SASE Sales Manager

  

This role has been designed as ‘’Onsite’ with an expectation that you will primarily work from an HPE office.

Job Description:

   

We are seeking a results-driven  SASE Sales Manager to join our high-performing sales teams in the Middle East and Africa.  In this role, you will serve as a subject matter expert and trusted advisor on Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solutions, helping enterprise customers transform their network and security architectures.

You will be responsible for leading a team, driving revenue growth by identifying opportunities, developing strategic account plans, and partnering with cross-functional teams to deliver tailored solutions that meet each client’s needs. This is a high-impact position ideal for someone with a strong technical foundation in cybersecurity and networking, a consultative sales approach, and a passion for helping organizations modernize their infrastructure securely to achieve their business objectives.

The Role:

Leads the sales community to success. Communicates direction to the team in line with the company’s vision and strategy. Inspires the team to meet and exceed goals. Manages the HPE sales motion towards growth and increased profitability. Creates a high performing team through recruiting, developing, and retaining talent. Organizes the team and adapts the resource mix to maximize the team’s and HPE’s achievement, market coverage and financial performance.

Coaches to assure best in class individual and team sales performance. Orchestrates major Enterprise-level customer engagements to deliver results and create the best customer experience in the industry. Manages escalations to solution, and solution to opportunity. Drives a hunting mentality. Engages customer executives to understand the customers’ business context, build trust, and deliver HPE’s value proposition in line with that. Creates early-stage opportunities by managing top customers’ executive level relationships.

Coaches and enables teams to craft the right technical, IT investment and pricing strategies to win. Partners with stakeholders to maximize cross-HPE team efficiency and customer success. Helps teams to bust barriers and overcome obstacles. Establishes sales methodology for end-to-end sales process management. Manages sales planning and follows up to ensure consistent execution. Provides timely and accurate sales forecasts. Provides customer feedback and won/loss deal analysis into the broader HPE team.

Responsibilities:
 

Managing the Business:

• Sales coverage - Builds well targeted business plans and strategies for allocating resources and driving sales activities to achieve margin; collaborates within the company and with the field to prioritize, facilitate and direct the use of resources.
• Account Planning - Assists in planning sales strategy; manages the internal processes in support of sales reps and selling activities; aligns tactical account plans with overall corporate strategy; actively develops and manages geography business plans to meet revenue goals/quotas; develops plans that articulate the strategies/requirements essential for focusing sales activities, forecasts accurately and communicates sales progress; actively manages and signs off on account business plans through scheduled reviews and updates.
• Pipeline management - Builds, monitors and orchestrates sales pipelines to ensure continuous population of near and long term opportunities; manages the size, shape and quality of pipeline; analyzes overall win rates and win/loss ratios.
• Deal management - Reviews deals to ensure soundness and problem-free processing by the company's back-end operations; Monitors the number of deals with TAS plan reviewed by managers.
• Business acumen- Exhibits base level of business, financial and legal acumen to develop meaningful business recommendations; continuously monitors and improves area-of-control operations to ensure alignment with the company's business direction, the quality of business practices and optimum organization performance.
• Strategic sales planning & implementation - Orchestrates the development of strategic sales plans that reflect the company's business strategy, to advance market share/penetration, and achieve profitable growth.
• Competitive Positioning/Strategy - Uses competitive intelligence in account planning and sales activities to develop counter strategies that will neutralize competitive influence on the customer's buying decisions.

Leading & Managing Sales People:

• Coaching & Performance Management - Assesses and manages employee performance to ensure individual and group excellence; counsels and supports individuals through selling challenges; manages performance and results of high and low performers.
• Leadership- Models effective selling skills; motivates and supports sales teams in selling; demonstrates a high level of support in the pursuit and closing of deals.
• People development - Sponsors and directs skill building activities to increase the productivity and accomplishments of the sales force.
• Change management- Ability to work through an environment of change and effectively lead a sales team through transitions beyond their control.

Selling as a Sales Manager:

• Focus on strategic direction- Understands the overall company/TSG strategic direction and portfolio, and can assist sales teams in customizing solutions based on client needs.
• C-level partnering- Contributes to enduring executive relationships at the client's organization; establishes professional relationships and credibility with key IT and business executives in support of other established relationships with the client.
• Consultative selling- Strategizes and coaches team on how to apply consultative-selling techniques to identify and advance opportunities that result in ongoing profitable revenue growth for the company; prepares for client calls in partnership with sales teams and supports the efforts of the team during client meetings; ensures sales teams have access to other company resources and encourages them to nurture relationships with client influencers and decision makers.
• Industry and client knowledge- Stays current with industry and competitive research and information to enable rich client dialogue; maintains an understanding of client business challenges, industry trends and markets; demonstrates the knowledge to position and map company capabilities that align to client business objectives and initiatives.

Education and Experience Required:

• Directly related management experience and work results including success in achieving progressively higher quota or other sales related goals.
• Demonstrated level of project management skills.
• University or Bachelor's degree.
• Typically 7+ years experience in sales.

Knowledge and Skills:

Business Management:

• Strategic Planning- Translates business goals into actionable plans and strategies that reflect the requirements and opportunities within area-of-control Aligns area-of-control account and market opportunities with upstream strategic plans and metrics. Sets sales priorities and establishing these as the focus of individual or sales team activities.
• Execution- Actively manages business plans to meet revenue goals/quotes and advance the business interests of the company. Determines if an opportunity is profitable for the company.
• Forecast/Budget Control- Tracks and manages rolling forecasts and budgets to ensure timely and accurate roll-ups.
• Pipeline Management- Builds, monitors and orchestrates sales pipelines to ensure continuous population of near- and long-term opportunities Balances quick wins against longer sales-cycle opportunities to ensure both immediate wins and long-term profitability for the company.
• Operations Building/Improvement- Continuously monitors, troubleshoots and improves area-of-control operations to ensure alignment with the company's business direction, the quality of business practices, optimum organizational performance and a highly motivated sales force.

Sales Development:

• Resource Brokering/Allocation- Collaborates across the company within the field to access, facilitate and direct the use of resources needed for effective selling.
• Sales Facilitation- Applies influence and organizational savvy to advances sales opportunities externally, with clients, and internally within the company; Establishes the company's account presence and extends the customer's account penetration to executive levels; Accompanies sales reps on calls to demonstrate and model effective selling skills.
• Strategic Account Leadership- Actively drives key enterprise and strategic account activities - promotes vision and models executive relationship building practices to build enduring partnerships and account share/penetration for the company.
• Attract and hire top talent.

Workforce Management & Development:

• Supervision- Assesses and manages employee performance to ensure individual and group excellence Builds individual and group commitment to business goals and personal excellence.
• Coaching- Personally develops employee performance to ensure individual and group excellence. Coaches and develops sales personnel in such activities as solution selling or relationship building. Reviews, brainstorms, validates, and troubleshoots selling strategies for individuals & account teams.
• Skill Development/Enhancement - Sponsors and directs skill building activities to increase the productivity and accomplishments of the sales force.
• Workforce Planning - Actively monitors, identifies and addresses sales and resource capability gaps within area-of-control Manages "span of control" issues to ensure such goals as adequate account coverage, employee retention, effective succession planning, and optimum implementation of workforce re- alignment models.
• Career Planning and Development- Nurtures and advances the talent required to maintain the company's sales force excellence within area-of-control.

Customer Face-Time:

• Proactively develops and nurtures solid relationships in key accounts as a basis for expanding the company's business-partnering presence.
• Solidifies an enduring partnership with key accounts through such strategies as active monitoring of customer satisfaction, speedy problem resolution, and advance communication of beneficial company initiatives or solutions.

Strategic Business Planning:

• Manages the top- and bottom-line - monitors discounts and margins involved in individual deals to align them with group performance.
• Works with others to create mechanisms that shift the focus from "low- hanging," immediate wins to recognizing and providing incentives for large deals/wins.
• Understands industry drivers and the customer base better to bridge company solutions with account-relevant problems and opportunities.
• Builds stronger internal relationships with other groups to ensure seamless selling of total company solutions and to establish clear expectations for resource alignment and support.
• develop effective counter-measures and messages.
• Builds clear strategies for working with key accounts to pursue and close major opportunities, including clear identification of tactics for accelerating progress through the pipeline.

Sales Team/Individual Coaching:

• Provides better coaching and men