Regional Sales Director, Digital Native & Emerging Markets

At IBM Global Sales, we bring together innovation, collaboration, and expertise to help clients solve their most complex business challenges. Working across industries and geographies, you'll partner with colleagues, clients, and partners to co-create solutions that drive digital transformation and lasting impact. Success in Global Sales is built on curiosity, empathy, and collaboration. You'll connect technical understanding with strong people skills, building trusted relationships and shaping solutions that improve business and society. With world-class onboarding, continuous learning, and a supportive culture, IBM offers the tools and opportunities to grow your career. Join us and be part of a global team that's passionate about driving innovation and making a difference.

You'll join a team that is defining a new category in data infrastructure and working with some of the world's most innovative organisations. You'll have the opportunity to shape the UKI growth strategy, develop talented sales professionals and help customers solve meaningful business problems with data in motion.

Confluent is an equal opportunity employer. We're committed to creating an inclusive environment where everyone can do their best work, and we welcome applicants from all backgrounds and experiences.

Your role and responsibilities As Regional Sales Director, UKI, you will own the/regional territory go-to-market strategy, recruit, retain and lead a high-performing team of enterprise Account Executives. You will be responsible for building a durable pipeline, developing executive relationships, winning strategic opportunities and driving sustainable revenue and consumption growth across the region.

You will operate as a hands on sales leader: setting clear priorities, coaching the team in the field, raising the quality of execution and creating a culture of accountability, collaboration and customer focus. You will work closely with Solutions Engineering, Customer Success, Marketing, Partners, Professional Services, Product and executive leadership to deliver outcomes for customers and the business.

You will be accountable for Customer Acquisition, New ACV expansion, renewals and consumption within your territory.

What you'll do

• Set the UKI sales strategy, operating rhythm and priorities in line with company goals.
• Lead, coach and develop a team of enterprise Account Executives, creating clarity on expectations, territories, account focus and execution standards.
• Build a predictable pipeline-generation engine across new logo, expansion and strategic account motions.
• Establish strong account and territory plans, with clear customer outcomes, stakeholder maps, champions and next steps.
• Coach the team through complex enterprise sales cycles, from discovery and qualification through negotiation, close and post-sale transition.
• Drive disciplined use of sales methodology, including rigorous qualification, mutual action plans, deal inspection and accurate forecasting.
• Engage directly with senior customer stakeholders, including CIOs, CTOs, CDOs and business leaders, to connect data strategy to measurable business value.
• Engage and build strong network across the IBM Ecosystem to build pipeline and executive engagement
• Lead strategic deal strategy and executive alignment for the region's most important opportunities.
• Partner with Solutions Engineering and Customer Success to ensure technical wins translate into successful production workloads, adoption and long-term customer value.
• Build productive relationships with strategic partners, including cloud providers, systems integrators and technology partners.
• Collaborate with Marketing and Sales Development to create targeted regional campaigns and improve pipeline conversion.
• Use performance data and customer insight to improve prioritisation, execution, forecast quality and sales productivity.
• Recruit and retain exceptional talent, develop future leaders and promote an inclusive, high performance culture.
• Represent the UKI field in wider EMEA and global leadership forums, bringing customer and market insight back into the organisation.

Required education Bachelor's Degree

Required technical and professional expertise

• Significant experience in enterprise technology sales, including experience leading and developing sales teams.
• A strong record of achieving and exceeding bookings and consumption targets in complex, multi stakeholder sales environments.
• Experience selling cloud, SaaS, data infrastructure, developer platforms or other technically sophisticated solutions.
• Deep understanding of pipeline generation, executive engagement, discovery, qualification, value selling and enterprise deal strategy.
• Demonstrated ability to coach Account Executives in the field and raise performance through structured inspection and feedback.
• Experience managing accurate forecasts and operating a consistent sales cadence across a region.
• Strong commercial judgement, negotiation skills and the ability to mobilise internal and external stakeholders around a deal.
• Experience working with consumption based, subscription or usage led business models.
• A customer first leadership style with high standards, clear accountability and genuine investment in people development.
• Excellent communication, presentation and influencing skills, with the credibility to engage from technical practitioners to C level executives.
• Experience operating successfully in a matrix organisation.
• Willingness to travel across the UKI region and occasionally more broadly within EMEA.

What gives you an edge

• Experience selling data streaming, databases, analytics, cloud infrastructure or open source technologies.
• Existing relationships with senior technology and business leaders across UKI.
• Experience building joint go to market motions with hyperscalers, global systems integrators or strategic technology partners.
• Familiarity with MEDDPICC or another rigorous enterprise sales methodology.
• Experience leading a regional team through transformation, rapid growth or a shift to consumption based selling.

What success looks like

• The UKI team has clear priorities, strong account plans and a consistent operating rhythm.
• Pipeline is healthy, diversified and connected to defined customer outcomes.
• Forecasts are accurate, risks are surfaced early and leadership attention is focused where it can change outcomes.
• Account Executives are improving through regular coaching, deal reviews and field engagement.
• Strategic customers recognise Confluent as a trusted partner in their data and application modernisation journey.
• New workloads progress into production, creating durable customer value and sustainable growth.
• The team attracts, develops and retains high quality talent.

ABOUT BUSINESS UNIT IBM has a global presence, operating in more than 175 countries with a broad based geographic distribution of revenue. The company's Global Markets organization is a strategic sales business unit that manages IBM's global footprint, working closely with dedicated country based operating units to serve clients locally. These country teams have client relationship managers who lead integrated teams of consultants, solution specialists and delivery professionals to enable clients' growth and innovation. By complementing local expertise with global experience and digital capabilities, IBM builds deep and broad based client relationships. This local management focus fosters speed in supporting clients, addressing new markets and making investments in emerging opportunities. Additionally, the Global Markets organization serves clients with expertise in their industry as well as through the products and services that IBM and partners supply. IBM is also expanding its reach to new and existing clients through digital marketplaces.

YOUR In a world where technology never stands still, we understand that, dedication to our clients success, innovation that matters, and trust and personal responsibility in all our relationships, lives in what we do as IBMers as we strive to be the catalyst that makes the world work better.

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