Senior Account Director

Caterpillar Financial Services Corporation; Gauteng; On-site; ZAR 1,200,000 - 1,800,000; Full time

Job summary

A global equipment manufacturer is seeking a Senior Account Director in Gauteng to lead significant mining customer relationships. This role is crucial for delivering exceptional customer experiences and aligning client goals with corporate priorities. Candidates should have strong leadership and strategic planning skills, expertise in customer relationship management, and experience in effective negotiation. A commitment to fostering client satisfaction and driving revenue growth is essential. This position requires an in-office presence five days a week, with travel expected.

Qualifications

• Proven experience in managing high-value customer relationships.
• Strong leadership and strategic planning capabilities.
• Excellent communication and negotiation skills.

Responsibilities

• Lead global accountability for customer performance outcomes.
• Build executive-level relationships with customer leadership.
• Oversee development and execution of global account strategies.

Skills

Customer Focus

Effective Communications

Negotiating

Relationship Management

Value Selling

Job description

Overview

Career Area: Sales

Job Description:

Your Work Shapes the World at Caterpillar Inc.

When you join Caterpillar, you're joining a global team who cares not just about the work we do – but also about each other. We are the makers, problem solvers, and future world builders who are creating stronger, more sustainable communities. We don't just talk about progress and innovation here – we make it happen, with our customers, where we work and live. Together, we are building a better world, so we can all enjoy living in it.

Job Summary

The Senior Account Director leads a global team of senior professionals responsible for managing Caterpillar’s most significant mining customer relationships. This role is pivotal in delivering a differentiated customer experience and driving performance through clearly defined customer outcomes. The Senior Account Director serves as the single point of accountability for strategic account performance across all sites, ensuring alignment between customer goals, dealer execution, and Caterpillar’s corporate priorities.

Responsibilities

• Global Accountability: Owns performance outcomes across all customer sites, ensuring alignment of goals and incentives between the customer, dealer, and Caterpillar. Serves as the single point of contact for high-value Caterpillar accounts, ensuring alignment with client success and company growth objectives.
• Executive Engagement: Builds and maintains executive-level relationships with customer leadership to understand strategic priorities and influence long-term planning. Builds and sustains strategic, trust-based relationships with mining customers, Caterpillar, and dealer stakeholders, leveraging deep client insight to anticipate needs, resolve issues, and drive long-term value creation.
• Strategic Planning & Execution: Leads the development and execution of global account strategies, including multi-year agreements, tailored go-to-market plans, and performance metrics. Identifies and leads profitable growth opportunities through cross-selling, upselling, and strategic account planning.
• Customer Relationship Management: Maintains a continuous pulse on customer satisfaction, site-level performance, and evolving business needs. Empowers and is accountable for delivering long-term client partnerships, driving profitable revenue growth, and delivering integrated, customer-centric solutions across Caterpillar divisions.
• Cross-Functional Leadership: Aligns internal stakeholders—including Product, Operations, CI, and Support teams—to deliver on customer commitments. Collaborates cross-functionally with internal teams to coordinate seamless service delivery and strategic execution.
• Empowered Decision-Making: Exercises empowered and strategic decision-making authority to support customer solutions, balancing risk, responsiveness, and business acumen to drive results in complex, high-impact environments.
• Forecasting & Incentives: Oversees PINS customer forecasting and ensures incentive programs are directly tied to customer performance metrics.
• Risk Management: Ensures consistency and compliance in global agreements, mitigating risk while maximizing value delivery.

What You Have - Skills and Experiences

• Customer Focus: Knowledge of the values and practices that align customer needs and satisfaction as primary considerations in all business decisions and ability to leverage that information in creating customized customer solutions.
• Champions, models and directs an organization's commitment to externally focused decision-making tied to customer business needs and satisfaction.
• Provides customer focused vision, strategy and leadership that exceeds customer expectations.
• Persuasively articulates the link between customer focus and enhanced business success to stakeholders.
• Teaches others to foster customer relationships based on mutual understanding, respect, trust and "business partnering".
• Develops 'best practices' to create, evaluate and enhance customer loyalty that are sought by others within and outside the organization.
• Consults with senior executives regarding critical success factors and details to being a customer focused organization.

• Effective Communications: Understanding of effective communication concepts, tools and techniques; ability to effectively transmit, receive, and accurately interpret ideas, information, and needs through the application of appropriate communication behaviors.
• Works to create a climate that values and rewards good oral and written communication.
• Communicates effectively with diverse audiences, using appropriate media and language.
• Monitors developments in communications tools for potential use by organization.
• Writes reports, articles, or books for distribution to the business or professional community.
• Ensures important messages are clearly understood.
• Coaches others on methods of improving their own communications.

• Negotiating: Knowledge of successful negotiation concepts and techniques; ability to negotiate successfully across the organization and with external vendors and clients in a constructive and collaborative manner.
• Leads complex, high-impact or volatile negotiations involving high business risks.
• Advocates a win-win approach to negotiating.
• Explains appropriateness of using adversarial negotiating versus joint problem-solving techniques.
• Overcomes resistance to the negotiation process.
• Teaches others the subtleties of negotiating strategic or high-impact agreements.
• Negotiates complex matters involving multiple parties.

• Relationship Management: Knowledge of relationship management techniques; ability to establish and maintain healthy working relationships with clients, vendors, and peers.
• Oversees key client reviews to assure service and relationship satisfaction.
• Coaches others in the value, issues, and methods of client partnering.
• Collaborates with clients in the pursuit of common business objectives.
• Maintains status information on major developments in client or partner environment.
• Works directly with clients to discern business trends and their implications.
• Fosters a climate conducive to establishing positive working relationships with outsiders.

• Value Selling: Knowledge of the principles and practices for selling products, technology and services; ability to provide overall product/service value and to differentiate support offerings that address clearly understood customer needs.
• Delivers bottom-line proof with credible third-party validation that proposed solutions deliver benefits of greater value than the competition.
• Researches customer's industry, strategies, environment and plans to support their business needs.
• Builds loyalty and 'partner versus vendor' relationships by helping customers understand, diagnose and resolve their complex business issues.
• Provides analysis tools to identify, quantify and qualify business issues and solution value components to help clients assess alternative business proposals.
• Provides highly solicited mentoring to various organizations regarding all aspects of 'value selling'.
• Presents compelling business cases for very complex business issues, shifting proposed solution focus from cost to overall value (benefits/payback).

Additional Information

• This role requires an in the office 5-day-a-week work schedule.
• Travel is required.
• This position is eligible for relocation assistance.

EEO and Privacy Notice

This content has been reviewed to remove formatting that is not allowed. Caterpillar is an Equal Opportunity Employer and considers applicants for all positions. Caterpillar commits itself to the realization of employment equity goals as envisaged in the South-African Employment Equity Act and policies relating to workplace equality. Caterpillar is committed to creating a dynamic work environment that values diversity and inclusion, respect and integrity, customer focus, and innovation.

For more information, visit the 2022 Caterpillar Careers page at the Caterpillar website.

Caterpillar takes data privacy seriously and is committed to compliance with The Protection of Personal Information Act in South Africa. Candidate CVs are used for the limited purpose of evaluating suitability for this job role and deleted from our database when it is no longer needed for the purpose as soon as it is practicable. For more information on Caterpillar’s privacy practices, please visit our Global Data Privacy Statement.

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Posting Dates: September 19, 2025 - October 1, 2025

Caterpillar is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Qualified applicants of any age are encouraged to apply

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