Sales Team Lead job description

B2B sales — Sales Team Lead
Coaches a pod, forecasts its number, and runs deal reviews.

REQUIRED SKILLS
Prospecting
- Account Research and Targeting — You spot patterns across won and lost accounts, adjust the targeting criteria for your segment, and show the pipeline effect of the change over a quarter.
- Outbound Prospecting — You design sequences other sellers adopt, run a controlled test of one message or channel variable, and report which variant produced more meetings and why.
- Cold Outreach Messaging — You review outreach written by other sellers, name exactly why a message will not land, and supply a rewrite that measurably improves their reply rate.
- Discovery and Qualification — You run discovery across several stakeholders in one account, reconcile conflicting accounts of the problem, and rescue deals qualified on the wrong basis.
- Inbound Lead Handling — You convert inbound interest into qualified opportunity at or above team rate, and can say from your own records which sources convert and which waste time.
- Referral and Network Development — You build a referral motion other sellers can copy, covering who to ask and when, and show the pipeline it produced beyond your own accounts.

Deal Management
- Solution Demonstration — You lead demos on complex or competitive deals, orchestrate a specialist alongside you, and prepare individual attendees before the session.
- Buying Committee Mapping — You navigate committees spanning divisions or geographies, and can show how you changed the deal plan after a reorganisation or a sponsor change.
- Champion Development — You develop more than one champion on a large deal, prepare them for internal opposition, and recover the deal when one of them leaves mid-cycle.
- Sales Objection Handling — You handle objections raised by a hostile stakeholder in front of the committee, and keep the deal moving without conceding commercially.
- Commercial Negotiation — You lead negotiations involving procurement or legal, structure multi-year or multi-product terms, and close without eroding the margin of the deal.
- Proposal and Business Case Writing — You write proposals for deals spanning several workstreams or legal entities, and shape them so the document works unaccompanied in a board paper.
- CRM Pipeline Hygiene — You spot the data problems across a pipeline you do not own, chase the specific records that distort the number, and explain why they matter.
- Competitive Positioning — You lead displacement deals, plan against the likely counter-moves of a specific incumbent, and brief the team on what worked and what did not.

Customer Success
- Customer Onboarding Handover — You can hand over accounts where scope was contested or the buyer was difficult, and name the risks delivery should watch for. You repair handovers others have done badly and improve the template when the same gap keeps recurring.
- Account Relationship Management — You can hold senior relationships in complex or political accounts and warm up one that has gone cold. You bring the right internal people into the relationship so it does not depend on you alone.
- Renewal and Churn Prevention — You can turn round accounts that have decided to leave, or agree a clean exit where that is the honest answer. You report the real reasons for churn to the business, not the reason the customer gave first.
- Upsell and Cross-Sell — You can expand into parts of a large customer where you have no sponsor, and structure the terms so the original contract stays intact. You show others how to find room in accounts they thought were finished.
- Customer Escalation Handling — You can handle escalations that reach executives or put the contract at risk, and decide what the organisation offers to put things right. You stay useful to the customer while refusing demands that are not reasonable.

Commercial
- Pricing and Discount Discipline — You can structure complex or multi-year pricing, judge when an exception is genuinely worth making, and put that case to whoever approves it. You notice when discounting across the team is drifting and say so.
- Territory and Account Planning — You can plan a complex territory or a handful of large accounts, with a written view of buying centres, competitors and the order the work happens in. You review other people's plans and make them sharper.
- Sales Contract Literacy — You can work through customer paper and heavily amended terms, and explain the commercial effect of a clause to your own side. You are who other sellers ask before they concede a term.
- Sales Forecasting — You can forecast for a team or a tangled set of deals, and challenge sellers whose numbers do not match the evidence in their pipeline. Your view of the quarter is the one others plan against.

Sales Leadership
- Deal Coaching — You can coach on deals that are large, stuck or politically awkward, and tell a seller something they do not want to hear without losing them. You work on their judgement, not only on this one deal.
- Sales Enablement — You can design and run the onboarding for a new seller, decide what they need in which order, and tell whether they are ready to sell. You retire material that is out of date instead of adding to the pile.
- Quota and Territory Design — You can design quotas and territories for a team so the workloads are comparable and the totals reach the plan. You can say which assumptions the model rests on and what would break it.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can run work spanning several teams, negotiate scope and sequencing with their owners, and maintain one shared plan that all of them actually use.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate work spanning several teams, name the assumptions each figure rests on, and re-cut the plan as those assumptions break.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can hold accountability for outcomes delivered mostly by other people, absorbing the blame when it fails and passing on the credit when it works.
- Quality Focus — You can design the quality practice for complex work owned by several teams, and you anticipate the failure modes that only appear once systems interact.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can solve problems in domains where you are not the expert, and your solutions hold up on cost, performance, and maintainability at once.
- Domain Expertise — You can bring in practice from outside the organisation and make it work here, and your judgement demonstrably improves the projects you touch.
- Continuous Learning — You can judge which new ideas are worth the team's time and which are not, and you make room for the people around you to learn too.

Communication
- Communication — You can bring disagreeing groups to a shared understanding, and colleagues come to you for help framing a difficult or sensitive message.
- Collaboration — You can align teams with competing priorities on a common goal, surfacing the conflict early instead of letting it harden into resentment.
- Technical Writing — You can own the documentation of a large project, coordinating contributions so the work can be maintained by people who never built it.
- Stakeholder Management — You can hold senior and external relationships, negotiate between competing demands, and deliver unwelcome news without losing trust.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can lead across team boundaries, build the credibility that makes people follow you by choice, and create room for others to lead.
- Mentoring — You can develop other mentors, coach people through career decisions rather than tasks, and lift the capability of a whole team.
- Strategic Thinking — You can set direction for an area, choose deliberately what not to do, and defend that choice when it is challenged.