Director of Sales
Temple Lifestyle Brands is building Canada’s leading functional beverage platform. With powerhouse brands like Thirsty Buddha® and Rise® Kombucha, we’re driving category growth and consumer love nationwide.
We are one of Canada’s fastest-growing health and wellness companies, home to a powerful portfolio of functional beverage brands including Thirsty Buddha® (Canada’s #1 organic coconut water and leader in functional hydration) and Rise® Kombucha (Canada’s pioneering kombucha brand and category leader).
With diversified manufacturing capabilities, a strong commercial engine, and national omnichannel distribution, Temple is redefining better-for-you beverages and inspiring healthier living across the country.
COMPANY: Temple Lifestyle Brands
LOCATION: Toronto or Montreal (Full-Time)
DEPARTMENT: Sales
REPORTS TO: Chief Executive Officer (CEO)
TRAVEL: Regular domestic travel and occasional international travel
THE OPPORTUNITY:
The Director of Sales will lead Temple Lifestyle Brands’ commercial sales organization and be accountable for delivering profitable, sustainable growth across our portfolio of brands, customers, channels, and strategic partners. Reporting to the CEO and working closely with the executive team and co-founders, this leader will translate our growth strategy into clear customer plans, disciplined execution, and measurable results.
This is a highly visible, hands-on leadership role. The Director of Sales will lead and develop our internal sales team while setting clear direction and accountability for brokers, distributors, and other external sales partners. They will personally engage on key customers and negotiations while building the systems, cadence, capabilities, and performance culture required for a scalable national sales organization.
The successful candidate will combine strong Canadian CPG customer relationships and commercial judgment with rigorous planning, forecasting, trade-spend management, analytics, and team leadership. They must be equally comfortable in a strategic planning session, a customer meeting, a weekly sales review, and rolling up their sleeves to solve an urgent issue.
Temple is founder-led and entrepreneurial. We move quickly, challenge assumptions, and expect leaders to operate with ownership, transparency, adaptability, and low ego. The right candidate will thrive in a fast-paced environment, work effectively and constructively with co-founders and entrepreneurial leaders, and bring enough structure to scale the business without creating unnecessary bureaucracy.
WHAT YOU’LL DO?
Sales Strategy & Growth
Own and deliver annual net sales, gross margin, distribution, and customer growth objectives across Temple Lifestyle Brands.
Develop and execute the national sales strategy, annual operating plan, customer plans, channel priorities, and growth initiatives in alignment with Temple’s long-term strategy.
Identify and prioritize growth opportunities across grocery, mass, club, natural, convenience, foodservice, e-commerce, distributors, private label, and emerging channels as applicable.
Build a disciplined commercial pipeline for new listings, distribution expansion, innovation, and strategic customer opportunities, with clear priorities, owners, timing, and expected value.
Maintain a strong external perspective on customers, competitors, category dynamics, retailer strategies, and emerging market opportunities, translating insights into action.
Customer & Channel Leadership
Own executive-level relationships with Temple’s most strategic customers and partners and participate directly in key line reviews, negotiations, and business reviews.
Lead annual customer planning and joint business planning to deliver growth while protecting margin and trade-spend effectiveness.
Lead or steward major commercial negotiations, including retail programs, pricing, trade terms, vendor agreements, distributors, brokers, and strategic partnerships.
Ensure strong selling stories, customer presentations, category insights, and fact-based recommendations using customer POS, syndicated data, and internal performance analytics.
Partner with Marketing and R&D to ensure innovation is customer-relevant, commercially compelling, and successfully launched across priority channels.
Sales Team, Brokers & Partners
Lead, coach, develop, and hold accountable the internal sales team, establishing clear roles, priorities, goals, and performance expectations.
Create a high-performance, player-coach culture where leaders develop people while remaining close enough to customers and execution to step in when needed.
Set clear mandates, KPIs, ways of working, and performance expectations for brokers, distributors, and external sales partners; actively manage performance and return on investment.
Ensure strong communication and coordination between internal sales resources, brokers, distributors, Marketing, Operations, Finance, and other cross-functional partners.
Assess organizational capabilities and recommend the people, processes, tools, and structure required as Temple’s portfolio and geographic reach expand.
Commercial Excellence & Operating Discipline
Own the sales operating cadence, including weekly performance reviews, monthly
forecasting, quarterly business reviews, annual planning, and customer-level action plans.
Deliver accurate, timely sales forecasts and work closely with Supply Chain and Operations to improve forecast quality, service levels, inventory health, and OTIF performance.
Own trade-spend planning and governance, ensuring investments are strategically allocated, tracked, evaluated, and aligned with customer profitability and company objectives.
Build and maintain clear sales KPIs and dashboards covering revenue, distribution, velocity, pipeline, forecast accuracy, trade spend, customer profitability, and other key commercial metrics.
Partner with Finance to understand customer and channel economics, P&L drivers, pricing, gross margin, deductions, and return on commercial investment.
Ensure disciplined use of CRM, customer data, reporting tools, and sales processes to improve visibility, accountability, and decision-making.
Cross-Functional & Entrepreneurial Leadership
Act as a strong cross-functional leader, aligning Sales with Marketing, Finance, Supply Chain, Operations, R&D, and senior leadership around company priorities and customer commitments.
Work closely and constructively with the CEO, co-founders, and entrepreneurial leaders, balancing speed and agility with the discipline required to scale.
Communicate clearly and candidly, raise issues early, challenge assumptions respectfully, and bring solutions rather than simply identifying problems.
Operate effectively through change, ambiguity, and competing priorities; simplify complexity and maintain focus on the highest-value opportunities.
Be hands-on where needed to deliver against objectives while building a sales organization that becomes increasingly scalable and less dependent on any one individual.
WHAT YOU BRING
Experience
10+ years of progressive sales and commercial leadership experience in CPG, with meaningful experience in beverage, food, health and wellness, or another fast-moving consumer category strongly preferred.
Demonstrated success leading and developing high-performing sales teams and managing both internal and external sales resources.
Strong Canadian retail experience and established understanding of major national and regional customers across grocery, mass, club, natural, convenience, and/or foodservice channels.
Track record of growing brands, expanding distribution, winning new business, and delivering profitable revenue growth.
Experience managing brokers, distributors, and third-party sales partners with clear performance expectations and accountability.
Experience leading customer negotiations, annual planning, pricing, trade terms, and joint business planning.
Experience working in a founder-led, entrepreneurial, high-growth organization is strongly preferred.
Commercial & Analytical Skills
Strong understanding of customer and channel P&Ls, gross margin, pricing, trade spend, deductions, promotional effectiveness, and return on investment.
Strong forecasting, planning, analytical, and fact-based selling capabilities, including experience using POS and syndicated data to drive decisions.
Ability to build clear sales strategies and translate them into practical account-level plans, KPIs, and execution priorities.
Strong negotiation, presentation, communication, and relationship-building skills, with executive presence and credibility with senior customers and partners.
Comfort with CRM, reporting, and sales technology, with a bias toward simple systems that improve visibility and accountability.
Leadership & Soft Skills
Hands-on, entrepreneurial, accountable, and solutions-oriented leadership style.
Player-coach mentality: able to set strategy, coach and develop the team, and personally step into important customer or executional work when required.
Thrives in a fast-paced, evolving growth environment where priorities can shift and processes and capabilities are still being built.
Comfortable working closely with co-founders and entrepreneurs; able to challenge constructively, receive direct feedback, adapt quickly, and maintain strong alignment once decisions are made.
High degree of ownership, urgency, resilience, judgment, and follow-through.
Low ego and highly collaborative, with the ability to influence across functions without relying solely on authority.
Excellent prioritization and time-management skills with the ability to manage multiple customers, initiatives, and deadlines simultaneously.
Additional Qualifications
Bachelor’s degree in Business, Commerce, Marketing, or a related discipline; equivalent relevant experience will also be considered.
Bilingualism (English/French) is considered an asset.
Ability and willingness to travel regularly across Canada and occasionally internationally as customer and business needs require.
Passion for health, wellness, functional beverages, and building better-for-you brands.
