Senior Category Manager

Description

Position Summary:

Category Managers are the business leaders for their respective product categories and are responsible for sales optimization across all sales channels and bottom line P&L performance. Category Managers responsibilities also include vendor management, demand planning, merchandising planning, campaign execution, and category management functions including sku and warehouse slot optimization. The Category Manager will be responsible for creating, maintaining, coordinating, and communicating their merchandising calendars. Aspects of the calendar include monthly partner and item highlights, sales team demonstrations, new item launches, point of sale needs, social media suggestions, events, and much more. This role is both strategic and hands on sales and customer experience driven.

This role will require working cross functionally on projects to continuously improve company performance. This role requires a pro-active, flexible; professional that quickly learns new roles and has experience trouble shooting and improving processes. This role requires a self-starter with ability to be flexible in an often-ambiguous environment.

Essential Functions:

• Sales Optimization across all sales channels and bottom-line P&L performance
• Vendor Management
• Demand Planning
• Create, maintain, coordinate, and communicate the Merchandising calendar throughout the organization
• Maintain company category hierarchy and perform category management tasks to optimize product lines and reduce redundancies in categories
• Present quarterly category reviews that dive into category performance metrics which will enable a strong level of SKU rationalization throughout the organization. Make documents category improvement suggestions including possible new items, brands, or farms while suggesting possible areas of SKU reduction.
• Maintain and improve category naming conventions, pack size consistency, alternative items, source specificity transparency, and all information fields that will improve the customer experience
• Partner with Business Intelligence team to perform competitive pricing analysis and ensure pricing is on par with Baldor standards. Assist in maintaining category pricing strategy and execution to ensure targets are met.
• Responsible for maintaining category landing pages such as Cheese Picks, Peak Season, or News from the Farm
• Develop training materials and work with internal sales and customer experience team to improve product knowledge. This includes maintaining point of sale information.
• Lead designated sales and purchasing meetings while educating internal teams of relevant material. Coordinate all needed materials in advance of meeting
• Liaison with customer experience team. Available to speak directly with customers at certain designated times.
• Provide planners with relevant forecasts for items that could be impacted by marketing activities or new business
• Evaluate vendors and products

• Research, improve, and communicate daily back order/shorts in the category by working cross functionally with supply chain and operations teams

• Provide expertise and sales support on customer visits

• Facilitate demos and customer trainings

• Work in conjunction with marketing department on various projects and events

• Weekly involvement in updating playbook

• Responsible for daily market recap and terminal market updates

• Heavy involvement in fresh cuts as we look to focus on how we can better support them and work closer on projects and sourcing.

• Schedule farm visits, attend food shows

• Brix support. Compliance, partner selection, contract details and negotiations.