Why Your Best Technical Hire Is Failing (And It's Not Their Fault)

The hidden partnership problem costing ingredients companies millions in missed opportunities.

I was catching up with a President in the ingredients space last week, and he shared something that caught my attention.

His company just had their best year ever. Revenue up significantly. Profits way up. New customer wins across multiple categories. They went from trailing their business plan for two years to blowing it out of the water in year three.

When I asked what made the difference, I expected to hear about a breakthrough product innovation, a major customer win, or perhaps an acquisition that changed the game.

Instead, he said: "One of the things that's helped us quite a bit this year is getting the right combination of those two talents together."

He was talking about pairing his head of sales, a commercially-savvy operator he'd worked with twice before and trusted implicitly, with his head of research, a scientist with deep technical expertise in their market. Someone who, as he put it, "you'll have a hard time topping in terms of her knowledge of the science around our particular type of products."

Two exceptional individuals. But more importantly, a partnership that actually worked.

The Technical-Commercial Divide

Here's the thing: we've all seen this pattern in food and ingredients businesses.

You've got brilliant technical people who can talk for hours about process optimization, formulation chemistry, regulatory pathways, and the nuances of ingredient functionality.

They know the science cold. They've spent years, sometimes decades, building deep expertise in their domain.

And you've got commercial people who understand customers, can read a market, know how to navigate complex buying committees, and can close deals. They have the relationships, the market intelligence, and the instinct for what will sell.

But they often operate in parallel universes.

The technical team creates elegant solutions and then looks for problems to solve. They get excited about capabilities and possibilities. The commercial team makes promises in customer meetings that sound great but are technically challenging. Or worse, impossible to deliver on the timeline they've committed to.

I've seen this play out countless times…

The R&D team develops a new product variation they're incredibly proud of, only to have Sales tell them, "That's great, but nobody's asking for it."

Or Sales comes back from a customer meeting with a spec that requires re-engineering half the process, and they've already promised a sample in two weeks.

The result? Friction. Frustration. Missed opportunities. And customers caught in the middle, getting conflicting messages about what's actually possible.

When It Works

But when you get that intersection working, when the technical and commercial minds are genuinely collaborating, not just coexisting in the same organization. Something fundamental shifts.

The technical person starts thinking about customer problems first, then engineering solutions backward. They're in the early conversations. They hear firsthand what keeps the customer's R&D team up at night. They start to develop intuition for market needs, not just technical possibilities.

The commercial person starts selling what's actually achievable, not what sounds good in a pitch meeting. They understand the constraints, the lead times, the regulatory considerations. They can have credible technical conversations because they've been educated by someone who knows the details.

Innovation becomes customer-led instead of lab-led. Sales cycles shorten because feasibility is baked into the conversation from day one. There's less back-and-forth, fewer surprises, and more trust.

The result? New wins across multiple customer accounts. A genuinely diversified business that wasn't overly dependent on any single category or customer. And a growth trajectory that surprised even their private equity backers, who had expected a more modest recovery after two challenging years.

The Cultural Enablers

Of course, putting two talented people together doesn't automatically create a high-performing partnership. Just look at most football (soccer) teams to see this.

Let’s dissect what made this work, a few things stood out:

First, the commercial leader had worked with the President twice before. There was pre-existing trust. He knew this was someone who would listen to technical constraints, not try to bull through them.

Second, the technical leader wasn't siloed in the lab. She also ran marketing and regulatory, which meant she had to think commercially. She wasn’t just throwing technical solutions over the wall.

Third - and perhaps most importantly, the President had created an environment where collaboration was expected, not optional. The organizational structure supported it. The incentives supported it. The culture supported it. An incubator for inevitable success in my opinion.

It sounds simple. But it's surprisingly rare.

The Hiring Implication

This got me thinking about how we approach senior hires in this industry.

We often look for a "commercial leader" or a "technical leader" as standalone roles. We write job specifications that focus on individual competencies: "15 years of ingredients sales experience" or "PhD in Food Science with 10+ years in R&D leadership."

We assess candidates in isolation: Can this person do the job we're hiring them for?

But what if we hired with partnership or the “system” they are entering in mind from the start?

What if we asked: "Who's the other half of this equation, and will these two people actually work well together? What type of leader is going to thrive in a potentially dysfunctional system?"

What if we considered not just technical skills and commercial acumen as separate checkboxes, but the ability and willingness to bridge that gap?

Because the reality is, in food and ingredients, neither technical brilliance nor commercial acumen alone is enough. The best technical solution that nobody wants to buy is worthless. The most compelling sales pitch that can't be delivered is worse than worthless - it destroys trust and relationships.

When I work with clients on senior searches, I'm increasingly thinking about this dynamic. Not just "Do we need a VP of R&D?" but "Who will they be partnering with, and what does that relationship need to look like?"

Sometimes that means involving the existing commercial leader in the hiring process earlier than normal. Sometimes it means looking for technical leaders who've demonstrated a little more than “commercial curiosity” in their past roles. Sometimes it means being honest that we need to upgrade both sides of the equation, not just one. 

Here we’re talking about designing a “system” that works instead of hiring individuals that don’t.

A Question for You

Think about your own business or the companies you work with:

Do you have that technical-commercial partnership working at a senior level? Or do you have two brilliant people, perhaps even good people who respect each other - but who are ultimately operating in silos?

When was the last time your head of R&D and head of sales sat together with a customer, co-creating a solution in real time?

And, if you're building or rebuilding a leadership team right now, are you thinking about individual hires - or complementary partnerships? - Are you thinking about “designing a system that works”.

The ingredients industry is facing no shortage of challenges at the moment. Market volatility. Geopolitical uncertainty. Margin pressure. Evolving consumer preferences. (These things will ALWAYS be there).

The companies that will navigate this successfully won't necessarily be the ones with the most brilliant individual leaders.

They'll be the ones who figure out how to get technical and commercial excellence working in a genuine and authentic partnership.

I'd be curious to hear your experiences. What's worked? What hasn't? Where have you seen this partnership truly hum?