SA23M5 Sr. Director, Commercial Operations

CAS uses intuitive technology, unparalleled scientific content, and unmatched human expertise to help companies create groundbreaking innovations that benefit the world. As the scientific information solutions division of the American Chemical Society, CAS manages the largest curated reservoir of scientific knowledge and, for 119 years, has helped innovators mine, assess, and apply that information to keep businesses thriving. The CAS team is global, diverse, and endlessly curious, and it strives to make scientific insights accessible to innovators worldwide.

CAS is currently seeking a Sr. Director, Commercial Operations on our Sales team. This position is located at our headquarters in Columbus, Ohio.

Position Summary

The Sr. Director, Commercial Operations leads the operational backbone of the commercial organization: GTM and market planning, pricing and renewals, customer agreements, sales analysis and territory design, customer operations, and the technology and data foundation that supports all of it. This role consolidates what is today split across four largely vacant leadership seats, and reports directly to the Chief Customer Officer / SVP, Sales & Customer Experience.

This role carries roughly three to six direct reports, several of whose seats are currently open, and about fifteen to twenty indirect reports across the workstreams it leads. It carries budget responsibility and is classified as exempt under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

This is not a pure operations or analytics role. The function's most immediate mandate is forecasting: building a rigorous, defensible revenue and pipeline forecasting process that the executive team can rely on, and that does not exist in a consistent form today. Because forecast credibility depends on field credibility, this role requires someone who has carried a quota and led a sales team before, not only someone who has analyzed one.

This is also a developmental seat. The Sr. Director is expected to build direct working relationships with the three regional sales leaders, with Commercial Enablement, Marketing and Product Management, and to demonstrate the commercial judgment and cross-functional leadership associated with broader general management.

The function this role leads has become process-heavy without becoming faster or easier to work with. A core mandate of this role is to lean out that accumulated process debt: aggressively reduce cycle time and friction in how the commercial engine runs, and materially cut the administrative burden Commercial Operations places on sales representatives, so sellers spend their time on customers and outcomes rather than navigating internal process. This supports a broader shift already underway in how sales talent is hired and developed, away from process-heavy profiles and toward ones focused on customer outcomes. This mandate is as central to the role as forecasting rigor; a candidate who can only deliver one is not the right fit.

Position Responsibilities

Commercial Forecasting & Revenue Rigor

• Own the end-to-end revenue and pipeline forecasting process across new business, renewals, and pricing, in direct partnership with Finance
• Invigorate forecast methodology, cadence, confidence categories, and variance analysis as a standing discipline, not an ad hoc monthly exercise
• Present forecast and pipeline health directly to the CCO and, on a recurring basis, to the broader executive team (CEO, CFO, etc.)

Process Simplification & Seller Friction Reduction

• Lead an aggressive simplification agenda across GTM & Market Planning, Pricing & Renewals, Customer Agreements and CAM, Sales Analysis & Planning, Customer Operations & ID Management, Technology and Commercial Data: measured by cycle-time reduction and process elimination, not by process maturity or added structure
• Partner with Technology & Business Data to identify and deploy AI and agentic automation, starting with high-manual-volume functions such as the Customer Center's fully live-agent call handling today
• Create targeted approach for reducing non-selling hours per rep per week through process simplification and leaning
• Actively retire or consolidate legacy processes and reporting requirements that persist for historical reasons rather than active business need

Commercial Operations Leadership

• GTM & Market Planning: own launch cadence, stage-gate governance, and market/ICP validation, absorbed from the former GTM Coordinator role
• Pricing & Renewals: own the platform for new business, renewals, and order entry; own bundling strategy; and own the Small Accounts Team, an inbound-only function handling new-logo intake and renewals for accounts at or below $50K ACV across North America and EMEA
• Customer Agreement & CAM: own Customer Agreement end to end, including the order-to-cash portion
• Sales Analysis & Planning: own territory design, sales reporting and collaborate with HR & Finance on incentive compensation
• Customer Operations & ID Management: own the customer support platform, identity management, and service-level standards, including modernizing a support model that today handles all inbound calls manually, with no automated or agentic support in place
• Technology & Data Foundation: own the shared tech/data backbone, the AI and tools roadmap, legacy system migration, Salesforce.com administration, and translation of business requirements into system changes

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Partner with Commercial Enablement on the launch stage-gate process, including AI-fluency readiness as a go/no-go criterion
• Serve as the data and cadence partner to Strategic Accounts on Top 150 health-score reporting, on a defined refresh schedule
• Maintain a direct escalation channel into Services and CSS leadership for delivery-caused account risk, distinct from the executive review cycle

Sales Leadership & Field Credibility

• Bring firsthand sales leadership experience to territory design, incentive structure, and forecast discipline; sellers need to trust this function, not merely comply with it
• Partner directly and credibly with the Americas, EMEA, and APAC regional leaders as a peer with sales-floor experience, not solely as a systems and process owner

Team Leadership & Talent

• Lead a distributed organization of roughly six workstream leads and their teams; fill and develop the leadership structure/seats that are needed in Commercial Operations
• Make speed, simplification, and reduced friction the operating discipline for a function that has run process-heavy; more standardization is not the goal, less friction is
• Partner with internal staff to build out the Small Accounts Team from the ground up (Renewals and In-bound BD), including its first hires, a new, inbound-only function not yet staffed

Background Experience

Suitable candidate background includes:

• 10+ years in commercial or go-to-market roles, including a minimum of 3–5 years in direct sales leadership (managing quota-carrying representatives or front-line sales managers) — required, not preferred
• Demonstrated ownership of revenue or pipeline forecasting at scale, with a track record of improving forecast accuracy over time
• Experience with CRM platform oversight (Salesforce.com preferred) and sales compensation design, while working cross-functionally with Finance, HR, and GTM/product-launch processes
• Strong executive presence, with experience presenting forecast and commercial performance directly to senior executive or Board-level audiences
• Comfort operating as a hands-on general manager across multiple distinct operational workstreams simultaneously, several of which currently lack dedicated leadership
• Demonstrated track record of simplifying process, reducing cycle time, and cutting administrative burden on a sales organization, not simply adding structure, controls, or reporting
• Experience deploying automation or AI/agentic tools to reduce manual service volume (e.g., customer support, order processing) a strong plus
• High learning agility and demonstrated potential for broader commercial or general-management leadership

Educational Requirements

Bachelor's degree in business, a technical field, or a related discipline; MBA a plus but not required.

Travel

Travel is expected to be 15–25%.

CAS offers a competitive salary and comprehensive benefits package, including a generous vacation plan, medical, dental, vision insurance plans, and employee savings and retirement plans. Candidates for this position must be authorized to work in the United States and not require work authorization sponsorship by our company for this position now or in the future. EEO/Disabled/Veteran