discipline, technological curiosity, and a strong commitment to developing people.
Critically, this leader must operate with a proactive and forward-looking mindset. The expectation is not simply to report what has already happened, but to help Sales Leadership understand what is coming next. This individual will continually identify important trends, emerging risks, growth opportunities, and leading indicators and translate those insights into clear recommendations and actions.
The Senior Director will be expected to look around corners, anticipate questions before they are asked, challenge existing practices constructively, and use data, AI, and technology to create increasingly sophisticated commercial capabilities.
Success will ultimately be measured by the extent to which Commercial Operations enables Sales Leadership to make faster, better-informed decisions; improves forecast and pipeline predictability; increases seller effectiveness; and drives more cons
Compensation and Benefits
The salary range estimated for this position based in Massachusetts is $192,700.00–$275,000.00.
This position may also be eligible to receive a variable annual bonus based on company, team, and/or individual performance results in accordance with company policy. We offer a comprehensive Total Rewards package that our U.S. colleagues and their families can count on, which includes:
A choice of national medical and dental plans, and a national vision plan, including health incentive programs
Employee assistance and family support programs, including commuter benefits and tuition reimbursement
At least 120 hours paid time off (PTO), 10 paid holidays annually, paid parental leave (3 weeks for bonding and 8 weeks for caregiver leave), accident and life insurance, and short- and long-term disability in accordance with company policy
Retirement and savings programs, such as our competitive 401(k) U.S. retirement savings plan
Employees’ Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP) offers eligible colleagues the opportunity to purchase company stock at a discount
For more information on our benefits, please visit: https://jobs.thermofisher.com/global/en/total-rewards