International Sales Operations Manager Job Description

An international sales operations manager makes export sales actually happen after the order is signed. International sales managers and their distributors generate orders in dozens of countries; somebody has to turn those orders into confirmed, documented, shippable business — checking prices and terms, entering and tracking orders, coordinating the paperwork every border crossing requires, keeping the customer database and forecasts honest, and chasing the exceptions before they become missed vessels and cancelled orders. That somebody is the sales operations manager: a process and systems role, based mostly at head office, whose customers are the sales team, the distributors and the logistics chain as much as any buyer.

More Sales & Selling Job Descriptions by Letter:

Order Flow From Confirmation to Delivery

The operations manager owns the order book's journey. Orders arrive from distributors, agents and direct export accounts in every format from portal entries to spreadsheets; the role checks them against the season's price lists, discount structures and payment terms, confirms quantities against available production and stock, and issues the order confirmations and pro forma invoices on which deposits and letters of credit are raised. A discrepancy caught here — a wrong currency, a style that does not ship to that market, a delivery window production cannot meet — is an email; caught later, it is a claim.

From confirmation, the manager tracks each order through production, quality release and packing, matching shipping instructions to the account's requirements: consolidations for small distributors, direct containers for large ones, the right Incoterms applied, and freight booked through the logistics team or the customer's forwarder. When production slips or a carton count changes, operations is the function that re-plans the shipment, informs the account before the goods are late rather than after, and keeps the paperwork consistent with what is actually on the water.

Documentation, Compliance and Systems

Export paperwork is this role's native language: commercial invoices, packing lists, certificates of origin, and the data that customs entries are built from, all accurate to the carton and consistent with each market's labelling and product rules. The operations manager coordinates the compliance side of selling — making sure a market's care-label language, fibre-content format or restricted-substance declaration is flagged at order stage, working with technical and legal colleagues where a requirement is new, and keeping the reference data that lets the same check happen automatically next season.

Systems are the other half of the desk. Sales operations typically administers the CRM and order systems the international team lives in: account and territory records, price lists by market and currency, order-status visibility for distributors, and the pipeline and forecast reports management reads. Clean data is not clerical vanity here — the forecast the business produces from, the credit limits finance sets, and the commission statements agents are paid from all derive from records this role maintains, and errors propagate into money.

Supporting the Sales Team and the Forecast

Enablement is the visible part of the job. The operations manager prepares the selling tools each season — line lists, order forms, price and terms summaries by market — coordinates sample sets and showroom logistics for market weeks, onboards new distributors into the ordering and documentation routine, and trains partners' staff on the systems they will use. When a distributor's team turns over, it is usually operations that rebuilds their knowledge of how to order, claim and reorder.

Forecast support runs alongside. The manager consolidates territory forecasts from the sales team and distributors, compares them with order intake and prior seasons, and flags the gaps — a market forecasting growth it has not ordered, a bestseller whose reorder rate the plan ignores — while there is still time to act. Sales leadership keeps ownership of the numbers; operations owns their quality, their timeliness and the follow-up that turns a forecast review into revised orders, production requests or honest write-downs.

Skills, Qualifications and Career Path

This is a detail-and-systems career. Employers look for experience inside apparel or consumer-goods sales operations, export administration or order management; fluency with CRM and ERP order modules and serious spreadsheet skill; working knowledge of export documentation, payment instruments and delivery terms; and the diplomat's touch for telling a salesperson their order cannot go as written. Accuracy under seasonal pressure — order intake peaks are unforgiving — matters more than presentation polish, though the role briefs senior management regularly.

Paths into the role run through export administration, sales support and order-management supervision, and business or supply-chain study strengthens an application. Progression leads to head of sales operations, commercial operations directorships spanning domestic and export business, or into supply-chain and logistics leadership, where the order-to-delivery knowledge transfers directly. It is also, quietly, one of the best vantage points in a fashion company: no other seat sees every market, every order and every failure mode at once.