Job Description
Sales & Operations Manager
Work Set Up
- Monday to Friday 2PM - 11PM MNL
- WFH/Remote
Hard Requirements (must-haves) Experience
- 5+ years total professional experience.
- At least 2 years in B2B outbound sales, business development, or SDR/BDR roles selling professional services, recruitment, or technical solutions to EU, UK, or AU clients. You have personally owned a daily contact quota, booked discovery calls, and built outreach sequences.
- At least 2 years in an operational or recruitment role: staffing or recruitment agency, captive pharma or medical device shared service centre, healthcare KPO, or B2B services operations. The sales and operations experience can overlap in a single prior role.
- Demonstrable ownership of a CRM as a daily working tool, for both sales pipeline and operations hygiene. Teamleader (which XSQ runs on) is the primary tool; comparable experience with HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, or any equivalent B2B CRM is acceptable. Not just I have used it but I owned the hygiene, built the views, ran the reports, ran the sequences.
Education
- Bachelor's degree.
- Preference for BS Pharmacy, BS Medical Technology, BS Nursing, BS Psychology, or BS Business Administration.
Life sciences fluency: conversant
- Recognises and correctly uses CE marking, MDR, IVDR, ISO 13485, GMP, GDP, GxP, CSV, QA, RA, technical file, Notified Body, without needing definitions.
- Can read a regulatory consultant's CV and identify whether their project work is consistent with the seniority they claim.
- Can spell the difference between CE marking (regulatory market access) and ISO 13485 (quality management system) in two clean sentences.
- Does not need to negotiate technical scope with a VP Quality.
Language
- Written English at C1 or C2. Crisp, direct, no filler.
- Comfortable on Zoom and Teams with European accents (Belgian, Dutch, German, French English speakers).
- Dutch, French, or German is a bonus, not required.
Technical fluency
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator as a daily prospecting tool. You can build Boolean searches for decision-makers (Quality, Regulatory, Compliance, Operations Directors and VPs) at life sciences companies, save leads into structured lists, and run targeted InMail and connection campaigns.
- Outbound sequencing in a CRM. You have personally built and run multi-touch cadences (LinkedIn connect, intro email, follow-up email, call, breakup). Teamleader is the primary tool at XSQ; experience with HubSpot Sequences, Apollo, Lemlist, Outreach, or Salesloft is acceptable as a transferable skill.
- Comfortable on a VoIP softphone for both outbound prospecting and consultant calls. XSQ runs on Destiny; equivalent experience (RingCentral, 3CX, Vonage, MS Teams Calling) is fine.
- Microsoft 365 (Teams, SharePoint, Outlook, Excel) at intermediate level. SharePoint comfort matters: the consultant bench, prospect dossiers, and client documents all live there.
- Comfortable building and maintaining structured databases (prospects, accounts, candidates) with consistent metadata.
- Familiar with GDPR principles for B2B outreach. Knows what a Data Processing Agreement is, what legitimate interest grounds look like, and why both matter when prospecting EU companies.
Soft skills (just as important) Communication style
- Direct without being abrupt. Comfortable writing No, because X instead of I will try.
- Adapts tone for Belgian and Dutch clients: low on superlatives, low on filler, high on specifics. No Hope you are doing well!, no So sorry, my apologies, please forgive the delay.
- We want a colleague, not a cheerleader.
Judgment
- Pattern matches well: recognises a padded CV, a suspiciously low day rate, or a reference that does not check out, without being told what to look for the third time.
- Knows when to escalate. Knows when not to. Comfortable making the easy 80 percent of decisions independently after week six.
Care for craft
- Sees the consultant bench and the prospect database as two products that compound over time. Every row better than the last.
- Updates the SOP wiki when finding a new pattern, whether in sourcing or in outbound, instead of solving the same problem twice.
- Pride in the small things: clean CRM fields, complete reference notes, accurate availability dates, well-tagged prospect lists, sharp subject lines.
Sales resilience
- Comfortable with rejection. A 3 to 5 percent reply rate on cold outbound is normal, not a failure signal. You measure activity (sequences sent, calls made, meetings booked) before outcomes.
- Curious about prospects. Reads the company news, scans the LinkedIn profile, finds the angle before sending the message. No spray and pray.
- Comfortable on the phone. Will pick up the receiver to book a meeting that two emails could not.
Operational temperament
- Calm under volume. Comfortable juggling 5 to 8 open mandates with 30+ active consultants in pipeline alongside a daily outbound quota.
- Comfortable with ambiguity in the first 30 days. The role and the system are being built together.
- Allergic to chaos. Will push back when intake briefs or prospect briefs are incomplete and ask the right questions before sourcing or sequencing.
Cultural readiness for EU clients
- Has worked with European, UK, or Australian clients before, or can demonstrate self-aware understanding of the cultural calibration from a US BPO style toward a Belgian or Dutch style.
- Comfortable with first-name address after one email exchange.
- Comfortable with ISO dates, 24-hour clock, and CET as the operating time zone for client correspondence.
Nice-to-haves (add weight to a candidacy)
- Prior SDR or BDR role at a B2B consulting, staffing, or professional services firm with measurable outbound results (meetings booked per month, pipeline value generated, sequences run).
- Prior employment at a life sciences shared service centre (Johnson & Johnson Global Services, GSK Asia Hub, Pfizer Business Services, Sanofi Shared Services, MSD Manila, AstraZeneca, IQVIA Manila, or Parexel Manila).
- Prior employment at a recruitment agency placing into regulated industries (life sciences, financial services, regulated tech).
- Exposure to Belgian, Dutch, or DACH clients in a prior role.
- Prior hands-on Teamleader experience. Strong second: any B2B CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive) with sequence functionality.
- Experience writing LinkedIn InMail cadences and Sales Navigator search strings for both prospecting (decision-makers at target accounts) and sourcing (life sciences talent).
- Basic Notion, Confluence, or SharePoint Wiki skills for maintaining an operating playbook and prospect research notes.
Disqualifiers (do not proceed)
- Career entirely in US-only voice BPO (Concentrix, Teleperformance, Sutherland, Sitel) with no written work track record. Sales here is consultative and written-first, not script-driven dial-and-pitch.
- No demonstrable life sciences exposure and no willingness to learn the terminology in week one. Selling into pharma and medtech requires speaking their language credibly.
- Cannot articulate, in 60 seconds, what a regulatory mandate looks like for a medical device manufacturer.
- Allergic to outbound. If cold outreach feels intrinsically uncomfortable rather than a skill to sharpen, this role will be misery for both sides.
- Allergic to operational rigour. If CRM hygiene, candidate sourcing, and document preparation feel beneath you, the operations half of the role will collapse.
- Prefers verbal over written work. The role is 70 percent written (emails, sequences, CRM notes, dossiers) and 30 percent on calls.
Note: As part of our recruitment process, we conduct background checks on all hired candidates. Please ensure that all required documents are prepared and submitted promptly.
