SeedWorks - Crop Manager/Product Manager

Educational Qualification: Graduate in Life Sciences, preferably in Agriculture with MBA (Marketing)

Job Description/ Responsibilities: 

Job Purpose : 

To drive the short and long-term crop strategy, manage profitability and collaborate with internal and external stakeholders on all crop initiatives

Key Accountabilities : 

- Marketing strategies for products - Plan and execute marketing strategies for the existing products

- Budgeting exercise (crop budget + promotional budget) + budget control with the regional sales teams

- Product Positioning - Work with Product Development team and conceptualize positioning statement

- Branding - Voice, working with vendors to develop outcome

- Communication - identifying innovative digital channels for communications

- Pricing - value pricing to arrive at the appropriate pricing, carry out pricing calibration based on market forces

- Collate customer Insights // Voice of Customer + demand estimation

- Own the Long-Range Plan (LRP) for the crop and decide the phase-in and phase-out of crop varieties

- Production Estimates (annual volumes confirmation) for 2 - 3 years

- Own and prepare the long-term strategic outlook of the crop (3-5 years)

- P&L delivery

Indirect:

- Collaboration with research - new product, discover segment

- Supply chain - packing material, finalizing packaging material

- Production, government affairs, sales

- CM-specific: Research & PD

- New Product Development - Coordinate with multiple stakeholders on new product development

- Work with the trialing team and drive selection of regions for executing trials.

- Draft product-positioning strategy by articulating the customer need and performing benchmarking against comparable competitor product for every trial region.

- Provide continuous feedback to R&D on all product trials underway across various regions.

- Market Definition - Build the market potential and scope for the new products

- Obtain feedback from new product trials and formulate the New Product Introduction (NPI) plan by identifying primary and secondary markets.

- Determine packaging, pricing and positioning of new products by assessing region-wise performance during trials and bench marking against comparable competitor products.

- Take ownership of product branding by making decisions on pricing, packaging, SKUs based on the market requirements.

- Continually engage with farmers, distributors and retailers to gather feedback on product performance and calibrate short-term product strategy.

- Ensure quality data collection in the context of fragmented markets and outdated government data sources to ensure all downstream activities are based on actionable insights from these data.

- Perform demand forecasting for both short and long-term planning horizons accounting of product performance in previous years to ensure accurate visibility of Total Addressable Market.

- Customer Engagement - plan and drive initiatives to maximize customer engagement with the brand and the products.

- Negotiate with regional sales teams on the basis of - value pricing- of each variety.

- Deliver the net realization value (NRV).

- Formulating communication strategy to mitigate brand risk and working with field, sales enablement and branding team to resolve any potential negative PR accident.

- Review the budget every quarter with the regional managers.

- Continuous follow-up with sales team on progress of sales.

- Drive Digital initiatives for the crop.