Commercial Director in Luton

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Position overview: Commercial Director shapes, steers and leads the UK&I regional commercial strategy, ensuring alignment with global priorities and market dynamics. The role mobilizes and orchestrates cross-functional resources to deliver sustainable growth in volume, revenue, customer partnerships and margin development across UK&I. Also, it serves as the executive lead for key regional accounts at CEO level, negotiating, safeguarding and expanding strategic local partnerships. This job position provides leadership to the regional team and all key stakeholders, fostering a high-performance culture anchored in growth mindset and innovation. In addition, Commercial Director develops future-ready talent and capabilities, ensuring organizational resilience and agility. Within the EMEA region, the role sets benchmarks and best in class execution support for wider regions.

Key responsibilities:

• Defines and drives the UK&I regional commercial strategy, ensuring alignment with global priorities and market dynamics.
• Leads the creation and execution of UK commercial plans, mobilizing cross-functional resources to deliver sustainable growth in volume, revenue, and profitability.
• Champions innovation and competitiveness, spearheading development programs in marketing, sustainability, and value differentiation to strengthen market leadership.
• Owns strategic relationships with regional key accounts, ensuring retention, satisfaction, and long-term growth.
• Partners with Global Account Directors to execute global customer strategies with excellence.
• Leads market and customer insight programs, monitoring trends, competitor moves, and emerging categories to inform strategic decisions and marketing focus.
• Positions differentiated formats and value-added solutions as competitive advantages, driving share gain and margin improvement.
• Identifies and cultivates new business opportunities, building strategic partnerships with emerging players and categories to accelerate growth.
• Directs regional commercial and marketing plans, ensuring alignment with broader corporate strategy and delivery of annual budget targets (volume, revenue, margin).
• Leads margin optimization initiatives, including value-based pricing, light-weighting, and collaborative efficiency projects with Supply Chain.
• Establishes robust forecasting and reporting processes, ensuring accuracy and transparency in commercial performance.
• Represents the organization at high-profile industry events, reinforcing thought leadership and brand positioning.
• Shapes bid strategies and commercial terms, leading regional bid processes to secure new business and achieve success KPIs.
• Orchestrates cross-functional collaboration with pricing, finance, and operations to ensure competitive positioning and profitability.
• Provides visionary leadership to the regional commercial team, fostering a high-performance culture anchored in growth mindset and innovation.
• Develops future-ready talent, delivering structured performance management, coaching, and capability-building programs.
• Acts as a strategic advisor within the wider commercial organization, influencing customer relationship management, forecasting, and new product development.
• Identifies and mitigates strategic risks to customer retention, development, and relationship health, ensuring resilience and continuity.
• Drives measurable improvements in customer engagement and service excellence, positioning the region as a benchmark for best-in-class experience.
• Delivers volume growth aligned with corporate objectives, leveraging competitive intelligence and differentiated value propositions.
• Achieves commercial revenue targets and cashflow objectives in line with strategic plan and budget, ensuring sustainable growth and profitability.
• Owns and elevates strategic relationships with regional key accounts, ensuring flawless execution of global account strategies and incremental value creation.
• Accelerates entry into emerging categories and secures new brand partnerships, contributing to diversification and long-term growth.
• Understands the region closely anticipating changes that could impact consumption behaviours.
• Delivers budgeted performance through strategic pricing, mix optimization, and efficiency initiatives, reinforcing profitability and competitive advantage.
• Ensures best-in-class forecasting accuracy, enabling proactive decision-making and robust commercial governance to support strategic objectives.

What we are looking for:

• Degree level education (desirable MBA or other business qualification).
• Responsibility for high-level key customer relationship management.
• Strategic commercial planning and forecasting.
• Commercial contract management and negotiation.
• Commercial leadership in a multi-site and strong stakeholder management.
• Successful commercial team leadership, with an awareness of cultural differences in a commercial and marketing environment.
• Understanding of operations and supply chain environment.
• Fluent English language.

Ball Corporation is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We actively encourage applications from everybody, regardless of gender, age, ethnicity, faith, ability, or orientation. When you join Ball you belong to a team of over 16,000 members worldwide. Our products range from infinitely recyclable aluminium cans, cups to aerosol bottles solutions that enable our customers to contribute to a better world. Each of us has a deep commitment to diversity and inclusion which is the foundation of our culture of belonging. Everyone at Ball is making a difference by doing what we love. Because what we create may change, but what we will always make is a difference.

Please note the advertised job title might vary from the job title on the contract due to local job title structure and global HR systems. No agencies please.