Commercial Director - Electric

Primary Responsibilities:

Commercial Strategy:

• Play an active role in the development and implementation of the strategic direction the product should take.
• Define the product B2B and B2C sales strategies.
• Ensure plans are well supported with market research and testing.
• Communicate and collaborate with senior management to insure alignment with other business goals.
• Defining (in collaboration with product management) project objectives, budgets, timelines, and deliverables.
• Identify and develop strategic partnerships.  

Sale Pilot Design:

• Work with the market research team to design and execute pilots to answer key product questions, collect user feedback, and measure product impact.
• Own the sales process definition for research pilots.
• Support pilot design by setting pilot, goals, methodologies, and locations.  
• Set goals to reach grant-funded milestones.
• Proactively identify major project risks and develop risk mitigation strategies.

Problem-Solving: Solve a variety of challenges as they arise in distribution, staffing, partnerships, and financials.

Team management:

• Implement and lead systems and tools for proper management of direct reports.  
• Coordinate team members, procurements, schedules, and tasks to deliver results for project milestones.
• Work together with the project controller (finance) to keep the budget tracking updated.
• Making sure that projects and teams are well structured, and that communication is efficient and effective.
• Managing sales teams to ensure implementation of pilots and sales activities is correctly carried out.
• Coordinate regular project meetings, develop agendas and send meeting minutes.
• Assist with hiring and onboarding new team members.
• Identify staffing needs based on the business strategy.

Support Product Development:

• Synthesize product specifications and parameters based on market research, lab testing results, and product development goals, as well as develop reports and gate presentations
• Initiate risk and safety analyses of new products.
• Ensure lab testing, electronics development, and market research are answering key product development questions.
• Fundraising and partnership development:
  • Assist with building partnerships across the electric and clean cooking sector to support the project.
  • Actively initiate and maintain internal and external communication, develop and give presentations for management, grantors, and other external collaborators.
  • Assist in identifying and writing grants that are well aligned with Burns’s mission, vision, and capacity.
  • Drafting narrative and financial proposals and reports for internal and external use
  • When required, represent BURN at conferences and events in Kenya and abroad.

Skills and Experience

• Experience developing business strategies and plans.
• Bachelor or MBA degree, preferably in business, market intelligence, or marketing
• 5 years of experience in project management and demonstrated ability to coordinate complex projects with many stakeholders to deliver results on time.
• Strong analytic/number-crunching background, particularly with sales and marketing data
• High level of comfort working with high-level business clients.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English.
• Enthusiastic, entrepreneurial, a desire to ‘sell for good’ and willing to get your “hands dirty”.
• Experience in identifying and developing B2B distribution partnerships in Ghana.
• Experience managing key accounts across a range of distribution channels.
• Previous experience in market research or M&E.
• Knowledge of the sales and marketing fields in (ENTER TARGET MARKETS), preferably in consumer durables and/or fast-moving consumer goods.