Sales Activation CoE Lead

Role Overview

The COE Process Lead – Sales Activation is accountable for the design, governance, and operational excellence of ERM’s Sales Activation capability delivered through the Global Delivery Center. This role leads a team of Sales Activation Managers (SAMs) and ensures consistent execution of sales activation processes across industries and regions. The Process Lead acts as the single point of accountability for sales activation ways of working, performance management, pipeline governance, escalation handling, and continuous improvement, working in close partnership with Global Process Leads, Functional Leaders, Industry Leads, and GDC leadership.

Key responsibilities

Capability ownership & governance

• Own and continuously evolve the Sales Activation operating model, including campaign execution, lead management, pipeline hygiene, escalation paths, and reporting standards.
• Maintain and update operating model, SOPs, RACI, SLAs and governance forums for the capability.

Act as the escalation point for process breakdowns, prioritization conflicts, and resourcing bottlenecks.

Process monitorization and delivery oversight & continuous improvement

• Optimise core processes to reduce lead-times, remove handoffs and increase quality.
• Oversee delivery across the team and campaign portfolio, ensuring tasks and priorities are addressed on time, on high quality standards and implement continuous improvement practices (root cause analysis, process metrics).
• Closely partner with global capability lead for ongoing workload assessment, agreeing on prioritization and time-task allocation.
• Drive automation and tooling improvements in partnership with IT/Engineering.
• Own reporting preparation workflow and align with global capability lead to ensure data informing reporting needs is maintained, up to date and ready to deploy.

Enablement & knowledge

• Maintain onboarding materials, playbooks, runbooks, training materials and a central knowledge hub to enable BAU teams and regions.
• Deliver regular training, office-hours and capability onboarding for internal teams and agency partners.

Stakeholder management

Act as primary internal contact for stakeholders (Global Marketing Director, Global Capability Lead, Commercial COE Lead, and others) on capability matters, escalating and collaboration on issue resolution.

Performance measurement & reporting

• Monitor KPIs/SLAs for the capability (e.g., time-to-publish, error rates, campaign build cycle time, cost per operation).
• Produce weekly/monthly performance reports, trend analysis and executive updates; recommend corrective actions.

People & resource coordination

• Lead hiring, onboarding, performance management, and development planning for the sales activation team.
• Define capability and skill development plans aligned to evolving sales enablement needs.
• Drive structured knowledge transfer and documentation to reduce dependency on individuals.
• Partner with GDC leadership on workforce planning and future capability scaling.
• Partner with global capability lead to discuss and resolve resource allocations to projects\campaigns.

Skills & experience

Essential

• 10+ years’ experience owning B2B or B2C operational capabilities/processes in a commercial, marketing or digital environment.
• Strong understanding of B2B buyer journeys, sales cycles, and revenue levers.
• Excellent process design and project management skills; experience building SOPs, runbooks and governance.
• Experience working with cross-functional stakeholders (marketing, IT, analytics, HR).
• Excellent communication and stakeholder influence skills.

• Experience in lead generation and sales campaigns, including ABM touchpoints and marketing and sales automation platforms (e.g., Salesforce, Pardot, Marketo).

Desirable

• Experience in a Centre of Excellence, capability or practice-lead role.
• Understanding of digital marketing.
• Knowledge of accessibility, data protection and compliance in sales and marketing.

Key attributes

• Problem-solving mindset with hands-on delivery orientation.
• Ability to manage multiple priorities under tight deadlines, with agility.
• Strong analytic orientation — uses data to prioritise improvements.
• Collaborative leader with practice-building and coaching skills.
• Detail-oriented with a bias for quality and repeatability.

Performance metrics / success criteria

• On-time delivery of capability roadmap milestones.
• Reduction in process cycle times and error/rollback rates.
• SLA achievement for digital ongoing work and campaign builds.
• Stakeholder satisfaction score and decreased ad-hoc escalations.
• Uptake and utilisation of playbooks / training