Manager - Sales Operation Excellence

The incumbent would be responsible for defining, planning, managing, and supporting the implementation of transformation initiatives in channel operations. These initiatives should be adapted from internal and external best practices to solve valuable problems and result in the delivery of the most efficient and effective processes and solutions. Ultimately, this role will drive organizational and process change to create future sales operations.

Roles and Responsibilities:

- Deeply collaborate with internal SMEs, sales department teams, and adjacent stakeholders to define the sales operations transformation roadmap through an understanding of underlying bottlenecks, best practices, business needs, and company aspirations.

- Collaborate with the field sales team and dealers to understand business priorities and pain points. Align the efforts to support achievement or solve issues that are widespread.

- Continuously scan, identify, document, communicate, and deploy best practices through diligent scanning of the internal and external business environments.

- Seek inspiration and adapt relevant processes from the retail, service, and hospitality industries.

- Conduct trials and POCs for process changes in dealer operations, measure outcomes, and conduct fast PDCA with agility to pivot to fine-tune processes.

- Create toolkits and playbooks, acquire peer validations, and provide scalable frameworks and implementation roadmaps to sales leaders for smooth, large-scale deployment of process changes. Monitor the progress and drive interventions to support the acceleration of initiatives.

- Report on the progress of various projects underway, highlight risks and issues, and gather support from stakeholders and management.

- Demonstrate deep understanding and expertise on the current state and future blueprint of dealer operations.

- Create and run forums with relevant stakeholders to raise the bar of sales operations excellence and dealer business resilience.

- Participate as a sales operations expert in adjacent projects to provide guidance and input.

Skills:

- Exceptionally skilled in leadership, stakeholder management, change management, facilitation, and organizing.

- Ability to lead without authority and with minimum guidance in a fast-paced, high-pressure, complex, and agile business environment

- High business acumen, strong KPI orientation, and deep perceptive understanding of sales processes, operations, and business models

- Highly analytical and conceptual, well organized with an eye for detail, and skilled problem solver

- Skilled in creating process designs, writing implementation guidelines for process changes, and documenting the after-action outcomes to bring clarity and conviction to the proposed recommendations.

- Able to translate concepts into action plans and oversee implementation in dealer operations.

- Ability and willingness to lead from the front with a hands-on approach as required.

- Excellent communication skills (speak, write, and present); active listener with the ability to motivate, negotiate, persuade, and influence people through interpersonal relationship building

- Tenacious, persistent, flexible to change, and with an executive presence to engage with senior sales leaders and dealer partners.

Experience:

- Minimum 8 to 13 years of experience in sales and business development roles in a high-paced, large-scale franchise-based retail environment (auto, FMCG, retail).

- At least 4 years of working in a similar role for operation excellence and transformation initiatives with hands-on experience. Relevant experience from operations strategy consulting is desirable.