Sales Director, Korea

Job Location: ​Seoul​

Company description

Ferrero is a family-owned company with a truly progressive and global outlook and iconic brands such as Nutella®, Tic Tac®, Ferrero Rocher®, Raffaello®, Kinder Bueno® and Kinder Surprise®. As the love for our brands continues to grow, so too does our global reach. Represented in more than 50 countries, with products sold in more than 170, the Ferrero Group is loved by generations around the world. The secret to our global success? 40,000  dedicated employees who celebrate care and quality to craft a business, careers and brands we are proud of. Join us, and you could be one of them.

Diversity Statement

Ferrero is committed to building a diverse and inclusive culture in which all employees feel welcomed and appreciated and have the same opportunities. We believe all of our people are equally talented in their own way. In nurturing the curiosity and natural abilities of our employees, we provide them, generation after generation, the means to succeed personally and professionally, enabling them to craft their journey at Ferrero. The diversity of our talents is what makes our work environment multicultural, innovative and highly rewarding.

About the Role:

The role is directly responsible for the sales achievements of the Ferrero Korea Business Unit and focuses on providing the Korea/Japan Cluster Manager with the commercial insights needed for everyday business management and related decision-making.

It defines the sales strategies at the distributor, channel, and key customer levels and manages the development of the annual commercial plan proposal for the Cluster Manager and Region multi-functional team consideration. The role also manages the sales budget, including comprehensive tracking and monitoring of volume, net sales, and related trade spend.

Main Responsibilities:

• Develop and present the mid-term sales strategy by channel with details of priorities identification & budget definition. Consider both bottom-up sales planning outcomes and top-down direction
• Define a channel-centric development roadmap and deliver a way of working across functions to ensure the activities are finalized in consistency with internal budgeting and longer-term planning considerations
• Ensure agreed commercial investment allocations are consistent with trade marketing, marketing, and the overall organization’s sales strategy
• Validate new proposals from Key Account Managers to ensure a fast decision-making process and smooth progress of granular planning activity
• Review, validate, and seek full alignment with Area Sales Business Development (SBD) on the final commercial plans to be presented to top management
• Ensure key customer management is delivered as per Ferrero standards
• Manage everyday business activities, supervising tracking of sales performance vs. commercial plan, notably volume, net sales, and trade spend
• Lead the definition and negotiation of distributor/customer contractual KPIs, agreements, and consistently track performance against them
• Promptly develop ad hoc action plans when performance deviates from set sales targets
• Hold accountability for the accuracy of sales to trade forecasting in order to minimize overstocks and avoid missing sales opportunities
• Lead weekly performance update meetings, assigning guidelines to Key Account Managers and validating selling stories. Approve agendas and validate meeting reports to ensure proper progress of daily operations
• Regularly meet stakeholders of distributors/key customers to ensure alignment and preliminary consensus on the commercial plan as well as explore new business opportunities within the commercial plan approach
• Validate all sales figures before official circulation across other departments
• Manage price promotion spending as part of the trade spend process with the revenue manager, supervise in-store activation operations from concept development to implementation
• Collect and present insights driven from completed activations to drive efficient future activities
• Supervise internal data infrastructure (dashboard) to ensure prompt and easy access to all available data (client POS, distributor sales, and stocks, etc.)
• Develop tailored analyses to support client meetings with strong quantitative rationales
• Perform a full mapping of internal processes related to Distributor-Ferrero Governance and decision-making processes, update processes to ensure efficiency and agile business operations
• Craft an effective consensus-building strategy among Ferrero and distributors on the proposed processes
• Act as a distributor key point of contact for everyday business operations dealing with the internal governance of a big local conglomerate
• Lead internal meetings to ensure alignment with Area SBD (Luxembourg) and Region (Singapore) in full compliance with internal governance and with a strong multi-functional alignment perspective
• Supervise and mentor direct reports in the sales team and influence distributor business units

Who we are looking for:

• University degree in a finance or business discipline
• Relevant commercial experience with strong FMCG market and knowledge of different business models
• Prior experience in leading commercial as well as cross-functional teams is required
• High analytical capabilities, strategic thinking, project management and insight-oriented reporting
• Proactivity, accountability, resilience, dynamism, self-motivation, growth mindset, and time management skills
• Strong decision-making skills, excellent presentation, negotiation, and interpersonal skills
• Great communication and influencing skills, strong stakeholder management, change and conflict management
• Agile mindset, strong ability in scenario planning, resource management, high result-orientation
• Excellent leadership and people management skills
• Advanced MS Office skills
• Fluency in English and Korean, written and spoken

How to be successful in the role and at Ferrero:

Consumers, quality and care are at the heart of everything we do. So, to be successful at Ferrero, you’ll need to be just as consumer and product centric as we are - dedicated to crafting brilliant results for consumers around the world.