Sales Director – Southern and Eastern Africa, Johannesburg

Sales Director – Southern and Eastern Africa Role Purpose The Sales Director is responsible for leading profitable growth across Southern and Eastern Africa for industrial vacuum pumps, blowers, engineered systems, and aftermarket services. The role owns commercial strategy and execution across direct sales, distributors, OEMs, EPCs, and end users, covering new equipment, engineered systems, spare parts, repairs, field service, audits, retrofits, and service agreements.
This is a hands-on leadership role that combines sales team leadership, frontline customer engagement, business development, pricing discipline, forecasting, and strategic account growth. The successful candidate will build a high-performing sales operation, strengthen market coverage, and increase recurring aftermarket revenue from the installed base.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead, coach, and performance-manage the sales team, application sales resources, and channel or regional sales managers where applicable.
• Maintain strong frontline engagement with customers and drive new business development, key account growth, and strategic opportunity conversion.
• Develop and execute the sales strategy for industrial vacuum, blower, engineered system, and aftermarket offerings across target sectors and territories.
• Own pipeline quality, forecasting accuracy, deal reviews, and CRM discipline to improve conversion, visibility, and execution.
• Drive pricing discipline and value-based selling, ensuring bids, tenders, and major quotations protect margin while remaining commercially competitive.
• Grow aftermarket revenue through spare parts, repairs, field service, retrofits, audits, controls upgrades, monitoring, and service agreements.
• Develop and manage distributors, agents, and channel partners, including coverage models, account ownership, training, and performance management.
• Lead commercial input into strategic quotations, contracts, and negotiations, and ensure effective handover to project execution and service teams.
• Work closely with engineering, service, operations, finance, and supply chain teams to align commercial commitments with operational capability.
• Provide leadership with clear reporting on order intake, revenue, gross margin, market share, pipeline health, and key commercial risks.

Key Accountabilities

• Order intake, revenue growth, and gross margin performance.
• Customer-facing revenue generation through key accounts and new business development.
• Building, coaching, and leading a high-performing sales operation.
• Market share growth in priority segments across Southern and Eastern Africa.
• Installed-base penetration, replacement capture, and aftermarket growth.
• Forecast accuracy, pipeline quality, and commercial execution discipline.
• Distributor performance and route-to-market effectiveness.
• Bid discipline, pricing governance, and commercial risk management.

Candidate Profile Experience

• Minimum 3 years’ experience in a senior sales management role, with 5 years preferred, within an international OEM or comparable industrial equipment environment.
• Proven success in selling industrial equipment, engineered solutions, or aftermarket services into industrial and process markets.
• Strong experience managing long-cycle sales involving multiple decision-makers, technical evaluation, and procurement processes.
• Demonstrated success leading direct sales teams and, ideally, distributor or channel networks.
• Experience in sectors such as food processing, packaging, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, plastics, metals, power, automotive, paper, wastewater, medical, research and development, oil and gas, or general industry is highly desirable.
• Experience handling major quotations, tenders, contract negotiations, and strategic accounts.

Technical and Commercial Knowledge

• Familiarity with vacuum, blower, or related industrial system applications would be advantageous, although deep product-specific knowledge is not essential.
• Strong understanding of lifecycle cost, total cost of ownership, energy efficiency, uptime, reliability, and operating cost reduction.
• Commercial understanding of installed-base strategy, aftermarket economics, pricing, margin management, and service-led revenue models.

Leadership Capabilities

• Ability to build and lead a high-performing sales operation.
• Commercially disciplined, data-driven, and decisive.
• Ability to coach teams in consultative and value-based selling.
• Confident in executive-level customer engagement and negotiation.
• Strong cross-functional leadership and stakeholder management capability.
• Ability to operate effectively in both strategic and hands-on sales environments.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Business, or a related discipline.
• An MBA or relevant commercial qualification would be advantageous.
• Valid driver’s license and willingness to travel extensively across the region.

Personal Attributes

• Commercially rigorous and margin-aware
• Structured, analytical, and highly disciplined
• Customer-focused but not price-led
• Credible with both technical and executive stakeholders
• Resilient in competitive, long-cycle selling environments
• Able to balance short-term delivery with long-term strategic positioning