Channelplay - Program Manager - Retail Marketing/In-Store Promotion/Visual Merchandising

Channelplay is one of India's leading retail marketing companies, working with most of the world's leading mobile phone, laptop and consumer electronics brands on their retail marketing efforts. Started by young entrepreneurs, Channelplay has grown well over the 8 years of its existence, and currently has over 4000 employees across the country delivering the best in retail marketing to our clients and revenues over Rs. 100 crores in revenue in FY 14-15.

This opening is for managing a Retail Marketing project for a leading consumer technology brand and involves activities for in-store promotion, channel sales, visual merchandising and training. With a field team of over 400 people across the country, this is one of Channelplay's flagship programs.

Role & Responsibilities

1) Collaborate with client stakeholders to create operating plans, retail marketing initiatives and targets etc., and manage the program resources to achieve the same.

2) Retail & Channel Operations Management - Manage a team of over 400 people comprising of in-store promoters, channel sales executives, visual merchandisers, field trainers and classroom trainers. Deploy industry leading best practices in all the above areas of channel management to deliver exceptional ROI to the client.

3) People management - Execute best practices in hiring, and employee lifecycle management to develop a highly capable, motivated and effective field team that delivers results.

4) MIS management - Use Channelplay's cutting edge field marketing management system 1Channel (www.1channeltech.com) to manage field marketing operation, collect useful information from the field, and take data based management decisions.

5) Support functions management - Manage support team of HR, Finance, Administration and IT resources to ensure effective delivery of critical support services required to run the program.

Skills & Experience Required for Success in This Role

1) Retail Marketing Skills: The candidate will be required to manage the retail marketing initiatives of one of the world's leading consumer technology companies, and thus is expected to have experience in managing similar initiatives in the past.

2) Stakeholder Relationship Management: While experience in business development and client management is not a prerequisite, a successful professional in this role will have experience of interacting with senior stakeholders in own or partner organizations, and will have the necessary emotional maturity and communication skills to develop effective working relationships.

3) Team Management: You should have managed mid and entry level professionals, and should be able to manage teams through effective KPI setting, delegation and monitoring, but not requiring micro or hands-on management. A good manager would have spent more than 80% of his time setting up processes and systems for proactive good management, and less than 20% of his time managing issues and escalations.

4) Aptitude for Innovation: Our ideal candidate would be someone who in the past has shown an aptitude to not just accept the status quo and focus on maintaining it through good management - but would have had ideas for improving things. A tinkering/improvising attitude will be important for being on a process of continuous improvement, and will help you have ideas for an effective long term strategy.

5) Business Management Aptitude: This role at Channelplay puts people in charge of a P&L statement, a significant amount of approval authority on cost and revenues, and control over a large team of people. The ideal candidate will be comfortable to take responsibility of, and thus accountability for, all of the above.

Education : Regular full-time MBA

Experience (No. of years) : Minimum 5 Years

Experience (Industry) : Retail, Distribution, Consumer products, trade/retail/marketing at a brand

Required Evaluations : Aptitude assessment, interview