About this opportunity
Location: Tokyo, Japan
Team: 12 people (7 direct reports)
Your Role
In this pivotal leadership role, you will unite and drive two high-impact commercial teams, Sales Development and Territory Sales, to accelerate new business creation and deliver sustained revenue growth across the Life Science Discovery Solutions portfolio in Japan. You will own the full commercial growth agenda end-to-end: from proactive opportunity identification and demand creation through to territory coverage, pipeline maturation, and revenue expansion. Operating with significant autonomy and strategic accountability, you will lead with hands-on field engagement, build a thriving external ecosystem, and embed a data-driven execution culture across multiple channels, including distributors, resellers, wholesalers, digital marketplaces, and direct accounts.
You will spearhead the discovery, validation, and commercialization of new applications and market opportunities, ensuring your teams engage deeply with target customers, academic partners, key opinion leaders, and ecosystem collaborators to run proofs of concept and convert them into revenue. Working in close partnership with global marketing and product management, you will co-develop go-to-market approaches and translate ecosystem insights into compelling value propositions. Your field leadership will be visible and decisive: joining critical customer engagements, co-developing deals, and personally driving key opportunities to close when pipeline gaps emerge.
You will instil an outbound-first growth mindset across your teams, establishing new-contact targets as core performance indicators and ensuring proactive market adaptation in response to demand shifts, regulatory changes, technology trends, and competitive dynamics. Cross-functional alignment with sales, global marketing, and product management will be central to your remit, as will stakeholder management across multiple regions conducted in business-level English. You will be accountable for performance metrics spanning growth, territory coverage, activity, and quality outcomes, and you will lead your teams through change with clarity, purpose, and resilience.
Who You Are
You bring a proven track record of leading both sales development and field sales teams, with deep knowledge of the Japanese life science or related B2B market and the ability to operate effectively within a multinational organization.
You have extensive B2B life science or adjacent sector experience, with a strong understanding of application development, ecosystem partnerships, and multi-channel go-to-market strategies.
You demonstrate the ability to lead teams in demand creation, manage complex channel and partner relationships, and translate market intelligence into actionable commercial strategies.
You are a strategic thinker with hands-on execution capability, equally comfortable setting direction at a senior level and engaging directly in the field to drive critical opportunities forward.
You possess strong leadership, coaching, and change management skills, with a track record of inspiring teams through transformation and delivering on ambitious targets.
You are data-driven in your decision-making, with disciplined pipeline management, forecast integrity, and a commitment to key performance indicator governance.
You communicate with confidence and clarity at business level in both Japanese and English, enabling effective engagement with a broad range of internal and external stakeholders across regions.
Job details
How this role compares
Computed from every other active Sales role in our database, not just this employer's listings.
We currently track 2495 comparable Sales roles across 149 biopharma companies.
Salary context
652 of 2495 peers report a salary range (USD, annualized)
Peers share this role's job function. This posting doesn't list a seniority level, so peers aren't narrowed by seniority either -- the range below may span more levels than usual.
Where these roles are based
Top locations among the 2495 comparable roles
+ 63 more countries
Seniority mix
977 of 2495 peers have a known seniority level
Therapeutic area mix
666 of 2495 peers have a known therapeutic area; the rest are genuinely unlabeled, not hidden
Similar opportunities
The closest matches from our peer group, ranked by how similar they are, not how well you'd qualify for them -- treat this as market context, not a guaranteed shortlist; a weak match is labeled as one below.
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How we calculate "similar"
No black box, no LLM guesswork: a deterministic score built from four normalized attributes. Here's this role's own peer group at different match levels, so you can see the mechanism, not just the result.
Every comparison starts from the same 100-point budget: 25 for working in the same function, 40 for the same therapeutic area, 20 for the same or adjacent seniority, 15 for the same country. A dimension we can't confirm on both sides contributes nothing, never a guess, never a free pass.
0 points, never a partial guess. A role we know almost nothing about beyond its function bottoms out at 25%; it never inflates to 100% just because there's little to compare against. Seniority uses a defined ladder (Associate → Manager → Associate Director → Senior → Principal → Director → Senior Director → Executive/VP) so "Director" and "Senior Director" count as adjacent, but "Director" and "Executive/VP" do not.