Commercial Director at PULA

What you will be doing: 

• The Commercial Director at Pula is far from the typical sales leader.
• You must be passionate about having meaning in your work.
• Willing to go the extra mile to evangelize the importance of agriculture insurance in transforming the lives of millions of smallholder farmers across multiple stakeholders from the political elites, to the Government systems, development agencies all the way down to the farmer.
• For you to be successful at the role, one must consider it their mission - “how you will be remembered”.
• Whilst at it, you will be rewarded very well as we believe in “doing good and doing well”.
• Whilst impacting hundreds of millions of farmers, our mantra is that those who are successful in the mission must be dollar millionaires in the end. At Pula, good deeds are rewarded. 

Everyday, you role will involve;

• Expanding your networks, influence and Pula’s positioning in the region
• Constantly building deeply entrenched relationships that will enable one to understand client needs, gather market intelligence and build a credible pipeline of opportunities. To succeed in the role, one must incredible enjoy building new relationships and leveraging on relationships to achieve your goals.
• Effectively communicate value propositions through presentations and proposals
• Act as the Pula spokesperson in the region.
• Using knowledge of the market and competitors in the regions, identify and develop the company’s unique selling propositions and differentiators.

Business Development

• Defining Commercial OKRs in your region and ownership of the results.
• Research, prepare and execute a sales plan focused on delivering new and recurring revenues through partnerships with agro-input companies and the public sector.
• Develop pipeline and continuously mature & qualify opportunities in order to increase Pula’’s market share and to enable achievement of sales target.
• Generating and qualifying new leads and using different approaches to penetrate prospective clients in your region. You are expected to qualify opportunities, know which deals to work on, and which ones to pass on.
• Progress prospects through a defined sales process to eventual contracting and implementation.

Customer Relationship Management
Manage and nurture existing client relationships across a wide range of stakeholders including commodity associations, farmers’ aggregators, insurers, government and private companies.
Manage the handover of new customers to the operations team for the implementation of the solution.

Team Leadership:

• Build and / or manage a high performing sales team to execute end to end sales including outreach, pitching, getting alignment, negotiation, closing deals and implementation.
• Analyze data and use it to make key strategic decisions for the business. 

What you need to have to be successful: 

• You have experience in strong demonstrable sales to development agencies, governments and / or financial institutions.
• You have demonstrable success working against a sales quota target.
• You have experience working with Development Agencies and / or Government officials at all levels and navigating government structures.
• Critical Thinking Skills. You must have the ability to define problems, collect data, establish facts, and draw valid conclusions
• Behavioural Skills. You must be self-directed, work well alone or in a team structure, highly results oriented, and willing to learn and expand his/her technical and product knowledge base through formal education, professional training, and self-study.
• You have knowledge and understanding of dealing with C-suite executives with excellent communication and presentation skills, integrity and impeccable professionalism.
• Sales and or consulting experience in the area of agriculture: seed / fertilizer / agrochemical industry or related is a significant advantage.
• Experience and knowledge in the insurance industry will place you at an advantage.
• You have the ability to use data and KPIs to make management decisions.
• You are fully comfortable with sales CRM platforms, Google Drive applications such as Google Sheets, Google Docs etc.