Europe Express is a business unit of Travelopia (https://www.travelopia.com/), the world's leading experiential travel company with over 2,000 employees in 30 countries around the world. We are a collection of diverse and exciting businesses, owned by KKR, one of the world’s largest private equity firms. Some of our businesses are iconic market leading brands such as TCS, the world’s leading private jet company based in Seattle and Quark, the world’s leading polar expedition company based in Toronto.
Established in 1990, Europe Express provides high-quality, custom travel services to Europe. The company serves both private group and FIT leisure markets, working exclusively with travel advisors as a B2B specialist to book everything from air and rail to hotels and sightseeing tours. The business has gone through a significant transformation over the past 2 years and is poised to become the market leader in FIT custom travel. Europe Express is also a preferred partner at leading luxury travel consortia including Signature and Travel Leaders.
Summary:
This is a phenomenal opportunity to join the Europe Express Executive Leadership team! The VP of Inside Sales is a critical role, responsible for leading the sales strategy and global sales teams across all territories. The role will report directly to the CEO of EE and will be responsible for all sales plans and activity to deliver the revenue and margin targets.
This is a key role as part of the senior management team of the Europe Express business, needing energy, drive and strong leadership and collaboration skills – to empower and inspire a large sales team and work in partnership with peers from other functions.
What You Will Be Doing:
Devise and deliver the sales plan to achieve the commercial targets:
- Own and refine the Europe Express sales plan to deliver the revenue and margin targets and ensure that the business remains competitive and continuously growing
- Create annual, quarterly, and monthly sales plans that deliver lead to book conversion targets
- Empower and own the sales team, including direct line management of a team of 6 managers and a wider team of 60 sales and customer service heads
- Build strong relationships with wider Travelopia Sales Leadership team to share standard process and leverage efficiencies
- Set goals and priorities for the team in line with the products’ targets, maintaining a regular cadence to motivate the team and track progress: including daily check-ins, weekly 1-2-1 reviews and monthly team meetings
- Build a high-performance team with strong performance management and high-quality hiring, celebrating success and sharing good practice
- Drive learning and development across the sales team by coaching and developing sales managers to optimally lead their teams
Deliver the margin targets:
- In collaboration with the commercial team, define the brands’ pricing strategies to optimize volume and margin delivery
- Drive the re-pricing process throughout the year; ensuring competitive prices whilst revenue and margins remain in line with required budgeted levels
- Initiate tactical sales promotions as required, ensuring collaboration between the sales and marketing teams in communicating these to customers
Build strong relationships:
- Collaborate well with other functions: marketing, product, operations, commercial, finance and people to drive effectiveness and improvement at the organizational level
- Work very closely with Finance and Commercial to agree selling prices and thereafter analyze margins
- Participate in Exec meetings as a positive thought leader
- Lead weekly trading meeting with COO to drive sessions to leads and leads to booking targets
Key measurables for the role:
The following areas will be used to measure success.
- Budgeted Revenue and margin targets
- Lead to Book conversion target
- Sales efficiency (delivering sales targets within budgets)
- Post booking NPS
- Team engagement
What We Are Looking For:
Ability to inspire and empower people to achieve great results: track record of successfully leading sales teams and delivering excellent results, with a strong commercial focus
- Ability to think and operate both strategically and tactically
- Respectful leader - exceptional interpersonal and leadership skills with consistent record of getting things done through persuasion and influence rather than command and control; pragmatic and flexible
- Tight-knit collaborator and skilled relationship builder, both internally and externally, with high emotional intelligence - inspiring trust, loyalty, and respect
- Effective communication (verbal and written) with strong influencing skills and the ability to establish trust and respect at all levels
- Hands on and ‘can do’ attitude, takes personal accountability to make things happen and to ensure results
- Proactive in improving the efficiency of working practices, with experience in leading change
- Excellent analytical, planning and organizational skills
- Calm, confident and resilient, able to deal with complexity and ambiguity
We are on the hunt for a collaborative, intuitive VP of Sales with a forward-thinking approach to sales strategy, leadership, performance management, and coaching and development.
We believe people are happier and perform best when they are able to be their true self, and that diverse teams deliver better results.
Together we will cultivate a diverse, equitable and inclusive environment, where everyone can flourish. We are committed to driving change through increasing awareness of, and counteracting, unconscious bias; building an inclusive culture, and embracing diversity in all its dimensions.
Travelopia is committed to ensuring a work environment that is open, accessible, and inclusive, removing barriers for all individuals. If you require accommodations/additional support to participate in the recruitment and selection process, kindly inform us. Our hiring team will work with you to provide suitable accommodations/additional in a timely and confidential manner. Information received will be handled with the utmost discretion.
To request accommodations, please contact our team at Talent@Travelopia.com
