Lumen is seeking a transformational senior commercial leader to serve as Senior Vice President, Sales Strategy, Commercial Excellence & Transformation. This is a highly visible executive role reporting to the Chief Revenue Officer and serving as a strategic operating partner to the go-to-market leadership team.

Role Overview

The Senior Vice President, Sales Strategy, Commercial Excellence & Transformation will own the end-to-end commercial blueprint for Lumen's go-to-market organization. This leader will be responsible for shaping multi-year commercial strategy, driving execution discipline, modernizing sales operations, strengthening customer and partner engagement models, and leading large-scale transformation across a complex enterprise environment.

This role is designed for a senior executive who can operate as a COO-like partner to the Chief Revenue Officer, translating enterprise priorities into a clear commercial agenda, scalable operating model, and measurable growth outcomes. The leader will play a central role in redesigning Lumen's commercial engine to support future-state growth across recurring revenue, consumption-based models, platform economics, partner ecosystems, and modern enterprise selling.

The ideal candidate brings a rare combination of strategic depth, operational rigor, executive presence, and enterprise transformation experience. They will be equally comfortable engaging with the Board and senior executives, partnering cross-functionally with Finance, Product, Talent, Sales Enablement, Technology, and Customer Success, and leading teams through high-impact change.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and operationalize Lumen's multi-year commercial strategy in partnership with the Chief Revenue Officer and executive leadership team.
• Redesign the go-to-market operating model to support recurring revenue, consumption-based selling, platform-oriented growth, and enterprise customer needs.
• Develop a clear commercial playbook that integrates strategy, sales motions, segmentation, coverage models, talent, incentives, technology, partners, and execution governance.
• Translate market insights, customer needs, and business priorities into focused growth agendas and scalable commercial capabilities.
• Partner closely with Finance to strengthen revenue planning, forecasting, performance management, and investment prioritization.
• Lead enterprise-wide commercial transformation efforts designed to modernize Lumen's sales engine and improve execution discipline.
• Drive Phase 1 of the transformation agenda, including stabilizing execution, modernizing sales platforms, aligning stakeholders, and building the foundation for scalable growth.
• Reevaluate the full sales lifecycle, including presales, sales motions, customer success, partner engagement, and post-sale expansion.
• Establish clear operating rhythms, accountability mechanisms, and performance metrics across the go-to-market organization.
• Ensure transformation initiatives are translated into sustained adoption, behavioral change, and measurable business outcomes.
• Partner with Sales Enablement, Talent, Compensation, and business leaders to reshape the salesforce for future-state selling.
• Help define the capabilities, roles, responsibilities, incentives, and enablement model required to support SaaS-oriented and consumption-based commercial motions.
• Improve sales productivity, forecasting accuracy, pipeline quality, customer engagement, and overall go-to-market performance.
• Lead initiatives to strengthen commercial discipline, customer experience, and repeatable execution across sales teams.
• Support the development of a more modern, agile, data-driven, and customer-centric sales organization.
• Drive modernization of sales platforms, tools, data infrastructure, and analytics capabilities, including continued evolution of Salesforce and related commercial systems.
• Ensure commercial technology investments directly support sales effectiveness, leadership visibility, operational discipline, and customer experience.
• Partner with technology and operations teams to improve data quality, workflow design, reporting, and decision-making across the revenue organization.
• Use data and insights to identify performance gaps, prioritize initiatives, and guide executive decision-making.
• Strengthen Lumen's partner strategy and ecosystem approach as a key lever for future growth.
• Align partner motions, direct sales coverage, and customer engagement models to support enterprise growth priorities.
• Improve the end-to-end customer experience by ensuring strategy, sales execution, service delivery, and customer success are tightly connected.
• Build scalable commercial approaches that enable Lumen to serve complex enterprise customers with greater consistency and impact.
• Serve as a trusted advisor and operating partner to the Chief Revenue Officer.
• Lead cross-functional transformation in a matrixed enterprise environment with multiple stakeholder groups and competing priorities.
• Build alignment across senior leaders, reinforce accountability, and help teams move from strategy to execution.
• Communicate with clarity and credibility across executive, board-level, and frontline audiences.
• Create momentum, remove barriers, and embed durable change across the organization.

Ideal Candidate Profile

The ideal candidate is a senior commercial executive with experience leading strategy, operations, sales transformation, or commercial excellence at scale. They will have demonstrated success operating in complex, matrixed organizations and driving enterprise-wide change that materially improves growth, productivity, and execution.

Strong candidates may come from technology, cloud, SaaS, enterprise infrastructure, cybersecurity, data platforms, networking, telecommunications, or other scaled B2B environments with sophisticated go-to-market models. Experience with recurring revenue, consumption-based models, platform businesses, partner ecosystems, or modern enterprise sales motions is highly relevant.

Required Experience & Qualifications

• 10 years in senior leadership experience in commercial strategy, sales operations, revenue operations, business transformation, go-to-market strategy, or commercial excellence.
• Proven track record designing and executing large-scale transformation across a complex enterprise environment.
• Experience supporting or leading commercial models tied to recurring revenue, consumption-based revenue, SaaS, cloud, platform, or enterprise technology businesses.
• Demonstrated ability to partner with a Chief Revenue Officer or senior executive team to translate strategy into execution.
• Strong understanding of sales lifecycle design, segmentation, coverage models, forecasting, sales enablement, customer success, partner strategy, and performance management.
• Experience modernizing commercial systems, sales tools, data platforms, and operating rhythms.
• Strong financial and analytical orientation, with the ability to connect commercial strategy to revenue performance, investment decisions, and ROI.
• Executive presence and credibility with senior leadership, board-level audiences, customers, and cross-functional partners.
• Experience leading teams and influencing across a matrixed organization without relying solely on direct authority.
• Demonstrated success building scalable operating models, governance mechanisms, and transformation playbooks.

Preferred Experience

• Background in enterprise technology, cloud, SaaS, AI infrastructure, networking, cybersecurity, telecommunications, or related sectors.
• Experience in organizations undergoing significant business model evolution or commercial transformation.
• Exposure to large global partner ecosystems and indirect/channel growth strategies.
• Experience with Salesforce modernization or broader revenue technology transformation.
• Prior COO, Chief Transformation Officer, Chief Revenue Operations Officer, Sales Strategy, Commercial Excellence, or senior GTM operations leadership experience.
• Experience engaging with Boards, executive committees, and external customers or partners.

Compensation

This information reflects the anticipated base salary range for this position based on current national data. Minimums and maximums may vary based on location. Individual pay is based on skills, experience and other relevant factors.

Location Based Pay Ranges

$279,263 - $372,351 in all states.

Lumen offers a comprehensive package featuring a broad range of Health, Life, Voluntary Lifestyle benefits and other perks that enhance your physical, mental, emotional and financial wellbeing. We're able to answer any additional questions you may have about our bonus structure (short-term incentives, long-term incentives and/or sales compensation) as you move through the selection process."

Learn more about Lumen's:
Benefits
Bonus Structure

Requisition #: 343257