Description

About the Function:

Our Sales team love building relationships, connecting with customers to sell our much-loved brands in new and vibrant markets where they can thrive. They help sell our iconic brands across 180 countries every year.

We're operating across different markets, channels, and areas of expertise. Using your curiosity and passion, you'll make the most of consumer insight and digital platforms, reaching new customers, markets, and celebrations to help us achieve our growth potential. We'll support your learning and growth as you develop your career with us and work with people across our business to realise your fullest potential.

About the role:

The Commercial Planning & Activations (CP&A) Lead acts as the strategic connector between brand, category, customer, and sales teams. The role translates brand and category strategies into customer-specific commercial plans and ensures flawless in-market execution that drives volume, value, share, and profit growth.

Role Responsibilities:

1. Translate Strategy Into Commercial Plans

• Convert brand and category strategies into channel and customer plans that maximise distribution, visibility, and rate of sale.

• Build annual and quarterly commercial plans aligned with the business cycle (AOP, QBRs, customer JBP timelines).

• Partner with Category Development and Finance to ensure plans land key strategic growth drivers and achieve NSV, profit, and share targets.

2. Promotional Planning & Governance

• Design profitable promotional mechanics across channels (off-trade, on-trade, e-commerce, general trade).

• Manage promo calendars, forecast volumes, and ensure alignment with finance and supply.

• Lead promo governance, ensuring compliance with guidelines and performance expectations.

• Analyse historical performance and deliver recommendations for continuous improvement.

3. Activation Delivery & In-Market Execution

• Develop execution toolkits, customer sell-in decks, planograms, and activation briefs for field and sales teams.

• Manage POS development (concept → production → distribution → execution).

• Own the "Picture of Success" (PoS) standards per channel and customer.

• Ensure flawless execution of NPDs, including listings, visibility, and range reviews.

4. Insights, Measurement & Evaluation

• Use shopper, category, and customer insights to inform planning and activation decisions.

• Track activation performance, promo return on investment, compliance, and rate-of-sale uplift.

• Provide clear post-activity reviews (PIRs) and insights to brand, finance, and category to improve future planning.

• Maintain dashboards or reporting tools to supervise performance throughout the year.

5. Cross-Functional Leadership

• Act as the integrator between Sales, Marketing, Category, Finance, and Supply.

• Lead the commercial rhythm of the business (IBP, AOP, JBP planning, M&E cycles).

• Champion ways of working that improve efficiency, clarity, and alignment.

• Provide guidance and support to sales teams to ensure priority focus and consistent execution.

Experience / skills required:

Experience

• Broad experience of Commercial (Minimum 4 - 5 years) working in sales, customer marketing, retailing or planning functions

• Project Management Experience

• Commercial and Financial decision making experience

Skills

• High cognitive ability

• Facilitate operational simplicity, enabling decisions to be made, aligned to and driven swiftly

• Analytical skills, systems proficiency and data handling expertise

• Capable of working cross functionally and with a sense of initiative and ownership

• Building collaborative and influential relationships with customers an industry peers in customer marketing and related fields

Flexible Working Statement:

Flexibility is key to our success. Talk to us about what flexibility means to you so that you're supported to manage your wellbeing and balance your priorities from day one.

Diversity statement:

Our purpose is to celebrate life, every day, everywhere. And creating an inclusive culture, where everyone feels valued and that they can belong, is a crucial part of this.

We embrace diversity in the broadest possible sense. This means that you'll be welcomed and celebrated for who you are just by being you. You'll be part of and help build and champion an inclusive culture that celebrates people of different gender, ethnicity, ability, age, sexual orientation, social class, educational backgrounds, experiences, mindsets, and more.

Our ambition is to create the best performing, most trusted and respected consumer products companies in the world. Join us and help transform our business as we take our brands to the next level and build new ones as part of shaping the next generation of celebrations for consumers around the world.

Feel inspired? Then this may be the opportunity for you.

If you require a reasonable adjustment, please ensure that you capture this information when you submit your application.