Regional Head Of Sales - Western Cape & KZN at Virgin Active South Africa

• The purpose of this role is to drive strong regional commercial performance by effectively translating national sales strategy into consistent, disciplined execution.
• This includes delivering on key metrics such as unit growth, revenue, conversion, yield, and net membership, while ensuring sales operations are well-managed through structured planning, coaching, and consistent people management practices.  
• A key priority is to build a sustainable high-performing sales team through strong leadership of Area Sales Managers and Sales Managers. This involves improving retention, productivity, onboarding, and leadership capability, while fostering a culture of accountability, continuous improvement, and adaptability to strategic change, ensuring new initiatives and ways of working are successfully embedded.

A day in the life of… (Your Duties & Responsibilities…)

Commercial Delivery and Execution

• Own the delivery of regional sales targets across units, revenue, conversion, yield and net membership growth.
• Translate the national sales strategy into clear regional plans with measurable actions, owners and deadlines.
• Monitor regional performance daily, weekly and monthly, identifying risks early and driving corrective action quickly.
• Ensure Area Sales Managers and Sales Managers are focused on the right controllables to improve run-rate, conversion and output.
• Drive regional forecast accuracy and maintain a clear view of delivery confidence, risks and mitigation actions at all times.
• Lead execution of product, campaign and commercial initiatives within the region, ensuring alignment between sales, marketing, operations and product teams.

People Leadership

• Lead, coach and develop Area Sales Managers capability to drive consistent performance.
• Lead, coach and develop people leadership capability where ASM’s can comfortably diagnose problems, drive actions and hold teams accountable.
• Build Sales Manager capability indirectly through the Area Sales Manager layer.
• Ensure regional review disciplines are concise, factual, visual and decision oriented.
• Create strong management discipline that drive clarity, confidence, urgency and ownership at all levels.
• Have an active and updated talent succession plan across ASM’s and SM’s within the region
• Model the leadership behaviours expected in Virgin Active: Direction, Effective Communication, Integrity and accountability, Empathy and EQ, Motivation and Inspiration and decision making.

Productivity, Workforce Stability and Effectiveness

• Drive sales workforce retention within the region and actively manage attrition risk.
• Improve tenure mix and reduce over-reliance on low-tenure sales employees.
• Ensure new joiners are supported through strong onboarding, effective training and manager-led integration into the team.
• Ensure the sales management team adhere to defined Virgin Active people practices.
• Partner with trainers, recruitment and the People team to improve ramp-up time, coaching quality and quality of hire.
• Review and recommend recruitment exceptions in line with the approved recruitment control process, ensuring every request is supported by performance, churn, vacancy and mitigation data.
• Drive a productivity-led sales model by improving output per consultant and ensuring resources are optimised before headcount is requested.

Regional Insight, Problem Solving and Opportunity Creation

• Use market and club insight to identify opportunities and risks within the region.
• Monitor competitor activity and recommend tactical changes where required.
• Identify new and creative ways to improve commercial performance, member acquisition and local market relevance.
• Ensure all marketing and trade activity requests are supported by cost, expected output and previous results where applicable.
• Encourage sharing of successful regional practices so that high-value ideas can be replicated quickly across the broader sales structure.

Governance, Systems and Operating Discipline

• Ensure all systems, tools, scorecards and reporting mechanisms required to drive the sales strategy are operational and used consistently.
• Maintain a strong cadence of club visits, Area Sales Manager reviews, performance follow-ups and intervention tracking.
• Ensure performance management, misconduct management and behavioural issues are addressed quickly and appropriately.
• Ensure operational discipline in lead management, pipeline visibility, conversion focus and customer experience at point of sale.
• Maintain strong financial discipline in regional budgeting, planning and cost awareness.

Travel

• A fair amount of travel is required to be successful in the role.

We can’t live without… (Minimum Requirements)

• Formal Matric qualification.
• Relevant tertiary qualification.
• Minimum of 4-5 years’ proven multi-site leadership experience in a regional or area management role
• 5+ years’ sales management experience (cluster or single site)
• 7+ years’ technical sales experience within a similar environment.
• Proven ability to lead remotely and drive execution through multiple management layers.
• Proven commercial and analytical capability, including understanding of cost, margin, profit and business performance drivers.
• Strong understanding of Virgin Active (or similar) sales processes, methodologies, systems and performance tracking.
• Proven track record of leading, developing and improving sales teams and sales performance.
• Proven coaching ability, including use of structured coaching models such as GROW.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Ability to travel is required for the role.
• Demonstrated ability to improve retention, onboarding effectiveness and team productivity.
• Demonstrated ability to use data and performance trends to make decisions and drive action.
• Demonstrated ability to lead change and embed new ways of working in a region.

We’d like you to have… (Attributes)

• Strong communication, interpersonal and senior leadership skills across all levels.
• Excellent presentation skills and the ability to influence credibly at senior stakeholder level.
• Strong relationship-building capability with the ability to create alignment across functions.
• Experience working with marketing, operations and product teams to unlock commercial opportunities.
• Strong strategic thinking combined with hands-on operational execution.

We’d love you to have… (additional skills)

• The ability to build a high-performance regional culture through coaching, systems and accountability.
• The ability to improve sales productivity across multiple sites and lead through others.
• The ability to identify patterns in performance and translate those into practical action plans.
• Experience leading transformation, stabilising underperforming teams and embedding new ways of working.
• The ability to balance commercial delivery with people development and long-term capability building.

 Closing Date 31 May 2026