Commercial Planning & Activations Manager at Diageo

About the role:

• The Commercial Planning & Activations (CP&A) Lead acts as the strategic connector between brand, category, customer, and sales teams. The role translates brand and category strategies into customer-specific commercial plans and ensures flawless in-market execution that drives volume, value, share, and profit growth.

Role Responsibilities: 

Translate Strategy Into Commercial Plans

• Convert brand and category strategies into channel and customer plans that maximise distribution, visibility, and rate of sale.
• Build annual and quarterly commercial plans aligned with the business cycle (AOP, QBRs, customer JBP timelines).
• Partner with Category Development and Finance to ensure plans land key strategic growth drivers and achieve NSV, profit, and share targets.

Promotional Planning & Governance

• Design profitable promotional mechanics across channels (off-trade, on-trade, e-commerce, general trade).
• Manage promo calendars, forecast volumes, and ensure alignment with finance and supply.
• Lead promo governance, ensuring compliance with guidelines and performance expectations.
• Analyse historical performance and deliver recommendations for continuous improvement.

Activation Delivery & In-Market Execution

• Develop execution toolkits, customer sell-in decks, planograms, and activation briefs for field and sales teams.
• Manage POS development (concept → production → distribution → execution).
• Own the "Picture of Success" (PoS) standards per channel and customer.
• Ensure flawless execution of NPDs, including listings, visibility, and range reviews.

Insights, Measurement & Evaluation

• Use shopper, category, and customer insights to inform planning and activation decisions.
• Track activation performance, promo return on investment, compliance, and rate-of-sale uplift.
• Provide clear post-activity reviews (PIRs) and insights to brand, finance, and category to improve future planning.
• Maintain dashboards or reporting tools to supervise performance throughout the year.

Cross-Functional Leadership

• Act as the integrator between Sales, Marketing, Category, Finance, and Supply.
• Lead the commercial rhythm of the business (IBP, AOP, JBP planning, M&E cycles).
• Champion ways of working that improve efficiency, clarity, and alignment.
• Provide guidance and support to sales teams to ensure priority focus and consistent execution.

Experience / skills required: 

Experience

• Broad experience of Commercial (Minimum 4 – 5 years) working in sales, customer marketing, retailing or planning functions
• Project Management Experience 
• Commercial and Financial decision making experience

Skills

• High cognitive ability
• Facilitate operational simplicity, enabling decisions to be made, aligned to and driven swiftly
• Analytical skills, systems proficiency and data handling expertise
• Capable of working cross functionally and with a sense of initiative and ownership
• Building collaborative and influential relationships with customers an industry peers in customer marketing and related fields