The Director, Commercial Excellence for Europe, Middle East, Africa (EMEA) Structural Heart serves as a member of the EMEA Divisional Vice President’s senior staff. This leader helps to define and operationalize commercial strategy for the EMEA geography to achieve annual commercial objectives. The Director collaborates across functions and with the respective country General Managers to deliver on commercial execution tactics that drive business growth and market expansion. This role reports into Structural Heart’s Divisional VP for Global Commercial Excellence and will be based within an EMEA major market (preferably Abbott offices in Belgium, Germany or UK). Requires up to 25% travel.
ROLE RESPONSIBILITIES
Strategy, Commercial Planning
1. Support DVP in strategic decision-making by transforming market intelligence, field team experiences, and sales metrics into data-driven insights. Bring expertise for creating strategic frameworks and scenario analyses.
2. Identify growth opportunities across product franchises and countries based on local dynamics.
3. Work collaboratively with Marketing and Country General Managers to deliver EMEA’s growth agenda and to ensure respective Country alignment and progress with strategic priorities.
4. In conjunction with DVP, coordinate periodic business reviews with Countries to identify and address business issues, opportunities, win/loss customer analysis to ensure progress toward business objectives.
5. To support commercial input for ABT’s quarterly financial reporting (LBE process), optimize efficiency and consistency in roll-up of EMEA commercial business reviews for global stakeholders.
Enable Field Execution
6. Remove friction and reduce field team administrative burden by simplifying trackers and optimizing processes to focus rep efforts on selling and serving customers.
7. Coordinate cross-functional partners (Marketing, Sales, Finance, HR, Training) in developing sales pull-through tools and processes. Serve as point of contact for project-managing new sales initiatives across EMEA.
8. Provide frameworks to track sales activity and overall execution toward EMEA achieving commercial goals. Example activities: drive alignment of EMEA-consistent dashboards/KPIs, recommend product mix optimizations, analyze sales force alignments/expansion options, track competitive share shifting.
9. Identify specific drivers of execution gaps. Craft structure to share best practices. Support development of commercial playbooks.
10. Collaborate with Marketing to organize field communication cadence and to analyze market data for account segmentation/targeting insights that feed EMEA commercial strategy.
Commercial Analytics
11. Perform business analysis that yields practical insights for sales leadership team to enable market share capture, sales growth, and margin enhancement
12. Thoughtfully create/identify tools that help reps to prioritize the right customers, to streamline account openings, to track device adoption/slippage and to overall manage their local business.
13. Partner with Director, Structural Heart Commercial Data to optimize meaningful performance metrics and dashboards. Articulate business needs to commercial data team for building field inputs into SFDC and for producing monthly KPI dashboards.
REQUIREMENTS
14. 10 years prior experience inclusive of either leading a business unit in implantable medical devices or top-tier consulting firm background with hands-on work in medtech sector
15. Proven consultative mindset able to operate both as a strategic advisor to Divisional Vice President for EMEA Structural Heart and also as a hands-on leader with cross-functional partners
16. Experience with P&L Management
17. High-energy, self-starter with proven ability to project-manage multiple tasks in a dynamic environment
18. Proven strategic planning skills: ability to define business issues, synthesize information from multiple sources, conduct analysis
19. Excellent oral and written communication skills with executive presence and the ability to influence senior stakeholders
20. Business acumen including financial literacy (budgets, forecasting, ROI, tight collaboration with finance partners)
21. Deep understanding of medical device buying trends and variability in health economic environments across EMEA geographies
22. University degree required; preference for Business Administration, Marketing or Economics.