At a glance
- Time to delivery
- 3 months
- Engagement
- Professional Search
- Candidates engaged
- 50
- Finalists presented
- 10
- Open roles
- 4 full-time
- Cities
- Munich · Berlin · Frankfurt · Augsburg
The challenge
Sales-experienced Team Leads for a well-known brand — across four cities at once.
Our client is an established e-commerce / banking group with around 2,000 employees and offices in Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt and Augsburg. They needed four Team Leads Customer Support to lead sales-oriented support squads — people who could coach a team on conversion and quality at the same time.
Two things made the search hard. First, the right profile was narrow: Team Leads with real experience leading sales teams (not pure CS managers), available in four very different German cities. Second, the client is a household name — every candidate on the market already had an opinion about the company, positive or negative, and that had to be navigated honestly in every conversation.
The engagement
Professional Search across four cities, run as one mandate.
We took the brief as a single Professional Search mandate covering all four locations, with one calibrated scorecard and one shared shortlist process — so the client could compare candidates apples-to-apples across cities, instead of running four parallel agency briefs.
Outreach was direct and confidential. We engaged 50 senior candidates with sales-team leadership track records across e-commerce, retail banking, telco and BPO environments, and qualified each one against the role, the city and — explicitly — their stance on the client's brand.
Roles hired
Four Team Lead Customer Support seats, one per city.
Team Lead Customer Support — Munich
Sales-driven CS squad in Munich. Owns conversion, quality and coaching for a front-line team handling inbound and outbound customer flows.
Team Lead Customer Support — Berlin
Berlin squad lead with prior experience leading sales teams, responsible for ramp, coaching and quota attainment of CS agents.
Team Lead Customer Support — Frankfurt
Frankfurt squad lead, partnering with the regional banking footprint. Sales coaching and CS quality combined in one role.
Team Lead Customer Support — Augsburg
Augsburg squad lead with deep local network. Builds and retains a sales-capable CS team in a tight regional labour market.
Candidate landscape
A thin pool — and every candidate already had a view on the brand.
Sales-team leaders from e-commerce & retail banking
Team Leads and Group Leads who had carried quota themselves and then led teams through ramp, quality and conversion targets.
CS leaders with a sales track record
Customer Support managers whose careers started in sales — they could speak credibly to agents about pipeline, objection handling and close rates, not only NPS.
Locally anchored across four cities
Candidates already living in or with strong ties to Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt or Augsburg. No relocation gambles for an on-site Team Lead role.
Honest about the brand
The client is well known and polarising. Every candidate had an opinion. We surfaced those opinions in screening and only progressed people who could work inside the real organisation, not an idealised one.
How we ran it
Three months, four phases.
- Weeks 1–2
Briefing & calibration
Joint kickoff with the hiring leaders for all four cities. One scorecard, four city briefs, and an explicit framing of the brand-perception challenge so every screen could address it head-on.
- Weeks 3–6
Mapping & outreach
Direct outreach to 50 senior candidates with sales-team leadership across e-commerce, retail banking, telco and BPO — anchored to Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt and Augsburg.
- Weeks 7–10
Shortlist & client interviews
10 finalists presented across the four roles. Structured loops on sales-team leadership, coaching, CS operations and motivation to join — including how each candidate viewed the client's brand.
- Weeks 11–12
Offers & accepts
Four full-time offers negotiated and signed inside the 3-month window. Smooth handover to internal HR for onboarding across all four cities.
The outcome
Four Team Leads hired in 3 months, one per city.
We delivered 50 engaged candidates and 10 finalists, and the client signed all four Team Leads on full-time contracts inside the 3-month window — one each in Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt and Augsburg.
The hires brought genuine sales-team leadership into the Customer Support organisation and were aligned on what working at a well-known, scrutinised brand actually means day-to-day. Attrition risk was reduced because every candidate had already worked through their view of the company before they accepted.
FAQ
Multi-city Team Lead searches, answered.
- Can you run four city searches as one mandate?
- Yes — and it usually delivers a better result than four parallel agency briefs. One calibrated scorecard, one shortlist process and one project lead means candidates are benchmarked consistently across cities and the client gets a real comparative view.
- Why look for sales-team leaders for a Customer Support role?
- Because the squads are sales-driven. The Team Lead has to coach agents on pipeline, conversion and objection handling alongside CS quality. A pure CS manager can't credibly do that — a sales-team leader who has also run a CS function can.
- How do you handle a polarising employer brand?
- We surface it in the first conversation. Every candidate gets a candid framing of the company — what people say, what is true, what has changed — and we screen explicitly for whether they can work inside that reality. It protects both sides from a wrong hire.
- How fast can you move on a four-role multi-city search?
- Typically 8–12 weeks from kickoff to signed offers. The constraint is rarely sourcing — it is interview cadence and decision speed on the client side.
- Do you cover smaller German cities like Augsburg?
- Yes. We routinely run searches outside the obvious DACH hubs — Augsburg, Stuttgart, Hannover, Leipzig — using the same direct-outreach approach we use in Munich and Berlin.
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