Primary Responsibilities:
Commercial Strategy:
- Play an active role in the development and implementation of the strategic direction the product should take.
- Define the product B2B and B2C sales strategies.
- Ensure plans are well supported with market research and testing.
- Communicate and collaborate with senior management to insure alignment with other business goals.
- Defining (in collaboration with product management) project objectives, budgets, timelines, and deliverables.
- Identify and develop strategic partnerships.
Sale Pilot Design:
- Work with the market research team to design and execute pilots to answer key product questions, collect user feedback, and measure product impact.
- Own the sales process definition for research pilots.
- Support pilot design by setting pilot, goals, methodologies, and locations.
- Set goals to reach grant-funded milestones.
- Proactively identify major project risks and develop risk mitigation strategies.
Problem-Solving: Solve a variety of challenges as they arise in distribution, staffing, partnerships, and financials.
Team management:
- Implement and lead systems and tools for proper management of direct reports.
- Coordinate team members, procurements, schedules, and tasks to deliver results for project milestones.
- Work together with the project controller (finance) to keep the budget tracking updated.
- Making sure that projects and teams are well structured, and that communication is efficient and effective.
- Managing sales teams to ensure implementation of pilots and sales activities is correctly carried out.
- Coordinate regular project meetings, develop agendas and send meeting minutes.
- Assist with hiring and onboarding new team members.
- Identify staffing needs based on the business strategy.
Support Product Development:
- Synthesize product specifications and parameters based on market research, lab testing results, and product development goals, as well as develop reports and gate presentations
- Initiate risk and safety analyses of new products.
- Ensure lab testing, electronics development, and market research are answering key product development questions.
- Fundraising and partnership development:
- Assist with building partnerships across the electric and clean cooking sector to support the project.
- Actively initiate and maintain internal and external communication, develop and give presentations for management, grantors, and other external collaborators.
- Assist in identifying and writing grants that are well aligned with Burns’s mission, vision, and capacity.
- Drafting narrative and financial proposals and reports for internal and external use
- When required, represent BURN at conferences and events in Kenya and abroad.
Skills and Experience
- Experience developing business strategies and plans.
- Bachelor or MBA degree, preferably in business, market intelligence, or marketing
- 5 years of experience in project management and demonstrated ability to coordinate complex projects with many stakeholders to deliver results on time.
- Strong analytic/number-crunching background, particularly with sales and marketing data
- High level of comfort working with high-level business clients.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English.
- Enthusiastic, entrepreneurial, a desire to ‘sell for good’ and willing to get your “hands dirty”.
- Experience in identifying and developing B2B distribution partnerships in Ghana.
- Experience managing key accounts across a range of distribution channels.
- Previous experience in market research or M&E.
- Knowledge of the sales and marketing fields in (ENTER TARGET MARKETS), preferably in consumer durables and/or fast-moving consumer goods.
