The Customer Development Senior Leader Panamá influences to obtain best-in-class RVPs to drive category growth based on robust shopper insights, guarantees powerful and profitable negotiations with key customers to maximize trade investment ROI within the Perfect Store Mindset, leads the field execution team to accelerate the commercial calendar implementation, analyze sell-out trends to recommend new ways to grow profitably and projects accurate Sales Forecasts for the next 3-5 years.
What are we looking for?
- Bachelor's degree plus Professional certifications. MBA Degree could be considered as well as equivalent experience with supervision, finance, or marketing studies.
- 5+ Years’ experience in Sales (preferably), Marketing, Category Management for Fast Moving Consumer Good Industries.
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Prior Account Management & Distributor Management experience (preferably within Panama).- Fluent understanding of forecasting, Nielsen, and trade management system.
- Good communication skills and fluent in both English & Spanish.
What will be your key responsibilities?
1. Distributor Sales Management: Coordinate/Develop/Track specific sales KPI plans for Supervisors and Merchandisers by Distributor zone to ensure results are aligned to market brand strategy. Develop distributor supervisors on leadership skills and vision for both MT & TT channels. Proactively identify gaps and recommend improvements to the distributor model to maintain a sustainable and profitable growth.
2. Portfolio Management: Ensuring & Recommending the right products, in the right place, at the right time with 100% Focus on Core & Increasing Numeric Distribution.
3. Budget Controls: Manage & Recommend Trade investments only with healthy ROIs of at least 4 to 1 to ensure long term brand building aligned to market strategy. Ensure Healthy 8-week inventory levels in the Distributor Warehouse.
4. Business Planning & Development: Ability to proactively anticipate channel and market dynamics by having multiple contingency plans available to ensure sales maintain pace & don’t suffer
5. Perfect Store: work along with Field Sales function to guarantee implementation of the Perfect Store in each channel, maximizing distribution and visibility for all categories.
6. Customer Relation: Able to relate to people at all levels in the organization to build and manage internal/external relationships involving all stakeholders. Can align our stakeholders with MARS category vision and strategy, while negotiating high ROI initiatives to boost category growth according to our SCM.
7. Category Expertise: Understand, apply, and transfer Category & Brand knowledge by working closely with Category Leaders & Customer Marketing.
8. Numerical approach: Able to use Nielsen & Sell-Out Data for Fact-Based arguments & go beyond with shopper insights that can help transform the business.
How the Job gets done?
Road warrior skills, 40% of the time will be spent creating collaborative relationships with top customers and distributor. The associate will team up with distributor’s salesforce to ensure right incentives are in place and negotiations to ensure proper execution of picture of success in MT and right coverage and execution in TT. Top negotiation skills and strong influencing without authority will be key as the sales force is from the distributor.
40%, on leading the strategy design and implementation to drive category growth. Two areas are key for this: Strategic Thinking and Developing Others. Results are achieved with a mix of own efforts and through skillfully leading a multifunctional team comprised of: two (2) direct reports from the Field Sales Execution Team and other associates from extended functions servicing the market.
20% of time will be for alignment and follow up on results (impact of actions in sales). Idea is to grow the business and stay on pace with solid planning, organization KPI tracking & execution, while guaranteeing synergies with our functional departments like finance and logistics. Be able to Manage & Measure work is key, but also, being a skillful communicator is a plus: able to adapt the message to the audience (top, peers or reports), share visibility on results and timely ask for resources as needed to grow ahead.
All actions based on Mars Five Principles and reporting to the Market Development Head.
What can you expect from Mars?
- Work with over 130,000 diverse and talented Associates, all guided by the Five Principles.
- Join a purpose driven company, where we’re striving to build the world we want tomorrow, today.
- Best-in-class learning and development support from day one, including access to our in-house Mars University.
- An industry competitive salary and benefits package, including company bonus.
