وصف الوظيفة
Role Overview
Director of Sales, Middle East at Planet, based in the United Arab Emirates. This is a full-time, remote position; if located near an office, you are expected to work from that office 3 days per week.
Company Overview
Planet designs, builds, and operates the largest constellation of imaging satellites in history. The company delivers an unprecedented dataset of empirical information via a revolutionary cloud-based platform to authoritative figures in commercial, environmental, and humanitarian sectors. Planet controls every component of hardware design, manufacturing, data processing, and software engineering. The company is a global organization with employees working remotely worldwide and joining from offices in San Francisco, Washington DC, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, and The Netherlands.
Role Purpose
Lead the regional sales organization and drive Planet's Go-To-Market strategy to accelerate revenue growth across national security, defense, and government sectors in the Middle East. Build executive relationships across defense ministries and key contractors, and position Planet's Earth observation platform as an essential capability for mission-critical operations.
Key Responsibilities
Strategic Revenue Growth
- Drive and execute a result-oriented Go-To-Market strategy to build, negotiate, and close high-value, complex deals across sovereign defense and government sectors.
- Own hitting or exceeding regional quota targets consistently.
Pipeline Management & Forecasting
- Maintain rigorous pipeline hygiene using Salesforce.com.
- Deliver accurate, data-driven revenue forecasts to executive leadership through disciplined deal inspection and pipeline management.
Capture Strategy & Value Messaging
- Engineer tailored capture strategies and high-impact executive narratives that align with agency-level priorities.
- Resonate with key decision-makers and win competitive procurements.
Team Leadership & Development
- Build, mentor, and scale a high-performing sales team.
- Establish a culture of accountability, operational excellence, and continuous professional development.
- Train and inspect direct reports on core sales methodologies and capture frameworks such as MEDDPICC and Shipley.
- Coach direct reports on deal qualification, stakeholder mapping, and win strategies.
Talent Management & Scaling
- Proactively recruit, onboard, and retain elite commercial and defense-domain talent.
- Build a solid talent bench as the regional footprint expands.
- Recruit, mentor, and retain top-tier talent, instilling a high accountability culture.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Orchestrate seamless collaboration across internal matrix teams including Government Affairs, Product, Engineering, and Field Marketing.
- Align corporate capabilities with regional market opportunities.
- Partner closely with Pre-Sales and Solutions Engineering to secure technical wins.
- Collaborate with Post-Sales teams to ensure flawless customer onboarding, retention, and long-term expansion.
Deal Cadence & Executive Engagement
- Communicate deal velocity transparently across internal business units.
- Mobilize executive sponsorship and cross-functional support when needed to de-risk complex pursuits.
Qualifications & Experience
- 8+ years of experience with a track record of driving revenue growth, building high-performing teams, and consistently exceeding multi-million-dollar individual and team quotas.
- 6+ years of progressive leadership and management experience.
- 5+ years of progressive sales leadership and enterprise business development experience within the defense, national security, or government technology sectors, with a track record of building high-performing teams and consistently exceeding revenue targets.
- Extensive background navigating complex government and defense procurement frameworks across the Middle East, with a primary focus on key markets including the UAE, KSA, Oman, and Bahrain.
- Deep operational understanding of defense domain priorities, sovereign procurement frameworks, and agency decision-making processes across the UK and EMEA regions.
- Experience managing complex, multi-year deal cycles with the ability to lead sales teams through disciplined capture frameworks, pipeline governance, and accurate revenue forecasting.
- An established C-level network across Ministries of Defense, Intelligence Agencies, and Tier-1 Prime Contractors and System Integrators in the MENA region.
- Deep understanding of how commercial technology and advanced data feeds support sovereign defense, intelligence, and national security missions.
Skills & Competencies
- Deep experience establishing pipeline discipline, accurate revenue forecasting, and thorough deal inspection using Salesforce.com and modern sales methodologies such as MEDDPICC.
- Ability to recruit, mentor, and retain top-tier talent, instilling a high accountability culture and coaching direct reports through complex, multi-year deal cycles.
- Success collaborating across internal matrixed teams including Government Affairs, Product, Engineering, and Legal to align corporate capabilities with regional opportunities.
- Strategic, self-directed leadership with sound commercial judgment, adept at leading teams through dynamic, high-growth, or startup-like market environments.
- Fluency in both English and Arabic is a solid plus, enabling the candidate to articulate complex strategic value propositions effectively to senior government ministers, agency leaders, and internal executives.
Additional Information
Contract & Compensation
- This role is eligible to receive commission.
Benefits
- Paid time off including vacation, holidays, and company-wide days off
- Employee Wellness Program
- Home Office Reimbursement
- Monthly Phone and Internet Reimbursement
- Tuition Reimbursement and access to LinkedIn Learning
- Equity
- Volunteering Paid Time Off
Benefits offerings are dependent on employment type and geographical location, based upon applicable law or company policy.