Category Manager at Talents and Skills Africa

Location: Ikeja, Lagos

Job Brief

• This job entails planning, coordinating, implementing and overseeing the strategies to boost business performance, across the Phones and Mobile Accessory category. The key role is to develop category strategies, in line with the organizational Product strategy chart, while monitoring its implementation, and ensuring category growth and profitability.

Duties and Responsibilities

• Develop a phones and mobile accessory category strategy, (broken down into achievable quarterly, monthly and weekly timelines), in line with the organizational Product strategy chart.
• Liaise with the Sales Lead to propose and evaluate category-centric sales and advertising activities, across Offline and Online sales channels.
• Monitor category-specific business performance, traffic and user trends to generate actionable category assortment insights.
• Conduct market surveys to provide customer-focused insights, to help advise category assortment strategy for wholesale, retail and E-Commerce platforms, using consumer demand signals, external data, pattern recognition and industry expertise.
• Catalyse cross functional teams (marketing, sales and operations) to act on these insights and deliver business impact.
• Propose new assortment additions, pricing, promotions and exclusivity to deliver a best in class category assortment.
• Create category-specific assortment plan for key seasonal moments and drive implementation with the marketing, inventory and sales team.
• Facilitate partnerships, on boarding and upscaling new merchants by providing seller & category-specific insights. Own relationship with existent onboarded sellers and Key Accounts.
• Create exit strategies for products that are not successful in the market, while monitoring inventory ageing and replenishment patterns
• Leverage syndicated POS, Ecommerce and retail data to develop deep understanding of the quickly moving and evolving category dynamics. Interpret data to deliver objective category insights, analysis, and thoughts that offers disruptive category growing opportunities.
• Have a comprehensive understanding of category landscape to help identify and drive strategic sales opportunities and customer growth objectives
• Advice merchandising team on offers for B2B and B2C integrated marketing campaigns with the aim of acquiring and retaining customers.
• Be responsible for category-specific consumer experience. Partner with operations team to translate customer insights into strategies which drive performance.
• Leading category management projects to optimize ranges and related merchandising.
• Manage a comprehensive portfolio of Phones & accessory category brands and OEM’s; while developing appropriate strategies to ensure profitable partnerships, product sourcing and profitability for the category.

Requirements

• Candidates should possess Bachelor's Degree qualification.
• 5 - 7 years experience.

Skills & Expertise

• Familiarity with sourcing and vendor management
• Expertise in category management
• In-depth knowledge of marketing and sales operations and processes
• Analytical and critical thinker
• Aknack for negotiation and networking
• Working experience with ERP software
• Ability to gather and analyze data and to work with figures
• Solid judgment with ability to make good decisions
• Strong leadership capabilities