- Lead and develop a high-performing team of Customer Engagement Specialists across Gauteng Inspire high performance, build future-ready capabilities and deliver sustainable,profitable growth while embodying Bayer leadership principles and maintaining uncompromising ethical and customer standards.
- Provide clear regional strategic direction by translating enterprise, portfolio and customer priorities into focused execution choices, resource allocation and measurable commercial outcomes.
- Navigate the evolving healthcare and pharmaceutical ecosystem, including wholesalers, corporate and independent pharmacy groups, public-sector stakeholders, healthcare professionals and other channel partners.
- Operate with an enterprise mindset, balancing regional delivery with end-to-end value creation across Sales, Marketing, Market Access, Supply Chain and Medical.
Key Responsibilities and Tasks:
Enterprise Leadership, Strategic Direction and Team Development
- Demonstrate VACC leadership by adapting leadership behaviours to team needs while cultivating a high-performance, psychologically safe environment grounded in trust, agility, accountability and results.
- Set a compelling regional direction and convert business strategy into clear priorities, trade-offs, customer plans and execution rhythms for the team.
- Contributing to enterprise-wide decisions, connecting cross-functional priorities and making choices that optimise total business value rather than local outcomes only.
- Coach the team to define aligned missions, goals and success metrics linked to individual sales plans and Customer Excellence KPIs.
- Build succession strength and future capabilities through differentiated coaching, field development, talent reviews, development plans and retention actions.
- Champion empowerment, collaboration, continuous learning and a creative growth mindset, enabling team members to own their business and contribute actively to Customer and Product teams.
Key Account and Ecosystem Leadership
- Provide leadership for priority regional key accounts and ensure account strategies are based on customer economics, channel dynamics, portfolio opportunities and mutual value creation.
- Build credible relationships with wholesalers, corporate pharmacy groups, buying groups and other strategic stakeholders.
- Guide the development of joint business plans, account growth plans and customer engagement strategies with clear objectives, value propositions, measures and review cadence.
- Ensure field execution strengthens product availability, appropriate stock levels, customer reach, portfolio penetration and quality of customer engagement.
Commercial Leadership and Profitable Growth
- Enable profitable sales delivery using commercial excellence tools, deep portfolio knowledge and customer-focused selling approaches.
- Translate portfolio, market and customer insights into commercially robust regional plans, including customer segmentation, targeting, resource deployment, risk mitigation and opportunity activation.
- Identify performance gaps early and drive cross-functional corrective action.
- Embed sales discipline and executional excellence by coaching the team to deliver defined KPIs, behaviours and customer outcomes.
Business, Data and Analytical Acumen
- Use data to make evidence-based decisions across territories, customers, channels, brands and SKUs.
- Turn demand, sales, inventory, market and competitor trends into action.
- Improve forecasts using customer and field insights, and escalate risks early.
Coaching and Performance Management
- Mentor and coach team members through regular field visits, formal In Call Quality assessments and structured business reviews.
- Set clear performance expectations, identify gaps for performance management
- Cross-Functional Execution and Change Leadership
- Align cross-functional teams to resolve barriers and deliver shared outcomes.
- Lead regional change adoption and sustain implementation.
- Support digital transformation and a hybrid, future-ready customer interaction model that strengthens engagement with healthcare professionals and other customers.
Compliance and Operational Oversight
- Ensure all sales activities comply with the South African Marketing Code of Practice, applicable IFPMA guidance, Bayer policies and relevant legal and regulatory requirements.
- Manage sales administration and reporting, and continuously simplify and improve regional operating rhythms, systems and processes.
Experience, Skills and Qualifications:
- Relevant university degree, for example BCom Business Management, commerce, finance, marketing or a healthcare-related qualification.
- Minimum three years of successful sales-management experience in the pharmaceutical or healthcare industry, or substantial internal customer-engagement experience with demonstrated leadership readiness.
- Demonstrated ability to create accurate sales forecasts, explain variance and bias, and contribute credible demand intelligence.
- Proficiency in Microsoft 365, CRM platforms such as Veeva CRM, and business performance dashboards or analytics tools.