SUMMARY:
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POSITION INFO:
MAIN PURPOSE OF THE JOB
The Product Manager will be responsible for both the product management and product marketing for the full range of consumable products.
This includes managing a range of products throughout their product lifecycles, provide input into stock requirements and ordering, building, and managing company budgets, analyzing sales trends, forecasting sales and margins, managing customer contracts, managing complaints, and defining the product vision to deliver winning products. It also includes working closely with the sales, marketing, operations, and customer service teams to ensure revenue and customer satisfaction goals are constantly met.
The Product Manager’s job includes ensuring that the product and marketing efforts support the company’s overall strategy and goals.
REQUIRED MINIMUM EDUCATION
Appropriate degree or diploma in marketing and/or business. i.e. BCom
MINIMUM PREVIOUS WORK EXPERIENCE
Experience in a Product Management/Category Management role.
DESIRABLE ADDITIONAL EDUCATION, WORK EXPERIENCE AND PERSONAL QUALITIES
- Advanced Excel Skills.
- Excellent attention to detail.
- Advanced Product Management acumen.
- Numeracy skills combined with an inquiring, analytical mind.
- Self-motivated, with excellent time and project management skills.
- Accepts responsibility and self-manages while delegating tasks as appropriate.
- Ability to work well under pressure and collaborate with a multi-faceted team.
- Ability to travel nationally as business needs demand.
- Proficiency in Microsoft Office programs.
- Excellent written, verbal communication & presentation skills.
KEY PERFORMANCE AREA
Budgeting
- Develops annual sales and expense budgets in conjunction with the Sales Team, National Sales Manager, Surgical & IPT Product Managers and General Manager.
- Build budgets based on in depth discussion with sales team and national sales manager.
- Build clear action plans for any plans to maintain or grow business across the product categories.
- Review budget assumptions and plans on a quarterly basis in order to ensure that they are still valid in terms of the market.
- Ensures that budgets are reviewed by Sales Rep and variances analyzed in conjunction with the NSM.
- Reviews budget assumptions to ensure that plans are in place to ensure that the positive assumptions are actualized, and the negative assumptions are mitigated.
Sales Force & Customer Service Communication
- Provides effective communication & management of promotional initiatives.
- Sales force is adequately trained to effectively promote Consumables products.
- Provides effective communication on changes in contracts and pricing to sales team and customer service teams.
- Communicating important changes in product information, product launches, changes in contracts & pricing to sales force and customer service teams.
- Speaks to salespeople to assess the effectiveness of products and initiatives in conjunction with National Sales Manager.
- Engage with customer service teams to ensure correct information on contract pricing and effective dates are managed.
- Training needs are regularly analyzed and acted upon for the sales team.
- Required information is reviewed and acted upon for customer service teams.
Key Customer Relations
- Maintaining relationships with all key customers involved in contracts and tenders.
- If the company achieves “Preferred Supplier” status to facilitate the award of business and contracts.
- Key contacts at key customers are phoned once a month in order to maintain relationships.
- Being the primary contact for all contracts and tenders aside from those managed by the management team.
- Develops a strong partnership with Hospital Groups, Department of Health, and complementary suppliers.
- Monthly/Quarterly meetings with key contract customers incorporating a meaningful agenda to develop and
- Maintain these relationships.
- Complementary suppliers’ views of the company as a preferred vendor of products to their business.
- Customer & supplier relationships are managed actively every month to ensure that contact is in fact made and ensuring that the objective of each contact is measured.
- Product Knowledge
- Develops an excellent working knowledge of all company and competitor products by actively gathering and analyzing information by attending training courses, reading, reviewing websites etc.
- Maintain competitive knowledge to create and adjust sales strategies.
- Assists sales force in customer meetings when additional product information is required.
- Manage competitor pricing and features matrix.
- Reviews competitor websites on a weekly basis to understand whether there have been any new product releases or changes.
- Reviews supplier websites once a week to understand whether there have been any new product releases or changes.
- Manage and investigate all competitor activity in the market to understand how they are performing on contracts/tenders, what activities they are executing, what pricing they are offering etc. to ensure that we can react and win/maintain business.
- Communicates with National Sales Manager & Sales Team monthly to understand the competitive activities in the market.
- Maintain matrix of all competitor pricing, competitor activity and competitor product features.
- Pricing
Responsible for managing that all pricing generated by the Managing Director is updated onto pricelists which are uploaded to the relevant pricing platforms and shared with customer service.
- Produces Price Lists for different customer groups and negotiates pricing contracts.
- Update and manage all price lists with customer and customer service.
- Update all pricing on the various pricing systems each customer has.
- Update costings and manage the need for increases based on supplier increases and exchange rate fluctuations.
- Manage all price increases effectively with all customers.
- Information is continuously collected and analyzed monthly.
- Monitoring/advising suitable pricing levels for exceptional orders.
Tender/Contract Management
- Completes consumable product tenders & contracts.
- Manages all consumables related product/code/admin queries from customers.
- Bi-Monthly analysis of all contract and tender performance against sales benchmarks with recommendations of how to improve sales.
- Influences tender specifications to suit the company's products.
- Consumable tenders are submitted on time and completed within a reasonable timeframe.
- Maintains contact with tender authorities and advises them on standards and specifications.
- Resolve queries from customers and internally concerning the correct product codes to quote or any issue with product codes on various contract and pricing platforms.
- Review contract and tender reports bi-monthly in order to gain insights and create action points for management and the sales team to increase sales.
- Manage all price and quote request queries with customer service.
- Prepare in advance for Tenders by ensuring that all product related documents are already organized and ready.
- Plan, execute & review action plans to maintain positive perception of the company's products before a tender is up for renewal.
- Train Marketing Supervisor to do administrative tender related tasks and delegate to them during tenders.
Supplier Management
- Manages relationships and any queries or requests from suppliers.
- Be the key contact for suppliers and key person responsible for any tasks that need to be completed for them.
- Engage with suppliers for information required for completion of tenders/contracts, customer requests.
- Monthly/Quarterly meeting with suppliers.
- Monthly reporting to suppliers.
Stock & Ordering Management
- Responsible for ensuring that stock forecasts and ordering are in line with any changes in contracts/tenders or market influences that could affect sales.
- Responsible for ensuring that stock is not written off.
- Work in conjunction with the Procurement Manager to ensure that consumables forecasts and stock are accurate for customer needs.
- Manage any stock that has a short expiry date and create a strategy to clear the stock before it expires.
- Review monthly re-order reports.
- Conduct monthly stock and sales forecast analysis to manage stock holding.
- Work in conjunction with the procurement Manager to ensure stock is ordered timeously.
- Manage and follow up with suppliers on any delays in orders.
- Review stock with short expiry reports monthly
- Provide monthly input into manufacturing requirement based on sales forecasts and market intelligence.
Reporting
- Attends Management meetings.
- Prepares monthly, quarterly and annual sales forecasts.
- Manage to meet / exceed monthly, quarterly and annual sales forecasts.
- Monthly Product and Territory Sales reports.
- All reports are produced on deadline without delay.
- Reports are presented with insights and recommendations for corrective or next actions.
- Reports are NOT provided purely as data without the relevant analyses, insights & recommendations.
- All reports are produced by their respective deadlines without delay.
- All reports are produced on schedule without delay.
- Presents sales performance against budget and makes recommendations as required to ensure future success, with adequate and effective reporting produced on schedule.
- Sales campaigns, contracts, initiatives, and low performing products are actively reviewed each month and analysis is done proactively in order to gain insight and provide recommendations.
- Sales & GP reports & Marketing reports for Suppliers.
- Quarterly sales campaign information from Goldmine is reviewed and reported on monthly.
Product Database Maintenance
- Maintains a database of all company Consumables products which contains:
- Brochures, Tech Datasheets, images etc.
- Relevant standards
- Competitive products
- Competitive pricing
- Marketing Plans
- Product presentations
- Product performance data
- Database is up to date and information can be easily retrieved by sales team
- The website is reviewed monthly to ensure that all product information is up to date, discontinued products are removed, and new products are added.
- The Sales Team Product Info folder is reviewed monthly to ensure that all product information is up to date, discontinued products are removed, and new products are added.
Marketing Support
- Acts as an adviser on: All Company Consumables products, Relevant Standards Competitive Products
- Maintains supplies of promotional material.
- Prepares & presents staff training programmes on products & Technical Matters,
- Constantly updates knowledge.
- Reads journals, participates in webinars etc.
- Current electronic and printed promotional material is always available.
- Training material is available & can be presented professionally.
- Marketing support material is reviewed monthly and kept up to date.
Product Promotional Activities
- Builds clear product marketing plans.
- Develops product promotions in line with marketing objectives.
- Sales Promotional campaigns are developed in conjunction with the National Sales Managers & the Marketing Manager and presented at Sales meetings.
- Non-Sales product promotions are developed in conjunction with the Marketing Manager and flighted in the appropriate media.
- Product Promotions from Marketing plans are managed on a weekly basis to ensure that the activities are being executed on time and correctly.
- Quarterly sales campaigns are constantly managed on Goldmine to ensure that the sales team are executing them as per plan.
- Follow ups with sales team are done to assist or check the progress on campaigns based on information from Goldmine.
- Social media, ENL, e-mail signature content is pro-actively managed on the Promotions Master document on OneDrive monthly. i.e. updated before weekly marketing meetings.
Market Development
- Keeps up to date with new technology trends.
- Identifies new opportunities for current and existing products, in line with the company’s strategic objectives.
- Conducts feasibility studies on new opportunities and produces Marketing Plans for new products where appropriate.
- Plans and monitors new product launches.
- Projects are produced for potential new opportunities.
- New Opportunity screens and feasibility studies are produced.
- Reviews the appropriate websites, LinkedIn groups and websites to keep up to date with the latest trends and topics concerning the consumables product range.
- Reviews the appropriate websites, LinkedIn groups and websites to keep up to date with the latest trends and topics concerning the consumables product range
Quality Management
- Investigates and manages all Consumable Product Complaints and initiates and manages all Supplier Product complaints.
- Ensures that the most up-to-date Product information is available and accessible including:
- Technical Data Sheets
- Safety Data Sheets
- CE Mark or other product certification certificates
- Supplier ISO 13485 / ISO 9001 certificates
- Other relevant documents
- Completes new and periodic Supplier assessments in terms of the QMS requirements.
- On an ad-hoc basis or for new products, manages customer/product survey process to obtain feedback on the safety, quality & effectiveness of the product.
- All complaints are resolved timeously.
- All product files are kept up-to-date and available to staff.
- All supplier assessments are completed timeously.
- Feedback from customer / product surveys is investigated and analyzed.
- Monthly reporting on product complaints and supplier complaints.
- Monthly reporting of customer surveys./feedback
