The hire you are worried about

The pipeline looks healthy and nothing is closing. Or things are closing and margin is going backwards because nobody has repriced against a raw material that moved.

Often it is a commercial leader who was hired out of branded food, is excellent, and cannot get traction because the sale here does not work the way they have always sold.

Why ingredients and supply is different

The sales cycle is measured in years, not quarters. You are being qualified by a customer's R&D and procurement teams simultaneously, and both can stop you for different reasons. A commercial leader who needs a fast scoreboard will be miserable and gone inside eighteen months.

Technical credibility is not optional in commercial roles. If your key account director cannot hold a conversation with a customer's application scientist, they are relegated to talking price, and price is the one conversation you cannot win.

Commodity exposure runs through everything. Contracts, hedging, pass-through mechanisms, what happens when a crop fails or a route closes. Leaders who have only worked with stable input costs make expensive assumptions here.

And switching costs cut both ways. Once you are specified into a customer's formulation you are hard to remove, which is the whole prize. It also means a quality failure is not a lost order, it is a lost decade.

What I screen for

I want a real example of a specification win that took years, with the detail of who blocked it and how they got round them.

For technical leadership I want to know how they run an application lab as a commercial asset rather than a cost centre, because the businesses that do that well grow and the ones that do not stall.

For anyone senior I want to hear how they think about a raw material position going against them, and what they actually did rather than what the policy said.

Where I draw the line

I will not move a branded FMCG commercial leader into a technical ingredients sale and let you find out in month nine. Some of them make the jump. Most do not, and I will say which one I think you are looking at.

Roles I run

Director to C-suite. Commercial and key accounts, technical and R&D, operations, supply chain and procurement, general management.

How the search runs

I do every step myself, from the briefing to the first ninety days after the offer, because there is nobody else here. More about how I work.

Tell me what you are trying to hire

I will tell you straight whether I am the right person for it. Book a 30 minute call, or email scott@williams-recruitment.com.