Commercial Director - 12month Maternity Cover
The Opportunity
As the Commercial Director, you will be responsible for creating the commercial strategy and overseeing the central commercial team of 9 individuals across marketing, insurer relations, referrer engagement and corporate partnerships to deliver our commercial objectives. This will entail a coordinated commercial plan for 12 established client centres in London, and our two new sites in Oxford and Cambridge opening in 2026.
You will be involved in business-wide strategic projects, ensuring new initiatives and launches have appropriate commercial support and budget allocation. Our business is currently working on a digital service transformation for both clinicians and patients, and you will act as a key stakeholder to ensure we have ambitious goals whilst delivering against a complex set of business requirements.
The position reports to the Chief Development Officer and sits within the Commercial and Development function. You will be expected to formulate the commercial strategy in conjunction with the commercial sub-team leads who will deliver the plans, and you will be available as an escalation point to resolve any issues.
The client is a fast-growing and innovative frontline healthcare company, now moving into the next stage of our development as we expand outside of London. The Commercial Director needs to be highly dynamic, balancing growth, changing business requirements and operational scalability, whilst also taking time to build a high-performing team to enable sustainable delivery of commercial plans.
Activities will include:
Commercial strategy
- Develop and execute a scalable commercial strategy, defining this in partnership with the CDO and heads of commercial functions (primarily Senior Marketing Manager, Head of Strategic Relationships, Senior Insurer Manager, and Referrer Engagement Lead)
- Establish a central commercial approach for WHP, standardising best practices and ensuring consistency, while allowing regional flexibility (London, Oxford and Cambridge)
- Allocate commercial budget across all function areas, for both London and regional centres, including standard BAU and large, one-off initiatives such as new service launches
- Build a strong knowledge of our customer base and clinical USPs to keep our overall commercial strategy aligned with the wider organisation goals
- Work closely with product and tech teams to align commercial goals with digital innovation
Commercial plan delivery and day-to-day team management
- Translate the commercial strategy into an actionable quarterly commercial plan, ensuring all sub-teams of commercial are consulted and have inputted into activities
- Manage delivery of this commercial plan and provide assistance to both commercial and operational team members who are implementing the actions, by acting as an escalation point for issues and providing strategic direction
- Oversee budget and monitor spend against the commercial plan, ensuring activities remain within monthly budgets
Patient acquisition and growth (marketing)
- Define our audience strategy, providing input to marketing team on targeting the right audience with appropriate messaging and branding
- Oversee a patient acquisition strategy alongside marketing team, leveraging digital marketing, SEO, PPC
- Drive demand for both self-pay and insured patients, ensuring a high conversion rate of enquiries
- Work alongside data team to develop a data-driven approach to track patient engagement, retention and lifetime value
Insurer relations
- Work with insurer lead to develop a strategy for each of our major insurer relationships (i.e. AXA, Bupa, Vitality, Aviva, WPA, Cigna etc.)
- Strengthen PMI relationships, supporting the insurer lead to negotiate contracts and price renewals which are in line with our pricing strategy
- Provide contract set-up and negotiation support for new centres opening in Oxford and Cambridge
- Assist in providing structure and strategy to individual centres for our insurer relations approach
Commercial reporting and performance
- Chair and manage annual Commercial Committees, keeping key stakeholders engaged and supportive of commercial activities
- Develop and track progress against quarterly and annual commercial KPIs for revenue, marketing engagement and referral growth
- Work with BI and reporting teams to develop commercial dashboards for reporting to a variety of stakeholders, and to use in day-to-day commercial team decision making
- Adapt metrics as the commercial function grows, to enable continuous improvement in day-to-day management and for senior stakeholder reports
Knowledge, skills and experience
Direct experience
- 7+ years' experience, to include commercial strategy development and execution covering market expansion, revenue growth and customer acquisition in a healthcare setting
- Proven track record in commercial delivery and leadership, including reporting progress against key metrics and presenting to senior leadership
- B2C & B2B sales and marketing experience, including direct-to-consumer marketing and B2B sales with referrers and insurers
- Experience with PMI and negotiating contracts with large insurers highly desirable
- Marketing experience preferential to assist with identifying audience & channel strategy effectiveness
- Experience in launching new sites / helping a business scale across multiple locations advantageous