Senior Manager: Commercial Planning

The
Senior Manager: Commercial Planning
is expected to lead the end-to-end planning and execution of Massmart's retail promotions, events, and campaigns to ensure alignment with trading cycles, business goals, and customer expectations. The role is also responsible for providing strategic oversight, governance, reporting, and risk management of commercial campaigns, driving cross-functional alignment across Buying, Marketing, Operations, e-Commerce, Finance, and Supply Chain to ensure initiatives are customer-relevant, operationally feasible, and commercially effective.

Responsibilities:

Annual and Seasonal Planning

• Develop and own the enterprise commercial calendar aligned to key trading cycles (e.g., Back to School, Black Friday, Festive).
• Ensure campaign timing aligns with sales objectives, inventory capacity, and operational feasibility.
• Lead cross-functional planning sessions (Buying, Marketing, e-Commerce, Operations, GSC, Finance) to secure alignment and resourcing.
• Embed risk reviews into planning cycles, ensuring dependencies and bottlenecks are addressed early.

Promotional Planning and Execution

• Define and validate campaign mechanics (discounts, bundles, offers) to ensure value propositions meet sales and margin objectives.
• Oversee cross-channel alignment (store, online, app, marketplace) to ensure a consistent customer experience.
• Direct the development of activation playbooks and execution frameworks for flawless delivery.
• Govern creative, supply chain, and operational briefing processes to ensure accurate, timely, and risk-controlled execution.
• Introduce and oversee digital campaign management and SLA tracking tools to enhance governance and accountability.

Performance Tracking, Reporting and Post-Campaign Reviews

• Oversee development of ROI and uplift dashboards to track promo sales lift, margin impact, and sell-through rates.
• Lead post-implementation reviews with stakeholders, extracting actionable insights and embedding lessons learned.
• Report quarterly and annual performance outcomes to senior leadership, highlighting trends, risks, and recommendations.
• Ensure performance monitoring data informs forward-looking planning cycles and buying decisions.

Cross-Functional Commercial Alignment and Governance

• Chair commercial alignment forums to ensure synchronisation across Buying, Marketing, Stores, e-Commerce, GSC, and Finance.
• Proactively identify risks, blockers, or misalignments and lead resolution to protect timelines and outcomes.
• Maintain a single integrated view of campaign pipelines, dependencies, and risk registers.
• Ensure accountability through reporting frameworks, with visibility into outcomes and trade-offs.

Continuous Improvement and Risk Management

• Embed structured campaign planning, review, and governance tools to drive consistency and predictability.
• Monitor and escalate campaign delivery risks, including operational capacity, supplier dependencies, and reputational exposure.
• Drive continuous improvement sprints to refine processes, increase agility, and reduce time-to-market.
• Promote a culture of data-driven decision-making, using insights to optimise future promotions and planning.

People Management

• Enable a culture of accountability, agility, high performance, collaboration of customer focus, and results orientation within and across teams and business.
• With the understanding of talent management processes, ensure the sourcing, development, cohesion, coaching, motivation, and retention of a high-performance team.
• Implement HR processes and procedures to regulate workplace conflict and/or institute corrective measures and consultation processes to address deviations from standards and ensure that performance goals are met.
• Ensure that controllership strategic goals are correctly cascaded to the team, both collectively and individually.
• Ensure the team effectively leverages Walmart resources, toolkits, and frameworks in their daily work and actively builds capability with the People Partner community and business.

Minimum Requirements:

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree/Advanced Diploma in Business Administration/Business Management/Commercial related qualification.
• Honours degree/Postgraduate degree in Business Administration/Business Management/Commercial related qualification advantageous.

Experience:

• 8+ years' experience in commercial planning/ retail marketing/ campaign management of which 3 years must have been managing a team preferable in retail, FMCG, or omni-channel transformation environments.

Competencies:

• Designs and governs enterprise commercial calendars.
• Skilled in identifying risks and embedding controls in planning cycles.
• Strong ability to track ROI, uplift, and campaign outcomes.
• Aligns multiple stakeholders behind common priorities.
• Uses insights to optimise campaign effectiveness.
• Presents performance narratives and trade-offs to senior leadership.
• Balances competing demands in fast-paced retail cycles.
• Builds and manages strong commercial planning teams.
• Champions agility and repeatable ways of working.

Technical Skills:

• Campaign planning tools and platforms
• Analytics and reporting tools
• Project and risk management tools
• Commercial and financial modelling
• Collaboration and workflow tools

"Employment Equity Policy Requirements may be applicable"

Massmart is an equal opportunity employer and encourages all people including people with disabilities to apply for the role. Due to the volume of applications we receive, should you not hear from us within 14 days of your application, kindly consider your application unsuccessful.

Please note that only the following information is required in your CV:

Contact details (email and contact number); Full name; Date of birth; Race; Gender; Disability status; Location (Current city/town of residence); Qualifications and training; Work experience; Memberships (if any); Personal and technical skills, including computer literacy.

Please take note that by responding to this application and providing your personal information, you confirm your express and informed consent for Massmart Proprietary Limited and all its subsidiaries and all affiliated companies ("Massmart"), to process your personal information in order for Massmart to consider your application for this position. All Personal Information that you provide to the Company will be used and/or retained only for the purposes for which it is collected, where after it will be permanently destroyed. Your information is only retained if it is required by law or where you have given consent to us to retain such information for an extended period.