Commercial Excellence Senior Manager

Role purpose

Planning and commercial navigation

• Own the annual budget, monthly plan, year-end estimate, and forecast-to-landing navigation logic for Commercial.
• Translate strategy and market dynamics into granular planning assumptions and challenge assumptions with evidence.
• Turn approved commercial ambition into supplier-level growth, margin, and negotiation strategies.
• Reconcile supplier plans with sales and margin targets and quantify contract, term, or funding improvements required to close gaps.
• Own monthly Sales Navigation and quarterly or six-month gate reviews, focusing leadership on exceptions, decisions, and corrective actions.
• Build a closed-loop plan-versus-actual process with root cause, action, owner, timing, and quantified impact for each gap.

Decision intelligence and team leadership

• Own Commercial KPI definitions, Power BI business requirements, semantic governance, and dashboard adoption, shifting dashboards toward actionable insight.
• Create and govern commercial decision-intelligence use cases using LLMs, agents, automation, external research, and advanced analytics.
• Ensure AI-generated analysis is grounded, auditable, evaluated, and governed with human decision ownership, overrides, and learning.
• Partner with IT and Data on data access, quality, integration, security, and productionization as Commercial product owner.
• Develop the team into commercial navigators, analytics translators, and AI-enabled decision partners.
• Identify opportunities where data, automation, or AI can improve decisions, productivity, or negotiation outcomes.

Experience

• 10+ years preferred in commercial planning, category or commercial management, revenue growth management, retail analytics, FP&A or business planning, strategy, or a related field.
• Grocery retail, FMCG, or consumer retail experience is strongly preferred but not required when transferable supplier economics and planning capability is demonstrated.
• Track record across multiple business units or categories and influence with senior commercial stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ownership of complex planning, forecasting, and performance cycles, translating data into executive decisions.
• Hands-on exposure to BI or analytics environments; Power BI familiarity is strongly preferred.
• Evidence of using emerging digital or AI tools to solve business problems is preferred; deep software engineering is not required.

Critical competencies

• Commercial and supplier economics; strategic planning, forecasting, and scenario logic.
• Structured problem solving, systems thinking, executive synthesis and challenge, and data and analytics fluency.
• Power BI and semantic-model understanding; LLM, agent, and automation product fluency; statistical and machine-learning literacy.
• Change leadership, adoption, people leadership, and capability building.