Chief Commercial Officer

Position Summary:

The Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) is responsible for driving operating company revenue and profitable growth across a multi-portfolio of $100 million holding company while maintaining strong operational discipline across all operating companies.

This role collaborates with company leaders for development of the commercial strategy for the company and ensures disciplined, scalable execution of sales, marketing, pricing, and customer growth initiatives at the operating company level with an emphasis on digital marketing, demand generation, analytics, and responsible use of AI to improve decision-making, productivity, and customer engagement.

The CCO, while respecting operating company autonomy, will actively elevate commercial maturity, moving the businesses toward repeatable, data-informed, and technology-enabled growth strategies while ensuring the operational foundations of process, talent, cadence and culture are in place to execute and sustain growth.

The CCO collaborates directly with operating company Presidents and General Managers, influencing through credibility, coaching, and measurable results rather than day-to-day control.

Key Responsibilities

• Work with each company to define a commercial strategy supported by market research, digital tools, and AI-enabled insights.
• Establish clear revenue growth priorities by business, market, customer segment, and product/service line.
• Identify opportunities to leverage shared digital platforms, data, and AI-enabled tools across the portfolio.
• Partner with the CEO and CFO to translate commercial initiatives into measurable revenue, margin and EBITDA growth.
• Gain thorough understanding of each company’s industries, competitive environments, and customer dynamics to inform strategy.

Commercial Strategies, Analytics, and Pricing

• Guide market positioning and go to market strategies for each operating company.
• Evolve commercial dashboards integrating sales and marketing at each company.
• Partner with portfolio company leaders to:
• Identify underperforming segments and growth opportunities.
• Identify the most valuable customers and apply strategies to maintain and grow them.
• Understand why and where we win or lose at the customer experience level.
• Improve pricing frameworks, discipline, discount governance, and margin realization.
• Partner with finance to ensure commercial decisions clearly link to profitable growth.

Marketing & Demand Generation

• Work with portfolio company leaders to execute progressive marketing efforts, including collateral, web, social media, and CRM to support brand and sales growth goals.
• Elevate brand strategy, digital marketing and lead generation strategies along with relevant marketing ROI measurements across all operating companies, including:
• Website performance and conversion optimization
• SEO/SEM and paid digital channels.
• Content marketing and thought leadership.
• Marketing automation, email, and nurture programs
• Lead attribution and lifecycle management.
• Deploy AI-enabled capabilities to improve marketing effectiveness, such as:
• AI-assisted content generation, optimization, and testing
• Predictive lead scoring and prioritization
• Campaign performance analysis and spending allocation.
• Personalized messaging by segment, industry, or buyer behavior
• Ensure marketing investment is ROI-influenced, pipeline-focused, and continuously optimized using data and AI-supported insights.

Sales Force Structure, Strategy, Enablement & AI-Supported Productivity

• Partner with operating company leaders to ensure sales channel design, structure and personnel are aligned with each company’s vision and revenue growth goals.
• Improve sales effectiveness using AI-supported tools and analytics, including:
• Forecasting and pipeline risk analysis
• Account and opportunity prioritization.
• Win/loss analysis and customer insight extraction.
• Automation that reduces administrative burden and improves rep productivity.
• Ensure strong alignment between digital marketing output and sales execution.
• Introduce modern sales, marketing and technology skills across all portfolio companies.
• Drive disciplined CRM adoption, marketing automation, data quality, and sales operating cadence.
• Align sales compensation and incentives with growth, margin, and strategic objectives.

Operations Leadership & Performance Management

• Drive businesses to achieve sales, profitability and cash flow goals and review monthly P&L, KPI’s, and scorecards versus budget and goals.
• Participate in Quarterly Business Reviews with each portfolio company to review financial performance, strategic initiatives, operational objectives and identify, discuss, and resolve critical issues.
• Collaborate with company leaders to implement the Annual Planning Process at each portfolio company: annual kick off meeting, talent reviews & incentives, 3-year strategic planning, annual objectives, budgeting and year end activities.
• Coach portfolio company leaders and managers who grew up operationally, not commercially.
• Establish positive, growth-oriented cultures that focus on teamwork, collaboration, innovation, learning and a “can do” approach.
• Champion execution of company visions, values and missions.
• Promote cross company best-practice transfers while respecting different operating company cultures and operating models.

M&A Support & Commercial Readiness

• Participate in acquisition related activities including pipeline development, company reviews, evaluations, and communications with relevant networks to identify and support acquisitions.
• Support commercial diligence for acquisitions, including assessment of:
• Market and customer growth potential
• Digital and data maturity
• Scalability of sales and marketing capabilities
• Support post-acquisition integration of commercial processes, tools, and AI-enabled capabilities.

Leadership & Operating Style

• Trusted advisor and leader to operating company presidents and general managers.
• Lead through influence, credibility, and measurable results.
• Nurture a data-literate, commercially disciplined, and customer-centric culture.
• Pragmatic adopter of AI—focused on a balance of learning and productivity. Operate with the highest level of integrity and honesty in all interactions.
• Effectively represent Stein Industries customers, employees, third party partners, suppliers and acquisitions targets.
• Effectively collaborate with CEO and CFO on all significant business, strategic and operational initiatives across the enterprise.

Qualifications:

• 15+ years of commercial leadership experience across sales and marketing.
• Demonstrated success driving digitally enabled, data-informed revenue growth.
• Experience in a multi-business, holding company, or private equity-backed environment strongly preferred.
• Working knowledge of:
• Digital marketing channels and analytics
• CRM and marketing automation platforms
• Practical and responsible use of AI in commercial settings
• Strong financial acumen linking commercial actions to EBITDA and value creation.
• Skilled in organizational development, personnel management, budget development and resource allocation and strategic planning.
• Excellent communication, coaching and change leadership skills.