Commercial Excellence Senior Manager

Job purpose

Lead the Commercial function's end-to-end navigation, planning and decision-intelligence capability, providing the CCO and Commercial leadership with an independent, fact-based view of where the business is going, whether agreed strategies are materializing, what is driving gaps, and what decisions or negotiations are required to land the plan. Own the evolution from reporting-centric analytics to a governed commercial decision system augmented by AI, automation and advanced analytics.

Key accountabilities

• Own the annual budget, monthly plan, end-year estimate and forecast-to-landing navigation logic for Commercial.
• Translate strategy and market dynamics into granular planning assumptions and challenge them with evidence.
• Lead conversion of approved commercial ambition into supplier-level growth, margin and negotiation strategies.
• Reconcile supplier plans back to total sales and margin ambition; quantify contract/term/funding improvements required to close economic gaps.
• Own the monthly Sales Navigation cycle and quarterly/six-month gate reviews, focusing leadership attention on exceptions, decisions and corrective actions.
• Build the closed-loop plan-versus-actual mechanism and ensure gaps have root cause, action, owner, timing and quantified landing impact.
• Own Commercial KPI definitions, Power BI business requirements, semantic governance and dashboard adoption; shift dashboards from descriptive to actionable.
• 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 subject to human decision ownership; maintain override and learning governance.
• Act as the Commercial product owner with IT/Data for data access, quality, integration, security and productionization.
• Develop the team from report producers into commercial navigators, analytics translators and AI-enabled decision partners.
• Continuously identify high-value opportunities where data, automation or AI can improve commercial decisions, productivity or negotiation outcomes.

Experience

• 10+ years preferred in commercial planning, category/commercial management, revenue growth management, retail analytics, FP&A/business planning, strategy or a closely related field; calibrate to internal grading.
• Strong preference for grocery retail / FMCG / consumer retail exposure, but not an absolute requirement if the candidate demonstrates strong transferable supplier economics and planning capability.
• Track record operating across multiple business units/categories and influencing senior commercial stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ownership of complex planning/forecasting/performance cycles and translation of data into executive decisions.
• Hands-on exposure to BI/analytics environments; Power BI familiarity strongly preferred.
• Evidence of adopting emerging digital/AI tools to solve business problems is preferred; deep software engineering is not required.

Critical competencies

Commercial & supplier economics

Strategic planning / forecasting / scenario logic

Structured problem solving & systems thinking

Executive synthesis & challenge

Data/analytics fluency

Power BI / semantic model understanding

LLM / agent / automation product fluency

Statistical / ML literacy

Change leadership & adoption

People leadership & capability building