1. Could you introduce yourself and tell us about you? Your current / recent jobs and employers? Previous companies and jobs?
He’s a French national and has been in Japan for about 17 years now; currently, he’s an APAC Sales Director for XXXX. On a daily activity level, he is managing the team based in APAC including people from the Japan office and other regional sales office in Malaysia, China, and South Korea; he also attends lot of meetings since he’s a Board Member, do a lot of cross-functional tasks with projects going overseas as well. In summary, his goal is to define, pilot, and implement the sales strategy for APAC. He first joined the company as a Subsidiary Manager for the Japan and Korea markets. Before this, he was a Sales Manager for ADAS in XXXX where they were handling larger sales account of about 400M EUR per year as a tier-one automotive company; he had led sales account of BU ADAS during that time for JOEM Nissan Japan. He also handled negotiations for global acquisition of RFQ. Prior to that, he started his career as a Sales Manager Deputy for XXXX, which is again a tier-one automotive company making brakes for the car industry.
Apart from his professional experience, he has 3 Master’s diplomas including one Executive MBA from ESCP. He speaks French, Japanese, and English, and has a long-term permanent visa in Japan.
2. What skill(s) / experience would you self-describe as strongest or specialist in?
Strongest skills would be his characteristics as a goal-oriented, analytical, strategic-minded, and ambitious person. He is also supportive to his team and can work with people with different types of mindset, way of working, and such; he is empathic when it comes to the team and really understands/listens to what their needs are.
One of the biggest achievement he has in his current company would be exceeding their targets plus 14% sales revenue in APAC, which is over 7% of their budget despite being in a highly competitive market. Another one would be achieving 90% market share on his previous role and having a profit margin which would be one of the highest record in the group.
3. Do you have the lists of key criteria’s according to the clients’ requirements?
He has been doing sales for more than 15 years now, including titles such as Sales Manager and now an APAC Sales Director; he has been in the automotive industry since he began his career and has worked with tier-one automotive companies and automotive industry in general. In terms of team, the biggest size he has handled so far was about 6 direct reports and 15 person including external collaborators. Being in the automotive industry for quite some time now, he is up-to-date with the industry trends and market dynamics. He mostly uses Salesforce but would be open to learn any other CRM or sales analytics tools as well if given the chance.
