Head of Sales

Centre for Industrial Rheology · Hampshire, UK · Full-time – In-house or Hybrid

The Short Version

We are a profitable, 18-year-old advanced materials characterisation laboratory. Our clients are industrial R&D and process teams at global blue-chip companies across pharmaceuticals, energy, food, personal care, and advanced materials. We have a strong technical reputation, healthy margins, consistent cash generation, and a sales function that has always run through the founder. The founder is not looking for a lieutenant; he is deliberately moving out of the commercial centre so the company can scale beyond him.

We are hiring our first Head of Sales to change that. You will own the commercial function end to end: the team, the pipeline, the playbook, the number. This is one of the most consequential hires in the company’s history, and we’ve structured it that way.

What We Do

Rheology is the science of how materials flow and deform – why a coating ribs on the press, why a cream feels luxurious or greasy, why a battery slurry won’t pump, why a chip goes soggy. When a formulation or process misbehaves, the answer is often rheological, and most companies don’t have the instruments or the expertise in-house.

That’s where we come in. Innovation teams share their hardest physical-property problems. We design the measurement, run it on research-grade instrumentation, and – critically – tell them what it means and what to do about it. Projects range from one-week diagnostic studies to sustained strategic characterisation partnerships.

The product is insight, not data. That’s what makes it valuable, defensible, and genuinely interesting to sell.

Where We Are

  • 18 years established, founder-led, consistently profitable
  • Repeat business from some of the largest industrial R&D organisations in the world
  • A four-person AE and SDR team, a documented sales playbook, a structured commission scheme, and a CRM with live pipeline data and enough structure to build from.
  • A fractional Sales Director who has helped lay foundations – foundations that now need a full-time owner

Where We’re Going

Our plan takes revenue from its current level to £5m over the next five to six years, building out the sales and marketing team and moving up the value chain from transactional testing toward strategic R&D partnerships. The strategic logic is simple and we’ll share the full model with serious candidates: revenue in this business is driven by applied sales capacity, not by market demand. The demand demonstrably exists – our constraint has always been the systematic effort to convert it.

You are that constraint removed.

 

The Mandate

Year One

  • Take full ownership of the live pipeline and key account relationships currently held by the founder, with a structured, supported handover
  • Lead, coach and performance-manage the SDR team; hire as the plan requires
  • Operationalise and evolve the sales playbook – outbound cadences, qualification, proposal, and closing process
  • Own the revenue number and report against it to the founder
  • Build the forecasting discipline that turns lumpy, founder-dependent revenue into a predictable engine

 

Beyond

  • Scale the team in line with the growth model
  • Develop the strategic-partnership motion: larger deals, longer relationships, multi-year framework agreements
  • Be a central figure in building a business designed for an eventual transaction – with the upside that implies

Who We Think You Are

  • 8–15 years selling scientific instruments, contract testing, technical consultancy or comparable B2B technical services – you’ve sold to industrial R&D buyers and you speak their language
  • You are strong on accountability, setting a clear rhythm of daily/weekly/monthly check-ins and holding the team (and themselves) to it.
  • You are a hands-on player-coach who is close enough to the work to inspect CRM notes, challenge weak qualification, improve call quality, and get involved in deals when needed
  • You may currently be a senior salesperson or regional manager who has hit the ceiling beneath someone else’s Head of Sales title – and you’re ready to own the whole function
  • You’ve hunted without air cover: no brand pull, no marketing machine, just you, a proposition, and a phone
  • You don’t need a chemistry degree, but you find the science genuinely interesting – our buyers can smell indifference
  • You can coach early-career salespeople with structure and patience, and hold them accountable without theatre

What You Get

  • Compensation: £70k–£85k base, £110k–£125k OTE, quarterly bonuses and a meaningful share-option package linked to the growth journey
  • Full commercial ownership – strategy, team, process, number
  • A founder and sales team who have spent two years deliberately building the systems (playbook, comp scheme, CRM discipline) so that this handover is real, not rhetorical
  • A small, expert, unpretentious team that cares about doing excellent science for clients

The Honest Bits

We’re a small company. There’s a tiny marketing department, no brand awareness budget, no safety net of inbound leads. If you need infrastructure around you to perform, this isn’t your role. If the absence of infrastructure is exactly the opportunity you’ve been looking for, we should talk.

How to Apply

Send a CV and a short note – not a cover letter, just a few honest paragraphs on what you’ve built commercially and why this mandate appeals – to [email protected] or linkedin.com/in/rheologylab/

Direct conversations welcome.