National Sales Head/Manager

Key Responsibilities

• Own the North America sales strategy, annual budget, revenue targets, and regional growth plan.
• Develop new OE and Tier-1 accounts and maintain a qualified, regularly updated opportunity pipeline.
• Promote the full product range with customer purchasing, engineering, and quality teams and look for new product opportunities.
• Monitor competitor activity, pricing trends, technology shifts, and regulatory developments, and provide actionable market intelligence to the India leadership team.
• Take full ownership of customer relationships, from initial enquiry through delivery, payment, and ongoing account growth.
• Represent Roots professionally at all customer levels, from purchasing and engineering leadership to plant operations.
• Manage enquiry processing by qualifying opportunities, coordinating costing and quotations with India, submitting proposals, and driving timely follow-up.
• Commercial negotiation – pricing, annual price agreements, development and tooling cost recovery, payment terms.
• Order management – schedules, EDI and customer portals, acknowledgement and change management.
• Manage payment cycles, follow up on overdue receivables, and maintain outstanding balances within agreed targets.
• Customer satisfaction – own the scorecard, respond to ratings, and close out actions.
• Act as the primary interface between the India engineering team and customers for all new product development programs.
• Drive program timelines across samples, prototypes, PPAP, and SOP, ensuring both internal and customer teams meet agreed milestones.
• Coordinate vehicle-level testing, validation, and homologation at the customer end.
• Manage third-party warehouse performance across cost, accuracy, dispatch reliability, space utilisation, and service levels.
• Monitor inventory against customer schedules and trigger replenishment from India in time.
• Ensure proper storage, handling, rotation, traceability, and stock accountability.
• Drive 100% on-time delivery in coordination with the warehouse operator and India logistics team.
• Handle import documentation, customs clearance, and compliance with the broker and forwarder.
• Resolve delays, damages, short shipments, and freight claims, and report root cause on premium freight.
• Respond to customer complaints on site and coordinate containment, segregation, sorting, and rework at customer locations as required.
• Work closely with the India quality team to submit 8D reports, PPAP documentation, and other customer-required quality documents on time.
• Monitor quality and delivery performance against Roots and customer targets, and drive corrective and preventive improvement actions.
• Cook up warranty returns – collection, analysis, customer closure, and commercial settlement.

Required Skills

• Strong commercial capability, including costing, quotation, negotiation, contract management, and receivables control.
• Hands-on, self-driven, and comfortable operating with a high level of ownership.
• Ability to work independently in the United States while maintaining close coordination with India-based teams across time zones.
• Experience selling to automotive or earth-moving equipment customers; current largest customers include forklift manufacturers such as Crown, Toyota, Peterbilt, Caterpillar, Komatsu, and John Deere.
• Ability to obtain new RFQs and convert them into agreements, and to pursue new product business.
• Understanding of electronics or education in electronics in order to understand customer needs/requirements and translate them to offshore manufacturing teams.

Required Experience

• Minimum 20–25 years of experience in automotive sales, key account management, or business development.
• Minimum 5 years of industry experience in automotive or related OEM sectors.
• Direct experience handling OEM and Tier-1 customers in North America.

Education Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering required.
• MBA preferred.