Director, Plant Extract Commercialization
kimberlyclark · Dallas, Texas, United States
Director, Plant Extract Commercialization
Job DescriptionYou’re not the person who will settle for just any role. Neither are we. Because we’re out to create Better Care for a Better World, and that takes a certain kind of person and teams who care about making a difference. Here, you’ll bring your professional expertise, talent, and drive to building and managing our portfolio of iconic, ground-breaking brands. In this role, you’ll help us deliver better care for billions of people around the world. It starts with YOU.
Kimberly-Clark is seeking a Director, Plant Extract Commercialization to lead revenue growth and commercial development for plant extract within the Natural Solutions organization. Reporting to the Vice President and Managing Director, this leader will shape and execute the strategy for turning plant extract into a scalable, profitable business.
The Director will lead the commercial organization responsible for identifying markets, developing customer relationships, building partnerships, managing the sales pipeline, and converting plant-extract opportunities into revenue. Target markets may include agriculture, animal health, surfactants, personal care, household care, and other specialty applications.
The Director owns the commercial outcome. Your responsibility is to determine where the strongest value exists, build the route to market, secure customers and partners, and ensure that technical and operating work is aligned to attractive revenue and profit opportunities.
In this role, you will:
- Own the commercial strategy for plant extract, including priority markets, applications, customers, channels, partnerships, portfolio priorities, and value-creation pathways.
- Lead and develop the plant-extract sales and commercialization organization, establishing clear roles, goals, sales processes, and performance expectations.
- Identify and prioritize markets and customers based on customer need, technical feasibility, competitive position, strategic fit, and financial value.
- Build a qualified pipeline across agriculture, animal health, surfactants, personal care, household care, and other suitable markets.
- Lead customer discovery, value proposition development, business development, sales negotiations, commercial proposals, and conversion of opportunities into signed agreements and revenue.
- Build relationships with customers, distributors, development partners, toll manufacturers, strategic collaborators, and other commercial partners.
- Lead commercialization from concept through customer validation, product definition, launch, scale-up, and ongoing business management.
- Translate customer and market requirements into priorities for technical, formulation, quality, regulatory, operations, and supply-chain teams.
- Confirm that proposed offerings can meet customer requirements for performance, quality, supply, cost, service, regulatory support, and timing.
- Establish pricing strategy, offer architecture, contract structures, channel models, partnership economics, and commercial terms.
- Own the plant-extract business case, including revenue, volume, pricing, margin, forecasts, profitability, capital requirements, and long-range value creation.
- Lead annual operating plans, growth plans, commercial forecasts, scenario plans, and financial updates for senior leadership.
- Establish the operating rhythm, pipeline reviews, commercial metrics, and governance needed to manage plant extract as a business.
- Coordinate plant-to-market planning with Operations and Supply Chain to align customer commitments with capacity, quality, inventory, logistics, and service expectations.
- Represent the business with senior internal stakeholders, customers, partners, and external organizations. Communicate strategy, progress, risks, and recommendations clearly.
- Lead cross-functional teams through customer qualification, product definition, trials, contracting, launch, and post-launch performance management.
- Champion accountability, customer focus, collaboration, innovation, and bias for action while upholding Kimberly-Clark values and standards.
About Us
Huggies®. Kleenex®. Cottonelle®. Scott®. Kotex®. Poise®. Depend®. Kimberly-Clark Professional®. You already know our legendary brands—and so does the rest of the world. In fact, millions of people use Kimberly-Clark products every day. We know these amazing Kimberly-Clark products wouldn’t exist without talented professionals, like you.
At Kimberly-Clark, you’ll be part of the best team committed to driving innovation, growth and impact. We’re founded on more than 150 years of market leadership, and we’re always looking for new and better ways to perform – so there’s your open door of opportunity. It’s all here for you at Kimberly-Clark.
Led by Purpose. Driven by You.
About You
You perform at the highest level possible, and you appreciate a performance culture fueled by authentic caring. You want to be part of a company actively dedicated to sustainability, inclusion, wellbeing, and career development.
You love what you do, especially when the work you do makes a difference. At Kimberly-Clark, we’re constantly exploring new ideas on how, when, and where we can best achieve results. When you join our team, you’ll experience Flex That Works: flexible (hybrid) work arrangements that empower you to have purposeful time in the office and partner with your leader to make flexibility work for both you and the business.
In one of our professional roles, you’ll focus on winning with consumers and the market, while putting safety, mutual respect, and human dignity at the center.
To succeed in this role, you will need the following qualifications:
- Bachelor’s degree required. An advanced degree in business, engineering, chemistry, materials science, chemical engineering, or a related field is preferred.
- Significant experience in commercialization, business development, sales leadership, strategy, product management, new-business scaling, or general management.
- Experience in ingredients, specialty chemicals, biomaterials, agribusiness, consumer products, industrial products, or adjacent sectors preferred.
- Demonstrated success leading new businesses, products, or platforms from development through customer adoption, launch, and scale.
- Experience leading and developing a sales or commercial organization, including pipeline management, customer segmentation, account strategy, sales execution, and performance management.
- Experience owning or materially influencing a P&L, including pricing, forecasting, margin management, business cases, and resource allocation. Strong track record working with customers, external partners, distributors, and senior leaders to create and execute growth strategies.
- Ability to translate technical or manufacturing capabilities into compelling customer propositions and commercially viable offers.
- Strong financial, strategic, analytical, negotiating, communication, and stakeholder-management skills.
- Proven ability to lead cross-functional teams in complex, ambiguous, and fast-moving environments.
- Willingness to travel as needed to plants, partners, customers, conferences, and market-development activities.
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Preferred Qualifications:
- Selling or commercializing plant-derived ingredients, natural products, specialty chemicals, surfactants, biomaterials, agricultural inputs, animal-health products, personal-care ingredients, household-care ingredients, or related solutions.
- Building a market, channel, or customer base for a new product or technology with limited existing market structure.
- Strategic partnerships, licensing, toll manufacturing, distribution models, contract development, or technology commercialization.
- Selling into multiple markets with different customer requirements, regulatory pathways, value propositions, and margin structures.
- Connecting customer needs to R&D, process development, formulation, ma