Head of Central Sales Strategy

Anthropic · San Francisco

Sales & Businessposted 12d ago

About Anthropic

Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

About the role

Anthropic’s commercial business is scaling at a pace that outruns any fixed go-to-market plan. New products and capabilities launch on a frontier cadence, new GTM motions get incubated and reorganized in months rather than years, and for each thing we sell, the questions of who we sell it to, how the field and our partners execute, how we win against the alternatives, and whether it’s working have to be answered continuously and globally. We need a leader who owns those answers.

You’ll lead the Sales Strategy team inside our Central GTM Strategy, Operations & Analytics organization, with a global scope across our full solution portfolio. That breaks into three things.

You’ll design the sales strategy for our solution portfolio from defining the core sales motions, who we target with them - across personas, segments, industries, and geographies - how we execute, including how the field and channel are orchestrated and which sales assets and programs support them; how we respond to competitor moves, and how we measure progress, through the KPIs and OKRs the business is run against.

You’ll be the connective tissue across Product, Marketing, Finance, Sales, Regional Sales Strategy, Customer Success, Enablement, and Operations, so that every GTM lever is tuned to drive execution success at scale rather than each function optimizing its own piece. Where a product, segment, or region is pacing behind its aspiration, you’ll co-own the plan to close the gap with the sales strategy partners for that part of the business, and stay with it until it does.

And you’ll own the signal. Your team will synthesize what the field and our customers are telling us, alongside pipeline and performance data, into a clear view of what’s working, what isn’t, and the systemic issues we need to solve to grow faster. You’ll lead the cross-functional steering committees where GTM strategy gets decided, and you’ll be accountable for those forums producing decisions rather than updates.

This is a player-coach role for an operator who can move fluently between a targeting model, a compete plan, and a strategy narrative for our most senior commercial leaders, is comfortable defining work that doesn’t yet have an owner, and wants to shape how a frontier AI company sells.

Key responsibilities

Solution sales strategy

Define the core sales motions for our solutions portfolio, and decide which ones the global field prioritizes
Define who we target with each motion: the personas, segments, industries, and geographies where we invest, and the reasoning behind those choices
Design how each motion is executed, including how field and channel roles are orchestrated and which sales assets and programs the field needs, and partner with Marketing and Enablement to produce them
Own how we compete: competitive positioning for the field, and the design and rollout of compete and takeout campaigns
Define how we measure progress on each motion, including the KPIs and OKRs, and partner with Operations & Insights to instrument and report them

Cross-functional GTM alignment

Act as the connective tissue across Product, Marketing, Finance, Sales, Regional Sales Strategy, Customer Success, Enablement, and Operations so that each function’s plans support the same product and solution outcomes
Bring the field’s perspective into product launch and roadmap decisions, and translate product decisions into changes to sales strategy
Co-own recovery plans with sales strategy partners when a product, segment, or region is pacing behind its aspiration, and drive follow-through until it is back on track

Signal, insight, and executive alignment

Synthesize field and customer signal with pipeline and performance data into a regular point of view on what is and isn’t working and the systemic issues behind it
Stand up quick-turn strategic analyses for GTM leadership on questions that need a defensible answer in days rather than quarters
Lead cross-functional GTM strategy steering committees: set the agenda, frame the decisions, drive follow-through on what’s decided
Serve as a thought partner to the Head of GTM Strategy, Operations & Analytics and to commercial leadership on sales strategy

Team leadership

Lead and develop the Sales Strategy team, including hiring, setting priorities across the pillars above, and setting the bar for the rigor of the team’s work

Minimum qualifications

Have owned sales or go-to-market strategy for a product or product line at a business-to-business technology company, in a sales strategy, product GTM, revenue strategy, or GTM strategy and operations role, or advised on it in a strategy consulting role
Have designed the following and carried through to rollout in the field: a sales motion or set of sales plays with targeting and execution guidance, a competitive positioning or compete program, a targeting model across personas, segments, or industries
Have defined the KPIs used to run a sales motion or product line and used them to change how the business operated
Have managed people, including setting priorities for a team and developing the individuals on it
Strong analytical fluency: you can build the analysis behind a targeting, investment, or performance question yourself in a spreadsheet, and set the standard for it on your team
Diagnose problems from a mix of quantitative data and qualitative field signal, and separate systemic issues from noise
Excellent written and verbal communication: you can put a recommendation in front of senior commercial leaders, take challenge on it, and drive the group to a decision
Work effectively across functions where you don’t own the outcome, and secure real commitments from partner teams
Work effectively with ambiguity, novelty, and pace, including being the first person to scope a problem the company hasn’t solved before
Strong hands-on skills in using AI as a thought partner and work accelerator; comfortable building AI Skills and Agents to improve personal and team productivity.
Are excited about Anthropic’s mission to develop AI that is safe and beneficial

Preferred qualifications

Extensive experience in sales strategy or product go-to-market, ideally in a commercial organization whose product line and go-to-market grew substantially during your tenure
Strong acumen on AI, cloud infrastructure, or other usage-based and API-driven business models, and with how enterprises evaluate and adopt AI products
Have taken a new product or capability from launch to an established sales motion in the field
Have worked across multiple regions, or with several routes to market at once, such as direct field sales, self-serve or usage-based adoption, and channel or partner-led sales, and understand how strategy differs across them
Have run compete or takeout programs against established incumbents
Have supported or run an executive operating cadence, such as steering committees, planning cycles, or a weekly leadership forum
Have owned or co-owned a recovery plan for a business that was behind its targets
Background in management consulting or a comparable analytical role, paired with subsequent in-house operating experience
Have used SQL or a business intelligence tool to work with pipeline and usage data directly

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

Annual Salary:

$310,000—$360,000 USD

Logistics

Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience

Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience

Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position

Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.

Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed. Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.

Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you from @anthropic.com email addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate Anthropic recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.

How we're different

We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At Anthropic we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts. And we value impact — advancing our long-term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI — rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science, which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. We're an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly value communication skills.

The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to Anthropic, including: GPT-3, Circuit-Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences.

Come work with us!

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage: Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.