Professional Services Practice Director

UK (Hybrid)

Company Description

Aforza is a groundbreaking, fast-growing cloud company focused on transforming the Consumer Goods industry. Backed by key Silicon Valley investors and built-in partnership with Salesforce, the worldwide leader in cloud business applications, Aforza helps Consumer Goods companies drive significant positive commercial transformation.

At Aforza, our values and culture are aligned with how we see the world, and our commitment goes way beyond building great cloud solutions. Yes, we want to build applications that our users love, but we also want to make the world a better place. We not only enable our clients to be more efficient and effective but are also building meaningful partnerships focusing on helping our clients reduce waste by providing best in class intelligence and automation wherever they conduct their business.

Job Description

Aforza is looking for a Professional Services Practice Director to lead our global Professional Services team. This is the senior leadership role accountable for how Aforza delivers, from the first scoping conversation through to go-live and beyond, across customer programmes in more than 70 countries.

You will own the practice end to end: the people, the methodology, the commercial performance, and the quality of every implementation that carries the Aforza name. You will lead a multi-disciplinary team of Solution Consultants, Technical Consultants, Solution Architects and Project Managers, set the standards they work to, and build the capability the business needs as it scales.

This is a role for someone who is equally comfortable in a boardroom and in a project review. You will be the senior escalation point for customer executives, the person who signs off complex estimates and statements of work, and the leader who decides when to grow the team, when to lean on partners, and when to walk away from work that will not succeed. You will work closely with Sales, Customer Success, and R&D, and will play a central part in shaping how Aforza scales delivery through our systems integrator ecosystem.

A successful Practice Director combines commercial discipline with genuine delivery credibility. You will need to hold a margin conversation with the executive team in the morning and a solution design conversation with a customer architect in the afternoon, and be believed in both.

Responsibilities

Lead, grow and develop the global Professional Services team across all regions, including hiring, onboarding, performance management, and career development.
Own the Professional Services P&L, including services revenue, utilisation, margin, rate card management, and quarterly forecasting.
Take overall accountability for delivery quality across the Aforza customer portfolio, ensuring programmes land on time, on budget, and on value.
Act as the senior escalation point for customers, running executive steering committees and recovering programmes when they need it.
Own the scoping and estimation process, reviewing and approving effort estimates, resource plans, statements of work, and change requests before they go to a customer.
Partner with Sales throughout the sales cycle, supporting RFP responses, services proposals, and pricing strategy, and providing an honest delivery view during qualification.
Build and manage the systems integrator and delivery partner ecosystem, defining how Aforza works alongside partners, where responsibilities sit, and how quality is assured.
Own and evolve the Aforza delivery methodology, governance model, RACI, tooling, and delivery accelerators, so that every project starts from a stronger position than the last.
Define and enforce Solution Governance standards, ensuring technical and functional consistency across all Aforza implementations.
Manage resource planning and capacity across regions, balancing permanent headcount, contract capability, and partner supply against pipeline.
Work closely with Customer Success to ensure a clean transition from implementation into adoption, support, and managed services.
Feed customer and delivery insight back to the R&D team to shape the Aforza product roadmap, and reduce delivery effort through productisation.
Champion enablement and certification across the practice, including Aforza Academy content, onboarding pathways, and Salesforce certification standards.
Represent Aforza credibly with customers, partners, and the wider industry as a senior voice on Consumer Goods commercial transformation.

We’ll show you how to do all this (and more) as you play an integral role in the success and growth of the business at the most exciting time in its history.

Requirements

Ideally you are someone with:

12+ years in professional services or consulting within enterprise software, with at least 5 years leading and growing delivery teams.
Proven ownership of a services P&L, including responsibility for revenue, utilisation, margin, and forecasting.
Deep experience delivering complex, multi-country enterprise cloud programmes, ideally on the Salesforce platform.
Consumer Goods or FMCG industry experience, with an understanding of retail execution, trade promotion management, distributor management, or route to market, is a significant advantage.
A strong track record of building and managing systems integrator and delivery partner relationships.
Demonstrable experience of scoping and estimating complex implementations, and of standing behind those numbers commercially.
Credibility with senior customer stakeholders up to and including C-level, with the confidence to have difficult conversations early rather than late.
Experience defining delivery methodology, governance frameworks, and quality standards, and getting teams to actually adopt them.
Strong commercial judgement, with the ability to balance customer outcomes, team wellbeing, and business performance.
Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to move between executive narrative and delivery detail.
A strong work ethic, initiative, and drive, with a bias for action and a comfort with data and insight analysis.
Willingness to travel internationally as required to support customers, partners, and teams.
Salesforce certification (Platform App Builder, Application Architect) and agile or project management certification (Scrum, PMP, PRINCE2) are a plus.

Benefits

There are plenty of good reasons to work for Aforza. Here are a few:

Salary - competitive salary, plus performance-related bonus.
Share Options - enrolment in the company’s Share Option Scheme (subject to Board approval).
Annual Leave - 25 days of entitlement.
Private Health Cover - Family Plan.
Life Insurance - 4 x Basic Annual Salary.
Pension - Group Personal Pension Scheme, 4% from Aforza.
Perkbox - Membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks.

Please note: the benefits outlined above reflect a typical UK employee package. Specific entitlements may vary depending on your country of hire.

Want to apply?

Thanks very much for considering Aforza!