Director of Sales and Marketing

The chemistry inside dental materials, electronics, and coatings people use every day often starts in a small reactor in Fairfield County, Connecticut. The manufacturer behind it has been making custom molecules for decades, taking them from lab development through pilot to commercial production for customers who can't make them themselves. Sales, marketing, and the accounts that carry the business run through a single seat, and this seat sets commercial strategy directly with the CEO and President.

About the Company

For more than 40 years, this manufacturer has made custom chemicals for specialty applications. Customers bring chemistry they can't make, either because their volumes are too small or because the IP matters too much to send overseas, and the company takes it from lab development through pilot to commercial production. The portfolio runs to photoinitiators, UV additives, energy-cured resins, and preservatives, reaching customers in electronics, adhesives, coatings, dental, and personal care.

Roughly 75 customers sit on the books against an eight-figure revenue base, and leadership is diversifying that base. The plant runs about 30 reactors in stainless steel, glass, and Hastelloy, and holds ISO 9001 certification. This person would be one of the few commercial seats in a company built around the lab and the plant, and process discipline runs deep because the chemistry leaves little margin for error.

About the Role

Day to day, the Director of Sales & Marketing carries the largest accounts personally and directs a business development manager focused on new business, alongside technical support and customer service. You'd be a key member of the senior leadership team, providing guidance to the President and CEO on where the growth is, which accounts deserve investment, and when the strategy needs to move. Deals run 12 to 24 months from first conversation to shipping product, so the work is patience plus pressure applied in the right place. There's no quota here; the bonus pays on results, not activity. You'd own the execution as well as the plan. And you'd stay close to what you sell: you can walk out of a pricing conversation and onto the production floor where the chemistry gets made.

The Goal

Twelve months in, you've carried the top accounts through the handover at their margins, and you know where the growth sits across the rest of the base. Leadership has a pipeline and a forecast it trusts, and the custom manufacturing story is yours to tell.

Outcomes You'll Be Responsible For

Hold and manage top accounts: The largest account carries several products at different stages, and most of the work is moving approvals and change control through their procurement, quality, legal, and business units. When the customer is the bottleneck, you tactfully push.

Grow revenue inside the existing base: Across the roughly 75 customers on the books, find the untapped spend, qualify fast, and know when to move on rather than generate activity. The business development manager goes after new accounts. You go deeper into the existing ones, and you pass referrals their way for the first call.

Run the portfolio on margin and order data: The CRM becomes the system of record for existing customers. You watch product-level margin and rolling 12-month open orders, and when an account starts to slip, you flag it early.

Own the custom manufacturing story: Marketing execution comes off the CEO's desk. Sharpen the value proposition into messaging and capability materials, direct the web and LinkedIn content, and work the trade shows as an account development channel. The company anticipates outside creative help in 2027, so you're setting direction, not producing it.

Skills Needed to Apply

10+ years selling into or from specialty or custom chemical manufacturing: photoinitiators, UV-curable chemistries, energy-cured resins, coatings, adhesives, or electronic materials. Accounts where the product is made to the customer's specification, and where the customer pays a premium for a domestic, IP-protected partner over the cheapest overseas price.

A chemistry or chemical engineering degree, a technical MBA with a career inside chemical manufacturing. You can hold an early capability conversation alone and know when to bring a scientist in.

You've built and defended pricing at the product level from raw material, labor, equipment time, and waste, and you've used product margin to argue for or against an account.

You’ve held Fortune 500 accounts, where one decision needs procurement, quality, legal, and multiple business units to line up. You can name a stalled approval you moved and how long it took.

Nice to have:

You've run a 12 to 24 month pursuit from first contact to first shipping order and won it on technical partnership rather than price.

A small account grew into a major one under you, and you argued another out of the portfolio with the evidence behind both.

You've sold successfully inside an engineering or science-led company where stage-gate and change control are enforced.

Marketing has been yours to run with little support, and an underused CRM became the system of record once you took it on.

Qualities

Technically credible: Respect gets earned through substance rather than charisma. Chemists and plant-minded buyers decide quickly whether you know what you're talking about.

Tactfully persistent: Speeding a customer up without annoying them is the skill. Staying on a slow approval for a year is the job.

Evidence-based optimism: D ata and trends rather than hype, and a forecast you can defend with the why as much as the what.

Works within the process and pushes it to go faster: Process discipline here is enforced across the company, not just from the top. Challenging a process with data lands. Routing around it doesn't.

Ownership without escalation: A missed forecast, a shrinking account, an approval stalled inside a customer: yours to diagnose and fix.

Open to rethinking the go-to-market: Messaging, channels, and how this company presents itself are yours to reimagine rather than defend.

Follows through: Your reputation with customers and colleagues rests on doing what you said you'd do.