Commercial and Sales Operations Lead

Crane Company • Twinsburg, OH

4d • $160,000 - $180,000 • Onsite

About The Position

This role leads the commercial and sales operations function, owning the processes, disciplines, and analytics that drive forecast accuracy, pricing effectiveness, operational scalability, customer responsiveness, and profitable growth. In support of these objectives, the lead will work closely with the Contract Manager to ensure complex deals are structured and executed within established contractual, risk, compliance, and governance requirements while maintaining speed and customer focus.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree from an accredited university or college in Business, Engineering, or a related field.
• Minimum of 5 years of progressive experience in commercial operations, sales operations, pricing, proposals, contracts, business management, or a comparable B2B environment, including experience leading cross-functional programs or teams.
• Demonstrated ability to structure and support complex proposals and agreements, assess commercial risk, interpret customer terms, and convert contractual commitments into executable business requirements.
• Proven ability to establish operating discipline, influence across functions, resolve difficult internal and external issues, and deliver measurable improvement without relying solely on direct authority.
• Strong capability in pricing, margin analysis, forecasting, pipeline performance, metrics, and decision support.
• Excellent project-management, process-improvement, problem-solving, prioritization, and schedule-management skills, with the ability to manage multiple deadlines and complex stakeholder requirements.
• Exceptional written and verbal English communication skills, including the ability to present concise recommendations, risk positions, and executive-level updates.
• Proficiency with Salesforce.com or an equivalent CRM, Microsoft Office tools, dashboards, and commercial analytics applications.
• This role requires access to export-controlled data and technical information. Access may be restricted under applicable U.S. export-control laws and company authorization requirements.

Nice To Haves

• Experience supporting industrial, energy, aerospace, nuclear, engineered-product, or other technically complex markets.
• Familiarity with ITAR, EAR, sanctions, and export-control implications for contract obligations, customer commitments, technical-data access, and execution.
• Demonstrated experience with tender strategy, public bids, customer portals, and formal compliance matrices.
• Experience developing pricing models, configurators, proposal automation, reporting, or analytics that improve speed, quality, control, and margin.
• Demonstrated success implementing new processes, systems, governance, or organizational transitions across functions and regions.

Responsibilities

• Lead the Commercial Operations, Sales Operations, and Customer Care operating rhythm.
• Build the processes, standards, systems, and infrastructure required to enable a high-performing sales organization and consistent execution across Inquiry-to-Order (ITO) and Order-to-Remittance (OTR).
• Own the operating metrics and improvement roadmap for orders, sales, margin, proposal on-time delivery, proposal quality, cycle time, hit rate and win rate, purchase-order turnaround, quote turnaround, backlog quality, and customer responsiveness.
• Establish root-cause reviews, corrective actions, and sustained process controls.
• Lead price benchmarking, segmentation, volume and margin analysis, and development of advanced pricing models, tools, and configurators.
• Partner with Sales, Product Line, Finance, and headquarters stakeholders to identify price opportunity and risk and to deliver fact-based, competitive, margin-accretive recommendations.
• Lead orders estimates and related commercial inputs for all planning sessions.
• Establish forecast assumptions, review pipeline quality and conversion, identify upside and risk, and provide leadership with clear actions to improve predictability and performance.
• Lead disciplined bid and complex proposal execution.
• Coordinate Sales, Engineering, Product Line, Sourcing, Supply Chain, Operations, Finance, and Quality inputs; translate customer requirements into executable solutions; help set proposal strategy, schedule, and governance; and ensure complete, accurate, and timely customer-facing submissions.
• Support strategic frame agreements and commercial arrangements with customers, channel partners, and other strategic partners, balancing growth, customer requirements, margin, execution burden, compliance, and long-term risk.
• Assist with identifying, quantifying, communicating, and mitigating commercial, contractual, pricing, delivery, supply chain, cybersecurity, confidentiality, and compliance risks.
• Support deal and risk reviews, document decisions, enforce Delegation of Authority requirements, and maintain practical clause guidance, deviation logs, and negotiation playbooks.
• Lead reviews of pricing, cost, margin, contractual obligations, execution assumptions, and deviations.
• Ensure complete handover from ITO to OTR using contract summaries, risk and obligation matrices, and prime and supplier flowdowns.
• Support complex change orders, claims, amendments, and formal contract notices in coordination with Contracts Manager, Legal and Operations.
• Develop training curricula and reference materials across Commercial Operations and Sales.
• Coach teams on pricing, proposal quality, risk parameters, contract structures, negotiation frameworks, CRM discipline, and operating processes.
• Own and influence CRM data quality, commercial dashboards, standard reporting, and analytical tools.
• Convert data into clear insights, decisions, and actions for Sales and business leadership.
• Travel based on business and customer requirements.

Benefits

• Crane Company. is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment and will not be discriminated against on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, general identity, national origin, disability or veteran status.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior