Head of Commercial Sales - Life Science

Your Role

In this pivotal leadership role, you will unite and drive two high-impact commercial teams — Sales Development and Territory Sales — to accelerate new business creation and deliver sustained revenue growth across the Life Science Discovery Solutions portfolio in Japan. You will own the full commercial growth agenda end-to-end: from proactive opportunity identification and demand creation through to territory coverage, pipeline maturation, and revenue expansion. Operating with significant autonomy and strategic accountability, you will lead with hands-on field engagement, build a thriving external ecosystem, and embed a data-driven execution culture across multiple channels, including distributors, resellers, wholesalers, digital marketplaces, and direct accounts.

You will spearhead the discovery, validation, and commercialization of new applications and market opportunities, ensuring your teams engage deeply with target customers, academic partners, key opinion leaders, and ecosystem collaborators to run proofs of concept and convert them into revenue. Working in close partnership with global marketing and product management, you will co-develop go-to-market approaches and translate ecosystem insights into compelling value propositions. Your field leadership will be visible and decisive: joining critical customer engagements, co-developing deals, and personally driving key opportunities to close when pipeline gaps emerge.

You will instil an outbound-first growth mindset across your teams, establishing new-contact targets as core performance indicators and ensuring proactive market adaptation in response to demand shifts, regulatory changes, technology trends, and competitive dynamics. Cross-functional alignment with sales, global marketing, and product management will be central to your remit, as will stakeholder management across multiple regions conducted in business-level English. You will be accountable for performance metrics spanning growth, territory coverage, activity, and quality outcomes — and you will lead your teams through change with clarity, purpose, and resilience.

Who You Are

• You bring a proven track record of leading both sales development and field sales teams, with deep knowledge of the Japanese life science or related B2B market and the ability to operate effectively within a multinational organization.
• You have extensive B2B life science or adjacent sector experience, with a strong understanding of application development, ecosystem partnerships, and multi-channel go-to-market strategies.
• You demonstrate the ability to lead teams in demand creation, manage complex channel and partner relationships, and translate market intelligence into actionable commercial strategies.
• You are a strategic thinker with hands-on execution capability — equally comfortable setting direction at a senior level and engaging directly in the field to drive critical opportunities forward.
• You possess strong leadership, coaching, and change management skills, with a track record of inspiring teams through transformation and delivering on ambitious targets.
• You are data-driven in your decision-making, with disciplined pipeline management, forecast integrity, and a commitment to key performance indicator governance.
• You communicate with confidence and clarity at business level in both Japanese and English, enabling effective engagement with a broad range of internal and external stakeholders across regions.