Business Development Manager - Lead Brands, GA

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER, Lead Brands (L5)

Locations : Georgia

ABOUT THE ROLE

The Business Development (BD) Manager is the in-market category & brand expert that leads consumer & trade demand generation for our brands. This role will promote the growth of Diageo brands, along with distributor/broker partners, customers, and consumers. This role is a blend of sales coordination, local marketing execution and category/brand representation - collaborating with our sales teams at Diageo and within our distributor teams. The role works directly with the relevant Diageo brand and trade marketing personnel to develop and implement winning brand, customer, and portfolio plans tailored for their market.

This role is designed to be very visible and active in the market – spending a minimum of 70% of their working time with customers, distributor sales teams, marketing/activation agencies, event and sponsorship promoters, and local influencers. This role relies heavily for success on effective collaboration with other Diageo sales and marketing teams - to ideate, create, budget for, and enable the operational readiness of their plans, allowing the successful candidates to focus on building an in-market reputation and track record of demand generation that translates into performance measured through sales depletions and share growth.

Role and Responsibilities

• Builds demand for our brands by locating, defining, and executing against the most important business/category opportunities in the market consistent with the category and brand plans developed for that market.

• Has a strong, trusted business relationship with the most important customers in their – market. Strengthens that relationship by regularly engaging with those customers to find mutually beneficial opportunities for growth.

• Identifies new opportunities for brands to participate in a market by being close to distributor, agency and customer personnel and validating opportunities through consumer, category & customer insight.

• Closely monitors standard brand performance metrics to ensure efforts are delivering against market/brand/customer expectations – course correcting where necessary – distribution, authorizations, display, menu, cross-promotion, share & re-order rates etc.

• Agrees category specific targets, timing and KPI’s for in market sales and agency partners – execution, merchandising, activation efforts, etc.

• Locates potential business opportunities by contacting potential partners – cross promotional opportunities, sponsorship opportunities, media, or local influencer opportunities etc.

• Inputs directly to the development (by brand/trade marketing teams) of local/in market category and channel plans for specific category and constituent brands.

• Leads local category & associated brand education opportunities and coordinates learning plans with Diageo and third-party personnel – including the Diageo Academy learning agenda.

• Protects Diageo by being an expert in our marketing code and living our code of conduct always.

• Helps refine and evolve the business development role by observing and recommending positive enhancements to the role and how it works and how it can better engage with internal and external stakeholders.

ABOUT YOU

Preferred Experience, Skills and Education Requirements

• BA in business administration or a related field

• 3 -5 years of sales & brand activation experience

• Existing or commitment to quickly complete WSET LI or equivalent education in Wines & Spirits

• On going category specific learning – formal & informal learning – liquid, consumer, category insights.

• Experience of beverage alcohol category and familiarity with On, Off and Non Premise channel landscape.

• Track record o