Sr. Sales Planning Manager

Core Responsibilities

1. Strategic Sales Planning & Budgeting

Commercial Strategy: Formulate and drive the annual APAC sales planning cycle, translation of regional corporate objectives into clear, measurable country- and account-specific commercial budgets.

Market Intelligence & Targeting: Partner with business intelligence teams to synthesize market trends, competitor movements and business trends into actionable sales targeting strategies.

Go-to-Market (GTM) Steering: Design and optimize sales channel strategies, balancing direct sales, key accounts, and channel partners/agents across diverse APAC markets

2. Commercial Steering, Pricing & Margin Management

Yield & Margin Optimization: Collaborate with regional product and pricing teams to drive margin management, ensuring sales efforts are directed towards high-yield trade lanes and profitable businesses (e.g., cross-border e-commerce, high-tech, healthcare).

Performance Monitoring: Establish and track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and commercial critical metrics across APAC sub-regions, managing weekly and monthly commercial performance reviews with country heads.

3. Sales Operations, Analytics & Pipeline Governance

Pipeline Institutionalization: Own the region's CRM architecture and enforce strict pipeline governance, ensuring data accuracy, lead-to-opportunity conversion metrics, and robust revenue forecasting.

Predictive Analytics: Build predictive forecasting models that give regional leadership clear visibility into the short-, medium-, and long-term commercial pipeline.

Sales Enablement & Training: Continuous optimization of sales toolkits, incentive/commission schemes, and region-wide sales training programs to lift overall sales productivity.

4. Cross-Functional S&OP / Integrated Business Planning (IBP)

Demand Planning Alignment: Act as the primary commercial voice in the regional S&OP/IBP process, translating sales pipelines into capacity demands for the network, air-freight, and operational teams.

Capacity Commercialization: Work closely with procurement and network planning to identify under-utilized lanes or capacities and develop tactical sales campaigns to commercialize them rapidly.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Forecast Accuracy: Variance between planned commercial revenue/volume forecasts and actual realization.

Sales Productivity: Increase in average revenue generated per sales headcount across the region.

Pipeline Health: Conversion rate improvements across stages and pipeline-to-quota ratios.

S&OP Compliance: Successful alignment of sales demand with operational capacity planning, minimizing capacity wastage or customer backlogs.

Qualifications & Experience Profile

Professional Experience

Industry Tenure:10 to 12+ years of progressive commercial leadership experience within major global 3PLs, express logistics, or global freight forwarding networks (e.g., DHL, DB Schenker, DSV, FedEx).

Regional Track Record: Minimum 5 years operating in a regional APAC capacity, demonstrating deep familiarity with the distinct commercial landscapes, regulatory environments, and cross-border trade dynamics across Southeast Asia, Australasia, and North Asia.

Proven Transformation: A documented history of standing up or transforming Sales Operations, Commercial Planning, or Sales Steering functions on a regional scale.

Education & Technical Capabilities

Academic Background: Bachelor's degree in Business Administration, Logistics/Supply Chain Management, Economics, or Data Analytics. An MBA or Advanced Management Program (AMP) certificate from a leading institution is highly preferred.

Systems & Data Literacy: Advanced expertise in CRM systems (Salesforce/Microsoft Dynamics), business intelligence tools (Tableau/PowerBI), and complex financial/data modeling. Exceptional ability to translate dense data into concise, executive-level recommendations.

Competencies & Leadership Style

Cross-Functional Influence: Highly polished stakeholder management skills. Proven ability to bridge cultural and functional divides, specifically acting as an objective partner to both aggressive sales teams and cost-conscious operations managers.

Bicultural Business Acumen: JD – Head of Sales Planningthe ideal candidate must seamlessly bridge global MNC practices with Chinese corporate frameworks. Multilingual capability (e.g., professional English and Mandarin) is an advantage for managing dual headquarters and regional country stakeholders.

Agility & Candor: Comfortable challenging the status quo with objective data. Thrives in highly dynamic, high-growth environments where quick pivots are necessary to capture market share.