Current Opportunities at Oxford University Press Southern Africa

• Oxford University Press is looking for an experienced Educational Sales Consultant to assist with promoting and selling of OUP products and partner titles to schools, booksellers, and other customers to meet sales budgets.
• Reporting to the Western Cape Regional Manager, the Educational Sales Consultant will work closely with all the various divisions within OUP. This post is based in Cape Town.

Principal Accountabilities:

• Achieving sales targets for front and backlist titles.
• Calling on schools (Public, Private and Independent) to secure adoptions.
• Understanding OUP’s position in the market.
• Establishing and maintaining productive relationships with internal and external stakeholders.
• Calling on district education officials, key booksellers, and libraries to generate sales.
• Conducting product presentations and facilitating exhibitions for educators.
• Familiarise yourself with and support company policies and procedures.

Requirements

Qualifications and Experience

• National Diploma or equivalent in Education, Marketing and Sales
• Extensive sales experience
• A through understanding of the South African School curriculum
• In-depth knowledge of the education and book trade market
• Relationship building skills
• Computer literate with MS Office, PowerPoint, Word, Outlook, and Excel
• Product knowledge
• Presentation skills
• Event coordination
• Sales Management
• Valid driver’s license and own transport

Attributes:

• Demonstrates a spirit of competitiveness
• Able to work well under pressure
• Displays ethical behaviour
• Support teamwork
• Communicates effectively
• Innovative
• Positive attitude
• Deadline-driven
• Highly organised

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Principal Accountabilities:

• Provide pre and post contract support, designed to generate interest in OUP product to help OUP UK achieve its targets.
• Working with the RM to develop and implement OUP UK marketing strategy for the markets covered.
• Maintaining a lead generating pipeline so that the maximum benefit is gained from each opportunity.
• Responding efficiently to tender reqeusts for new, and renewals of existing, agreements.
• Giving product presentations, product demonstrations and training to academics and information professionals.
• Conducting regular customer visits as well as representing OUP at relevant industry events.
• Tracking progress of the lead generating pipeline reporting and planning at weekly meetings, and by submitting a monthly activity report.
• Acquiring and/or maintaining a through knowledge of the electronic information publishing industry, the needs of its markets and current trends within them.

Requirements

About You

• The successful candidate will be a confident communicator with good sales experience and negotiating skills, highly organised and able work to tight deadlines. You should also possess a good level of IT literacy and have experience of online information publishing, especially in a sales environment.

You will ideally be:

• A publishing or publishing-related professional, able to demonstrate experience in sales or marketing, educated to degree level or equivalent
• Highly results-oriented, and a confident communicator with strong negotiating skills
• Extremely organised and able to effectively manage a high volume, complex workload through prioritisation of tasks in line with departmental objectives
• Highly skilled in using software packages such as Excel, with a proven aptitude to learn and work with new systems
• It would be desirable if you have knowledge of the electronic information publishing industry, its products, markets and trends

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Principal Accountabilities:

• Develop and maintain demand forecasts for local and import materials for the African businesses. 
• Review historical sales trends, research demand drivers, prepare forecast data, develop statistical forecast models, and evaluate forecast results. 
• Coordinate cross-functional research activities to reconcile significant variances and refine the forecast model to reflect updated sales and marketing assumptions. 
• Interact with sales, marketing, editorial, and finance teams to understand demand forecast drivers, and build in requirements from the different market segments.
• Use and maintain the relevant demand planning software tools to refine outputs and increase forecast accuracy, product availability, and reduce bias.
• Work closely with the Inventory and Manufacturing team so the demand plan can be used to develop inventory and manufacturing strategies on materials in all stages of their product lifecycle.
•  Achieve core key performance targets and scorecard metrics including forecast bias and forecast accuracy, investigating, and resolving discrepancies in the measures.
• Regularly review segmentation and hierarchy of products to ensure they are being planned and reported at the appropriate level.
• Schedule and run the monthly Demand Review Meetings as part of the full S&OP process.
• Continually seek to improve forecasting systems and methodologies, becoming a subject matter expert on demand planning within the business responsible for creating and maintaining SOPs.

Requirements

Qualifications and Experience:

• Relevant working experience in demand planning or forecasting role or preferred sector experience will include publishing, retail, consumer goods, manufacturing, and pharmaceuticals.
• Degree level in business, supply chain or other relevant fields.
• Able to demonstrate proficiency in statistical analysis, forecasting and forecasting methodologies.
• Experience working cross functionally to deliver results.
• Detailed working knowledge and experience of the most up to date Sales & Operations Planning methodologies, including statistical modelling.
• Detailed working knowledge of demand planning software, with recent knowledge of SAP.
• Strong IT system capabilities particularly Microsoft Excel skills.

Attributes:

• Demonstrate strong analytical skills
• Excellent attention to detail
• Report and present data at an aggregated level
• Strong interpersonal skills are essential
• Strong communicator
• Demonstrate ability to deal with ambiguity and remain calm under pressure