Sales Team Lead - SME Business

What You'll Be Doing

Team Leadership & Performance

• Lead a team of Business Development Managers, setting clear expectations, providing regular coaching and feedback, and creating the conditions for individuals to perform at their best.
• Own the day-to-day performance of your team, monitoring pipeline health, conversion rates and activity levels, and intervening early when performance needs to improve.
• Run a consistent team rhythm - daily stand-ups, weekly performance reviews, call listening and skills development, ensuring the team is focused, motivated and accountable.
• Support the recruitment, onboarding and development of BDMs, building a team with the capability and culture to sustain high performance over time.

Sales Execution & Pipeline Management

• Take ownership of your team's pipeline, ensuring leads are managed with urgency and discipline, that follow-up is systematic, and that opportunities are progressed efficiently from first contact to funded account.
• Work with your team to develop and refine the sales approach for your channel, sharing what works, identifying where the pitch or process can improve, and building a team that gets better over time.
• Ensure the team is using CRM and sales tooling effectively, maintaining accurate records, generating reliable pipeline data, and using insight to prioritise effort.
• Step in on complex or high-value opportunities where senior involvement adds to the client experience or improves the likelihood of conversion.

Channel Development

• Contribute actively to the ongoing development of the sales model for the SME channel, sharing insight from the team's day-to-day experience to inform how we segment, approach and serve clients more effectively.
• Work closely with the Head of Sales Operations on the evolution of incentive structures, sales processes and team design, ensuring the channel is set up to scale efficiently as volumes grow.
• Partner with colleagues across the business, including Client Operations, Marketing and Product, to ensure the end-to-end client experience is joined up and that hand-offs between teams are smooth and well-governed.

Outbound Capability Development

• Take full ownership of building a systematic outbound sales capability within the SME team - this is a new and structurally important motion that did not exist in the previous model, and this role is explicitly accountable for establishing it.
• Design and implement a repeatable outbound process, including prospecting cadences, lead qualification frameworks and pipeline governance, that enables the team to operate effectively across both inbound conversion and proactive pipeline development.
• Coordinate the outbound motion alongside the new SME Intermediary channel, accountancy and finance broker relationships, ensuring direct outbound and intermediary-sourced leads are managed without duplication and with clear ownership throughout.
• Scale outbound activity in line with strategy targets - Sales Operations is explicitly tasked with supporting growth from £5.2bn to £8.78bn Direct SME AuA by 2028, with SME outbound identified as a primary contributor. The Sales Team Lead owns the execution of that plan at the team level.

Reporting & Commercial Awareness

• Provide clear and timely reporting on team performance to the Head of Sales Operations, with a confident view on what is driving results and where the risks and opportunities lie. Maintain a strong understanding of the commercial context your team operates in, including platform positioning, competitive dynamics and the factors that influence SME client decision-making.

What You'll Bring

Sales Leadership

• Experience leading a sales team in a financial services, fintech or comparable environment with a clear track record of improving performance and developing individuals.
• A hands-on leadership style - someone who is present, engaged and genuinely invested in the success of their team, not just the aggregate number.
• The ability to hold people to a high standard with consistency and care, someone who creates a culture of accountability without sacrificing the psychological safety that allows people to do their best work.

Sales Skills & Commercial Instinct

• A strong personal foundation in sales, where you understand what good looks like in a client conversation, and you can coach others to get there because you've done it yourself.
• Comfort working with data and CRM tools to manage pipeline, diagnose performance issues and make informed decisions about where to focus team effort.
• A genuine curiosity about how to improve the sales model, you're someone who brings ideas, challenges assumptions, and is always looking for a better way.

Outbound Sales Experience

• A demonstrable track record of building and operating systematic outbound sales processes, not just managing inbound flow. This is a core requirement of the role, not a nice-to-have.
• Experience leading a team through the transition from reactive, inbound-led sales to a blended model with structured outbound activity, including building the process, coaching the behaviours and measuring what matters.
• Confidence coordinating outbound and intermediary-led pipelines in parallel with the commercial awareness to manage lead source mix, avoid duplication, and ensure both routes are contributing effectively to overall SME growth targets.

Audience Knowledge

• Experience working with or selling to SME businesses, with an understanding of how business owners and finance decision-makers approach cash management and what drives their buying behaviour.
• Familiarity with regulated financial services or savings and investment platforms is an advantage, though not essential. We care more about your ability to lead a high-performing sales team than your product knowledge on day one.

Ways of Working

• Comfortable operating in a fast-moving environment where the model is still evolving. You're someone who brings structure and clarity rather than waiting for it.
• A collaborative team player who builds strong relationships across the business and sees cross-functional partnership as part of the job, not an add-on.
• A clear sense of ambition - someone for whom this role is a genuine stepping stone, and who is motivated by the prospect of growing alongside a business at this stage of its journey.