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 Management
MINIMUM PREVIOUS WORK EXPERIENCE
Clinical/Sales experience in the perioperative space in a hospital and is currently working in a medical equipment related role.
DESIRABLE ADDITIONAL EDUCATION, WORK EXPERIENCE AND PERSONAL QUALITIES
- Excellent Computer Skills:
- Including Excel,
- Word and Outlook
- Effective Time Management;
- Methodical;
- Able to work under pressure;
- Analytical skills;
- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills with superiors, subordinates and suppliers.
- Accurate, numerate, team player
KEY PERFORMANCE AREA
Planning
Integrates company's strategy for its Surgical business into Product Marketing Plans
Analyses market trends on a Quarterly basis & updates Marketing Plans
Plans initiatives in order to meet the Product Marketing Plan objectives per product
Pro-actively manages the tasks associated with various objectives without supervision or reminding
Reviews Product Marketing Plan weekly to ensure that strategic objectives are being managed and met
Plans tasks for the week based on strategic objectives, promotional objectives and ad hoc requirements each Monday on Microsoft One Note and executes them meeting reasonable deadlines as per plan
Reports back on the outcome of these initiatives on a monthly basis in the Product Manager Sales Report
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 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.
- 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
- Develops a strong partnership with Hospital Groups, Department of Health and complementary suppliers
- 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.
- 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.
- Assist with Road Shows and Congresses
- Key customers to be visited at least twice a year incorporating a meaningful agenda to develop and maintain these relationships
- Complementary suppliers views the company as a preferred vendor of products to their business.
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.
- Provides product training to the sales force in conjunction with the Product Managers when required
- 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 and Quotes
- Works with the CE Team and MD to create market relevant pricing for customers and projects.
- Manages, specs and signs off all quotes for surgical equipment.
- Pricing is developed through a combination of negotiating with suppliers and analyzing competitor pricing in order to be competitive in market.
- Surgical Quotes are developed based on the specific needs and configuration identified by the customer and are approved and sent out 48 hours from request.
- Information is continuously collected and analyzed monthly
- Monitoring/advising suitable pricing levels for exceptional orders
Tender/Contract Management
- Completes surgical product tenders & contracts.
- Influences tender specifications to suit the company's products.
- Surgical tenders are submitted on time and completed within a reasonable timeframe.
- Maintains contact with tender authorities and advises them on standards and specifications.
- 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.
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.
- Quarterly sales campaign information from Goldmine is reviewed and reported on monthly.
Product Database Maintenance
- Maintains a database of all company Surgical 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.
- When anything is added or removed a message is sent over mail and on Yammer.
Marketing Support
- Acts as an adviser on: All Company Surgical 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.
Product Promotional Activities
- Builds clear product marketing plans.
- Develops product promotions in line with marketing objectives and latest Product Management trends, utilizing the following tools: Sales campaigns, Print Advertising, Electronic Newsletter, SteriView, Articles for Journals, Product In-services, Website, Key Opinion Leader emails, Public Relations, Road shows, Congresses
- Researches and keeps up to date with the latest Product Management trends
- 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.
- Attends symposia & trade shows, reads journals, makes use of Internet
- Spends time with customers
- 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
Controlling
- Constantly monitors the effectiveness of promotional campaigns by assessing outcomes
- Monitors Sales, Gross Profit margins against budget for each product group
- Sales & Marketing promotional campaigns are monitored in conjunction with the National Sales Manager and corrective action taken if required
- Takes corrective action in conjunction with the Finance and other appropriate departments where necessary
- The sales team activities are reviewed on Goldmine in order to track the progress and effectiveness of the quarterly promotional campaigns
- The sales team activities are reviewed on Goldmine in order to track the progress and effectiveness of the quarterly promotional campaigns
- Follow ups are done with the sales team to gather more information or assist with any problems
- Monitoring and advising on exceptional orders received for Surgical
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
