Head of Sales & Customer Growth Tikkurila UK

Location: Edinburgh
Department: Commercial
Level: Senior Leadership
Reporting to: Senior Management Team

The Role

We are looking for an experienced and commercially ambitious Head of Sales & Customer Growth to join our senior leadership team and help shape the next phase of growth for the business.

Our business operates across direct trade, ecommerce, physical stores, national distribution partners and online marketplaces, supported by an established digital marketing and customer acquisition infrastructure.

We have a significant existing customer base and continue to acquire new professional customers. Our opportunity now is to become much more sophisticated in how we convert, develop, retain and grow those customers.

Working closely with the Senior Management Team, this role will have three key objectives:

• Drive customer and revenue growth - maximise the value of our existing and future customer base through structured acquisition, development, retention and reactivation strategies.
• Lead and develop our internal sales operation - bring direction, commercial focus and accountability to our existing customer-facing teams, turning customer opportunities into proactive sales activity.
• Modernise our commercial approach - use CRM, customer data, automation and technology to build a more effective, scalable sales operation while bringing fresh thinking and challenge to the wider business.

This is not a traditional field-sales leadership role. We're looking for a modern, digitally minded, customer-focused leader who can set the strategy, challenge existing thinking and drive results through our internal teams.

Key Responsibilities

Customer & Commercial Growth

Own and deliver the customer-growth strategy, with clear accountability for sales performance, customer development and revenue growth across the internal sales operation.

Key priorities will include:

• Identifying and prioritising customer growth opportunities through meaningful segmentation, purchasing behaviour and commercial insight.
• Improving first-order conversion, repeat purchasing, customer value and product penetration.
• Building structured cross-sell, account-development and lapsed-customer reactivation programmes.
• Establishing clear sales targets, KPIs and commercial reporting.
• Translating customer insight and marketing activity into practical sales opportunities.
• Work closely with Marketing and wider commercial teams to maximise campaign effectiveness, sales follow-up and opportunities across all routes to market.

Provide strategic commercial leadership to our Customer Care and Outbound Sales teams, working alongside the existing Customer Operations Lead to establish clearer direction, accountability and a more proactive approach to customer development.

Responsibilities will include:

• Shaping and overseeing the outbound sales strategy, priorities and commercial targets.
• Working with the Customer Operations Lead to translate commercial objectives into structured team activity, KPIs and performance measures.
• Developing a more proactive approach to customer engagement, ensuring teams have clear direction on which customers to target, when and with what proposition.
• Identifying opportunities for targeted sales campaigns, incentives and promotional activity to drive customer growth.
• Providing commercial leadership, coaching and direction to the outbound function, supporting the development of skills and capability across the wider team.
• Reviewing performance and identifying opportunities to improve conversion, productivity and customer value.
• Shaping the future structure and capability of the internal sales function, with scope to develop and expand the team as the business grows.

The successful candidate will be expected to set the direction, challenge existing approaches and drive commercial performance, empowering the teams and their existing management structure to deliver against clear objectives.

CRM, Data & Commercial Transformation

Take strategic ownership of how CRM and customer data are used to drive commercial activity.

Our ambition is to move towards a sales operation where systems proactively identify who needs attention, why, when and what the next action should be.

This could include new accounts that haven't converted, declining or lapsed customers, replenishment opportunities, cross-sell potential and high-value accounts requiring attention.

The role will play a key part in the planned evolution of our ERP and CRM infrastructure, helping define the commercial requirements around customer data, reporting, workflows, automation and integration.

They will also identify practical opportunities to use AI and automation to improve sales effectiveness, turning customer intelligence into structured actions for the internal teams.

About You

We are looking for an established commercial leader who combines strong sales instincts and people leadership with a modern understanding of CRM, customer growth, systems and data.

You will ideally bring:

• Significant experience in a senior sales, commercial or customer-growth leadership role, with a proven track record of revenue growth.
• Experience leading, motivating and developing internal sales, telesales or customer-facing teams.
• The ability to build effective outbound sales strategies, targets, incentive structures and performance frameworks.
• Strong commercial and analytical skills, with experience using CRM and customer data to identify and develop sales opportunities.
• A good understanding of digital customer acquisition and customer lifecycle management.
• Experience contributing to CRM, ERP or wider commercial transformation projects.
• An interest in practical automation and AI applications within sales and customer management.
• Confidence operating at senior leadership level, challenging existing thinking and influencing business direction.
• A proactive, commercially driven leadership style, with the ability to translate strategy into measurable results through others.

Experience within paint, coatings, construction or the wider trade sector would be advantageous but is not essential.

We are more interested in finding a modern commercial leader with the right growth mindset than someone whose experience is predominantly based on traditional field-sales management.

The Opportunity

This is an opportunity to take a senior role in shaping the next stage of an established multichannel business. Much of the infrastructure is already in place - customers, data, ecommerce, marketing capability, distribution, marketplaces, stores and national fulfilment.

The opportunity now is to bring those elements together, lead a more proactive and commercially focused internal sales operation, and help shape where the business goes next.