Vice President of Sales and Marketing

Location: Wichita, Kansas (on-site preferred; open to a direct-flight metro with heavy traveland 2 on-site visits per month)

Travel: 50%, including international travel, active passport required

Compensation: Competitive base + bonus Own the sales & marketing engine of a manufacturer that has spent years getting the hard things right and is now ready to grow. The product has been proven in the market for generations, the engineering runs deep, and the last ten projects landed on time and under budget with room to scale beyond the current footprint. What comes next is a commercial function to match. You'd own the pipeline, the operating system, and the team. Sales today runs on relationships and individual effort, strong at the trade shows and on the marquee deals, and your opportunity is to turn that foundation into repeatable, scalable growth. You'd report directly to the CEO and lead a three-person sales and marketing team as a working VP. The first 12 to 18 months are a build. You'd carry the hardest, most complex deals yourself while standing up the cadence, coaching the sellers around you, and putting people in positions to succeed. Over time, the weight moves from your own production to the team's, as you hire, coach, and scale the function around you.

About the Company: The business sells highly technical, custom-engineered products directly to a wide range of buyers. These are memorable products the public experiences in person, so selling them is as much about the joy you're delivering as the engineering behind it. Each buyer needs a different approach, and custom deals get priced and closed alongside the CEO, controller, operations, and engineering. Ownership is patient and growth-minded, the team is lean, and the company runs on an EOS operating cadence. Revenue has historically leaned on a handful of large, relationship-driven deals, and building a steadier, higher-frequency order book is central to this role. The GoalIn your first 12 months, you've built the pipeline that fills the backlog and anchors the roughly $27M bookings plan at target margins, stood up the sales operating system and cadence the function runs on, and are leading the team as a player-coach. You're extending a respected name within a loyal customer base while opening new opportunities alongside it. Outcomes You'll Be Responsible ForBuild the pipeline and grow the core revenue number: Fill the backlog, and drive the new bookings behind the roughly $27M plan at solid margins, won across the full customer mix rather than concentrated in any one segment or product. Forecast accurately and measure success by balanced wins. Stand up the sales operating system and cadence: Put in place a documented playbook from engagement to close, disciplined CRM and pipeline hygiene, a forecasting rhythm, and the weekly metrics to manage by evidence. Adopt, replace, or rebuild what tools the function needs. Lead as a working VP: Coach each seller to the playbook, give clear ownership of segments, and take the hit when they stumble while giving away the credit when they win. Where the plan supports it, add capacity across sales and marketing so sellers can focus on selling. Build the demand engine and test new markets: Once the core is solid, establish a consistent brand presence across digital, print, trade shows, and social, and deliberately test adjacent markets. Expand with discipline. Skills Needed to Apply 10+ years selling high-ticket ($200K+ per unit), custom-engineered products directly for the manufacturer, running consultative, multi-stakeholder pursuits on 12-month-plus cycles across procurement, technical, and executive buyers. A documented, repeatable record of hitting a meaningful revenue or bookings number at solid margins: $20M+ carried personally, or $35M+ leading a team. You can speak to plan vs. actual, year-over-year growth, and win rate concretely. Experience building or meaningfully professionalizing a sales operating system: CRM discipline, a playbook, forecasting cadence, and metrics. If you've operated inside a best-in-class system rather than building one from scratch, you're confident you can recreate those standards. A track record leading a small commercial team as a player-coach, balancing personal production with coaching and segment ownership. Credibility on a manufacturing floor and with engineers, and the earned ability to translate the technical to a buyer's level without losing the substance they need to trust the solution.

Nice to have: A technical degree or engineering background. Ownership or heavy influence over pricing and margin on custom or configured products. Marketing having reported to you (a coordinator, director, small team, or agency) with budget ownership across the sales-and-marketing funnel. You don't need to be a marketing practitioner; this won't screen you out. Experience in a $25M to $75M closely held or PE-backed manufacturer running an EOS cadence.

Qualities That Will Make You Successful: Engaging and credible from the first conversation: You connect quickly across very different buyers, from technical procurement to public-sector institutions to blue-collar operators, and you pass the authenticity bar customers apply. A storyteller who closes: You win through consultative persuasion and conviction, not through hard-close bulldozer style. Owns the outcome: When a deal, forecast, or launch slips, you look first at what you could have done differently. No spin, no curated disclosure, just information and what you do with it. Results- and margin-minded: You set ambitious targets and work with urgency to hit them, and you grow both price and volume with the business judgment to defend a deal with data. Fulfilled by the team's success: You take genuine satisfaction from putting people in a position to win, sharing credit and absorbing setbacks, without a status drive that turns team wins into a zero-sum game. Calibrated, not overconfident: Your forecasts, pricing assumptions, and competitive claims are grounded in reality. Coachable entrant: You're curious enough to learn a new industry deeply, the product, the history, and the customer, and receptive to team-built systems and a staged mandate.10th St. Talent is exclusively retained on this search. As a comprehensive talent partner that connects growth-oriented businesses with leaders for their most pivotal roles, we run every engagement end-to-end.