The SRM Trade Manager (this role) reports to the Strategic Revenue Management Director serving as a key business partner and the Trade Promotional (TP) evaluation expert as well as the trade investment expert for the local unit.

This position helps drive increased trade investment productivity across the MWC portfolio, mainly by ensuring Sales/KAM team decision support to unlock category value & profit pool growth through smarter trade spending decisions with customers

The Primary objectives for the SRM Trade ROI manager are:

·     Lead development of portfolio TP strategy for profitable growth with Customers. This includes collaboration across all functions to deliver a holistic approach, ensuring category, consumer (shopper), customer, company (CBU) and competitive impacts are well-understood and integrated within trade promotional strategies for the Annual operating Plan (AOP) and Customer and Channel execution plans. These strategies will be underpinned by the Mars Laws of growth, helping to drive a higher proportion of ‘4 star’ promotions, creating ‘win-win’ ROI and brand equity building events.

·     Drive continuous TP investment productivity improvements and optimized Trade ROI. This includes ensuring regular monitoring and assessment of trade promotional performance versus the category, development of strategic TP guidelines and recommendations and project management of associated actions & execution (through Annual Plan and S&OP+ process cycles). A key element being the close partnership with Sales/KAM teams to provide decision support and guidance in ensuring the quality and understanding of at least 80% of TP investments, both pre and post event.

·     Drive Trade ROI Capabilities and ongoing understanding of the role of promotions to deliver growth across the organization. This includes partnering closely with sales teams, Customer Marketing, CBU Marketing and CMI to continuously update and ensure understanding of promotional insights across the business, helping to drive greater accuracy and robustness of promotional forecasting and a deeper understanding of key metrics/concepts (ROI, Trade Leverage & ‘4 Star’ Promotions). This includes ensuring that TPM solutions are appropriately used to ensure accuracy and reliability of information informing decisions.

Key Accountabilities or Responsibilities     

·     Lead the creation of the trade promotional investment budgets to deliver the overall business growth strategy, by partnering with:

o   Sales Director to create the overall trade promotional investment requirements for the business (split by Channel/Customer) and driving trade promotion productivity forward to deliver category value growth and ‘win-win’ ROI for MWC and Customers.

·     Lead the creation of market trade promotional strategy, development of annual trade promotional plans/recommended actions and overall management of the local market trade promotional practice.  This includes leveraging MWC trade promotion excellence playbooks to build overall capabilities & partnering with:

o   CBU Marketing, SDL/CMI and Sales to deliver optimized brand portfolio promotional architecture across key price tiers, thresholds and partitions to ensure promotional pricing attractiveness and competitiveness against consumer penetration, transaction and trade-up goals and integrating this within the brand activity calendar

o   CBU Marketing, CMI and other SDL functions to ensure promotional strategies support the Mars Laws of Growth.

o   Sales, Customer Marketing, Category Management & Key Account teams to unlock trade promotional price point opportunities by channel for category and profit pool growth with customers.

o   Commercial & Finance to deliver target Prime Margin/MAC shape for the CBU’s as part of continuous Trade ROI improvements.

o   CBU Marketing and R&D to optimise Promotional opportunities for Innovation ensuring ongoing alignment within existing guidelines.

o   Finance and S&OP+ team to ensure trade promotional recommendations and action inputs are included in Annual Operating Plan and period S&OP+ cycles.  

·     Lead the execution, planning and management of agreed trade promotional Strategy for the Brand/Portfolio by:

o   Partnering with Customer Marketing to develop and deploy channel/ pack type trade promotional guidelines for KA teams on a periodic basis.

o   Partnering with Customer Experience and Finance teams to ensure accuracy and reliability of data within the TPM system, through strong compliance and governance around data input and usage.

o   Leading SRM Trade ROI Analyst team, partnering closely with KAM Teams to ensure >80% of Trade spend analyzed at the program/event level to optimize Trade ROI at the total account/budget level. This includes ensuring robustness of KAM pre-event TP evaluations and assumptions.

o   Chairing trade promotional performance reviews alongside Trade ROI analyst/s, Trading Directors, Key account teams & Demand Finance to inform ongoing strategy and ensuring growth and trade budget opportunities and risks are fed into S&OP+.

o   Managing the trade promotional learning library to capture learnings and help inform ongoing strategies and guidelines, optimizing trade ROI across the portfolio.

o   Consolidating and Inputting recommendations to promotional exception sign off as part of S&OP+. Ensuring agreed actions are managed on time in full.

·     Manage the day to day activities of the Trade ROI analyst (where relevant) ensuring all the trade promotional objectives of the business are met.

With the support of the SRM analyst:

·     Analyse External and Internal Promotional Landscape on a periodic basis including:

o   Monitoring Retail Promotional Landscape across CBUs periodically (e.g. Promotional Price Points)

o   Conducting detailed promotional analysis across channels/pack types to highlight opportunities

o   Tracking competitors and multi-category promotional pricing and changes in strategy

·     Conduct event-level Trade ROI analysis, and effectively communicates insights and findings to Trade ROI Manager and KAMs

·     Consolidate & monitor compliance to promotional guidelines at account or budget holder level

·     Ensures quality and completeness of TPM data for ROI work with KAMs