Leader, Sales

Job description

What You'll DoLead and manage direct account and architecture teams, accountable for team performance and portfolio profitability while serving as an influencer in customers' purchasing decisions. Build and sustain strong, long-term relationships with a broad range of customer and buyer stakeholders (e.g., CTO, CIO, CFO, Purchasing leaders, Partner Executives, LOB leaders, Buyer or Partner Sales Managers, and decision makers). Collaborate with customers to understand their business goals, identify opportunities for upsell and cross-sell additional solutions, and create demand based on what's possible in customer roadmaps. Serve as the Account Orchestrator, aligning and integrating solutions with customer needs and driving sustainable cross-portfolio growth through coordination and competitive deal packaging. Lead both the product and services strategy across the portfolio or architecture. Maintain a comprehensive understanding of Cisco's full product portfolio. Engage specialist teams to enhance the sales process, particularly where deep technical expertise is required. Build the sales funnel through opportunity development and drive opportunities through to sales completion to achieve revenue goals. Review business plans and forecasting data, presenting recommendations to senior leadership to shape data-driven account strategies. Stay informed about industry trends, market dynamics, and competitive landscapes. Typically lead an account team managing a broad portfolio and/or teams managing product-specific architecture teams. Be accountable for sales growth across multiple years for particular products, portfolios, or regions. Manage financial and strategic objectives, including growth, profitability, entering new markets, and launching new product lines. Direct resource utilization in accordance with strategic sales priorities and guidance from global corporate leadership. Review forecasts and other sales data to identify opportunities, recommend sales tactics, and provide aggregated feedback from multiple accounts to influence sales planning. Oversee consistent execution of sales strategies by streamlining processes and aligning team efforts across field, partner, and virtual teams. Lead competitive analysis and planning, translating insights into actionable sales strategies. Refine customer success metrics that align with the sales strategies deployed by your team. Coordinate joint planning sessions between partner, virtual, and field teams for assigned accounts. Lead skill-building workshops that improve team capability and quota attainment. Build and manage executive-level customer relationships. Who You Are You are an experienced sales leader with a track record of building high-performing teams and delivering business growth in complex enterprise environments. You combine strategic thinking with strong execution, thrive in customer-facing roles, and are passionate about developing people and helping customers achieve meaningful business outcomes. You bring: Extensive experience leading enterprise technology sales teams with responsibility for revenue growth and business performance. Proven ability to develop and execute account and territory strategies across large, complex customer environments. Experience building trusted relationships with C-level executives and senior business stakeholders. Strong business acumen with the ability to analyze market trends, forecast business performance, and make data-driven decisions. Demonstrated success leading cross-functional teams and collaborating across sales, technical, partner, and services organizations. A passion for coaching, mentoring, and developing high-performing sales professionals. Excellent communication, presentation, and executive engagement skills. Bachelor's degree with 12+ years of related experience, or Master's degree with 8+ years of related experience, or PhD with 5+ years of related experience. 2+ years of people management or supervisory experience. Why Cisco? At Cisco, we’re revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era – and beyond. We’ve been innovating fearlessly for 40 years to create solutions that power how humans and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds. These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint. Fueled by the depth and breadth of our technology, we experiment and create meaningful solutions. Add to that our worldwide network of doers and experts, and you’ll see that the opportunities to grow and build are limitless. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere. We are Cisco, and our power starts with you.