Vacancy: Agricultural Products Sales & Marketing Manager
Location: Nairobi, Kenya
Our client is an award-winning social venture that is creating new organic agricultural inputs that will reverse the trend of declining harvests and increasing prices for farmers.
They are preparing to launch their first agricultural input, a locally produced, high-quality organic fertilizer.
We are looking for an experienced Agricultural Products Sales & Marketing Manager responsible for increasing awareness of their fertilizer products and completing sales.
This role will require a combination of skills and experience.
- Experience managing direct sales relationships and building effectiveness/capacity of teams
- A love for working directly with customers and rolling up one’s sleeves on trial set-ups, monitoring, reporting, and relationship development to acquire new adopters
- A deep interest in the challenges of bringing new products to market
- Deep knowledge of the agricultural landscape in Kenya, and experience working with organic inputs
- Extensive contacts and network within the agricultural sector in Kenya (especially medium and large-scale commercial farms)
- Keen agronomic skills. The ability to diagnose farmers’ needs and counsel them on improved farming practices.
- Excellent communication and relationship development skills — both with customers and our internal team.
This is a leadership role which will provide a varied experience with a high degree of influence and autonomy in a rapidly growing company as it launches new products into the market.
Responsibilities
- Overseeing activities in Fertilizer Sales & Marketing. Setting team goals, meeting sales targets, and reporting back to company directorship
- Working directly with farmers – Evaluating soil health and farming practices, explaining product benefits, recommending application rates, managing trials, closing sales, and following up to ensure consumer satisfaction and product effectiveness
- Recruiting, hiring, training, etc. necessary to expand the team
- Receiving customer feedback and working with our technical team to ensure that product specifications match farmers’ desires
- Developing initiatives to connect with co-operatives, export agencies, and other growing schemes to open up new institutional sales channels
- Working with regulatory agencies and certification boards to ensure good standing
- Monitoring field trials and contributing to technical efforts on product improvement
- Ensuring compliance to all industry standards and internal quality systems, maintaining confidentiality and protocols.
- Generating data and meet deadlines, and analyse, write and present reports
Requirements
- At least 5 years experience in direct sales of agriculture inputs to large and medium-scale farms
- Solid agronomic background and the ability to diagnose farmers’ needs and counsel them on improved farming practices.
- Proven track record of achieving and preferably surpassing targets consistently in previous work experiences
- Demonstrated achievement of a difficult business objective, such as successfully launching a new product, expanding an existing business to a new market, or leading a successful turnaround of an existing business.
- Deep knowledge of the agricultural landscape in Kenya, and specifically experience working with organic inputs
- Extensive contacts and network within the agricultural sector in Kenya (including medium and large scale farmers, agro-vet owners, extension services providers, and agricultural consultants)
- Technical familiarity with organic fertilizers. The ability to diagnose farmers’ needs and counsel them on improved farming practices.
- A self-starter and critical thinker with attention to detail, ability to multi-task, and work with a high-degree of autonomy
- Excellent communication skills – both in communicating the value of our product to farmers and in managing a team and growing its capacity
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