Director Technical Sales - Key Accounts and Category Expertise EMEA
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Lille, France
- Work setup
- Remote
- Seniority
- Not specified
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 1+ years
- Category
- Sales
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in technical discipline. Master’s degree or equivalent experience preferred.
- Expert knowledge in multiple related specialised fields, disciplines, tools and approaches within the Technical Sales function.
- Experience in managing and developing customer facing and preferably lab-based teams across geographies
- Advanced communication skills to convey highly complicated and sometimes commercially sensitive information with a diverse audience.
- Able to significantly influence the decision-making across categories at regional and global level engaging with relevant stakeholders and forums
- Demonstrated successes in value-based selling (i.e. using technical and commercial elements across customer touch points to demonstrate total value delivery to customer)
- Developing short to mid-term (1-3 years) strategies and delivering longer-term strategies (3-5 years)
- Able to identify emerging and future technical needs across categories and more broadly across F&B
- Demonstrated ability to network with peers, counterparts and stakeholders at regional and global levels to identify cross-region/category learning opportunities and ensure the global initiatives pipel
- Able to solve highly complex problems which require advanced decision-making, original thought and new solutions.
- Proven ability to close critical deals or contracts by effectively influencing and negotiating with internal stakeholders and Leadership Team.
- Demonstrated success in negotiating and securing high-value partnership with senior external stakeholders (i.e. customer counterpart such as category R&I, Application and Solutions/Innovation leaders)
Full description
For this role you may be home-based within Europe with the ability to travel regularly.About Us
Tate & Lyle is on a journey of change, inspired by our purpose of Transforming Lives through the Science of Food. Today, we are a global leader in sweetening, texture and fortification products that remove calories and add fibre. Customers use our innovations to create healthier, tastier food and drink for billions of consumers. Across the world, we are unlocking the curiosity and courage in our people – to foster a truly experimental culture and create a tech-enabled, more agile, risk-ready operation. Join us to play your part in growing our business and its positive impact on communities, society and the planet.
About this role:
The Technical Sales Director, Key Accounts & EMEA Category Expertise Lead (EMEA TS Director) oversees the Technical Sales and Category Expertise functions, guiding its strategy, execution, and performance across categories for Key Accounts (KA) - Partners and Enterprise accounts, and for selected regional accounts in coordination with regional Technical Sales teams.
The role ensures that technical engagement consistently advances customer and business priorities by embedding solution-selling excellence, defining technical direction for Key Accounts, and maintaining close alignment with Commercial, Marketing, R&I, Applications & Solutions, and Product Management teams.
Working closely with senior leadership, this senior technical role integrates the voice of the customer into solution development, long‑term account planning, and strategic decision‑making, ultimately driving customer satisfaction and commercial success
This position plays a leading role in driving pipeline‑led growth by strengthening opportunity identification, prioritization, and technical validation across categories. It leads the definition, development, and deployment of EMEA Growth Initiatives and provides targeted technical leadership on high‑value customer engagements beyond the Key Account portfolio when doing so enhances strategic outcomes.
The Technical Sales Director, Key Accounts & EMEA Category Expertise Lead also acts as a senior technical interface for selected Key Accounts, cultivating executive-level relationships and unlocking multi-year commercial opportunities.
A core responsibility of this role is building and safeguarding technical excellence across EMEA, leading knowledge preservation and succession planning, sets standards for category and application expertise, and guides capability development across regional Technical Sales teams. By influencing the broader commercial strategy and ensuring strong alignment between technical capabilities and growth ambitions. The role positions Technical Sales as a strategic value creator for both customers and the organization.