Qualification and Experience Required:
- Minimum of 5 years experience in management or Product Marketing Management.
- Tertiary education such as bachelors commerce degree, MAP or MBA is preferred.
- Demonstrated success defining and launching products and services.
- 5+ years of experience in a job in the IT networking and/or channel segment
- Excellent writing and verbal communication skills.
- Skills in preparing budgets and forecasts.
- Ability to perform market opportunity analysis, size, profitability, competitor analysis.
- Excellent teamwork skills.
- Proven ability to influence cross-functional teams without formal authority
Business Development
- Gather market research and market intelligence from the sales force and other sources
- Gather and assimilate business requirements from sales/distribution entities in the Group
- Research for new products for the company and business unit
- Develop solutions where required (product and technology combinations)
- Give input to the product division for new products and go to market strategies
- Specific to new products in their early phase of roll-out:
- Support The company sales team and product managers with product info to sell and input to marketing materials for lead generation and sales demand
- Give input into pricing and margins
- Accountable for overall reporting to the vendors, including forecasting and sales out (POS) / inventory reports where applicable Product Planning
- Market research and intelligence
- Idea screening, for activities, events and demand generation
- Analysis of business and technology requirements and processes
- Input to product marketing and press releases / thought leadership Business Case
- Determine annual budgets
- Input to development of business case spreadsheet (Income Statement; Balance Sheet; funding requirements; new heads and equipment; market share, vendor reporting, serial number reporting; objectives (MBOs))
- Sales performance to budget Measuring Products
- Monitor daily sales reports
- Monitor gross profit from daily sales and contribution reports
- Measure profitability and return metrics of products (ROWC) Give input to resellers through:
- Product roadmaps
- Product high level timing and milestones
- Input to detail recording of all products related activities Channel development
- Identify suitable channel partners per product and service
- Supply enablement services to channel
- Grow the units channel partners by numbers and revenue
- Develop technical sales and marketing assistance training for partners
- Ensure C-level engagement with vendors and channel partners
- Ensure business unit teams train and enable the broader the company sales teams Planning
- All Business Unit Managers are expected to produce coherent and integral plans including the drivers such as: budgets, resources, vendor strategies and marketing on an annual, half year and quarterly basis using systems, processes, templates, quality expectations, timelines and best practices of the organisation and our partners and vendors
- The plans must clearly describe what is required to be done inside each BU to ensure that budget and organisational targets are met as well as what success will look like. This will include all BU staff KPA's and related total salary packages becoming the map for the business unit to navigate, be guided and rewarded through the year Management of Execution
- To ensure that the plans materialize, managers are expected to translate their plans into a set of actions that has to be done such as targets and building a competent and motivated team to execute
- These include taking resources, such as capital, people and marketing, and channeling these into the plans
- The team must be adequately resourced and have strategic relationships to market and implement the plans
- The recruit, enable and grow activities with the channel now comes into play
- The outcomes of the activities will be judged on how the plan and innovative adjustments in the 5x P's (product, place, price, people, and promotion) are made to align with objectives and produce the required results
- This speaks to why we invest in the business and why we spend money
- The manager must ensure that all the BU's activities are governance compliant, ethical and up to the organisation's code of conduct and policy standards
- The Business Unit Manager is to ensure that all our contractual obligations to the Vendor are upheld and enforced across the business Data Management and Reporting
- It is expected that all Business Unit managers constantly absorb, analyse and reflect the data that signals them to ascertain the health and alignment of the BU
- The company produces reports which all managers must scrutinise daily and create a closed loop between the data, the plan and execution
- The Business Unit managers are expected to spot the anomalies and risk and when this deviation is evident, managers must assess them and make process improvements and changes
- The managers must also ensure that all valuable data in the business unit is recorded, analysed and timeously reported back to the organisation
- The managers must provide the organisation with insight surrounding their respective business units and market on what it is they do
- These reports, such as commit, payroll, KPA's and board pack, are expected of the Business Unit managers to run their business
- The managers' responsibility spans outside of the business unit and interfaces with finance, logistics, human capital, marketing, operations, vendors, partners and customers
