As the Senior Manager of Category Promo & Coupon Planning & Execution, you will use your leadership skills to build strong relationships with partners in multiple business units to design, influence, and implement strategies that positively impact the company, and our promotional strategy for your divisional merchandising team, partnering closely with our Senior Managers in Pricing Planning & Execution and our Senior Managers in Promotion Optimization. You will partner with select Category Managers and Assistant Category Managers to provide optimal promotional strategies that drive consumer behaviors and ensure profitable bottom line financial accountability for CVS Health. In your role, you will build significant value for the enterprise by leveraging your creative thinking to elevate our consumer experience and drive consumers to our stores for their everyday shopping needs.

You will impact our business in the following ways:

• Participate in divisional merchandising strategy sessions and implement go-to-market monthly promotional strategy outcomes to deliver customer and business goals by executing against cross-functional operational plans and key milestones.
• Builds category-level bi-weekly promotional plans deliver on event criteria, themes/claims, or strategically pre-defined category promo KPIs, as established based on the impact promotion has for that category relative to other categories.
• Builds category and branded coupon offer pools that support category-level ad plans and drive customer engagement (share of wallet) and deliver unit lift incremental to base regular/promotional unit forecast & plan.
• Ensures brand-level promo and coupon plans drive unit lift and profitable sales growth in a win-win fashion for CMs and vendors while identifying and addressing funded promo/coupon plans that may be suboptimizing CVS total and category-level promotional KPIs, especially given yellow-tag and store labor constraints
• Support CMs in aligning vendor promo submissions/ideas with category guardrails and maximizing the unit-driving impact of scan backs and coupon MD funding.

Primary Job Duties & Responsibilities:

Strategic Planning:

• Establishes clear, prioritized activity roadmap that successfully delivers the company’s ambitions, including changes in promotional strategy, or processes across our ecosystem, with appropriate collaboration across multiple stakeholders.
• Identifies portfolio of participating categories, brands, and programs for mass market promotions and personalized coupons based on projected impact – leverage category & deal/offer level reporting re: category buyers, promo sales & margin lift, promo unit & trip lift, category redeemers, coupon redemption rate, redeemer penetration, sales/units/trips/margin from redeemers, etc.
• Develops category ad block and personalized coupon deal/offer pools and evaluates branded/store brand deal/offer submissions, using impact projections to approve/reject category and branded deals and offers given projected outcomes (e.g. promo sales & margin lift, unit & trip lift, buyers, redeemers, redemption rate, MD investment, unit lift, etc.)
• Proficiency in working with data to develop measures and metrics that yield actionable insights to business owners, and lead / conduct / support first-level analyses to identify underlying drivers of new trends.
• Ability to drive efficient and effective planning processes by implementing and upholding a strong project management discipline across boundaries.
• Ability to influence at all levels – up to and including cross-functional SVPs. Excellent written and oral communication skills-strong presentation skills required.
• Assigns appropriate timelines and accountabilities for items, empowering the team to drive action steps to completion.
• Leverages thought partners (senior leaders, corporate partners, peers, team, etc.) as needed to create and revisit the strategy.
• Navigates ambiguity and change to achieve goals despite potential obstacles.
• Creates strategies that continuously improve our programs and/or processes that drive service and productivity improvement.
• Aligns the team to establish, update and maintain a clear set of actions including interdependencies needed to achieve overall goals.
• Follows-up on strategic initiatives and KPI performance.
• Champions innovation by bringing ideas to own ED & VP as well as the broader Merchandising Leadership Team in an agile way, while balancing growth against financial risk and incremental cost to the organization

Delivers Results:

• Continually evaluates performance against category KPIs and identify opportunities for improvement to Lead Director/CMs/DMM/Exec Director based on performance vs. forecast.
• Drives KPIs which could include psku count, yellow tag/blade count, offer strength, purchaser count, savings %, deal simplicity score, etc.
• Balances promotional deals, depth, and frequency to deliver forecasted outcome KPIs that could include promo sales/margin, reg/promo sales mix, unit/margin lift vs. non-promoted, etc.
• Evaluates coupon programs & individual offers for category/branded impact and refines strategy & plans for future based on performance metrics – parameters include categories, brands, SKUs, offer types, offer depth, offer frequency, start/end dates, etc. leveraging overall coupon capabilities.
• Leverages a results-oriented mindset to assign appropriate timelines and accountabilities for initiatives, projects and deliverables. Empowers the team to drive action steps to bring to completion
• “Inspects What They Expect” – routinely inspects and monitors key processes and functions; institutes improvement measures as needed; holds team accountable to KPIs and deliverables
• Optimizes and level sets expectations with stakeholders by partnering closely with Merchandising Leadership, Marketing Leadership, Supply Chain Leadership, and Store Operations to ensure appropriate levels of support and collaboration
• Works cross-functionally with CSC partners to develop strategies and action plans to mitigate identified risks and opportunities tailored to the specific needs of each merchandising business unit, as needed.
• Optimizes use of data to support field execution of key programs and processes; ensures field feedback is incorporated by team into dashboards and reporting to improve utilization and effectiveness

Drives Improvement and Innovation:

• Continuously looks for opportunities to drive efficiency and productivity across the team; partners with Price & Value leadership team, IT, and DDAT to identify and recommend implementation of new technologies to achieve this
• Coaches and empowers team to identify new pathways to create simplicity for store teams and field leaders to execute key sales driving activities
• Fully embraces organizational improvement initiatives, acting as a change agent with one’s own team and peers
• Provides both constructive and positive feedback on new initiatives to appropriate teams. Look for ways to break through implementation barriers rather than be impeded by them.

Stakeholder Influence

• Collaborates on the build of the bi-weekly category plans – including block contents, deal structure, discount depth, etc.
• Communicates and aligns with CMs and vendors on optimized level of category/branded coupon discounts for each category (supported by promo optimization team, as needed)
• Leverages data, insights, and analytics to influence stakeholders and makes recommendations as appropriate.
• Fully embraces organizational improvement initiatives, acting as a change agent with one’s own team and peers and partners.
• Provides both constructive and appreciative feedback on ideas and key initiative.
• Looks for ways to break through implementation barriers rather than be impeded by them.
• Establishes and enforces policies and procedures that promote ethical behavior, compliance, and best practices.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Facilitating collaboration between different departments to promote a cohesive and integrated approach to achieving organizational goals.
• Drives change agility in self, team and network.
• Measures key performance indicator results on an ongoing basis and provides recurring readout to leadership in partnership with cross functional business leads.
• Leverages a results-oriented mindset, using metrics to monitor improvements.
• Develops and manages a standardized set of views that are used to internally monitor macro-level trends and key drivers of each

Education:

Bachelor's degree or Equivalent Experience

Required Qualifications:

• 8+ years’ experience of developing, implementing and executing retail merchandising and/or marketing programs.
• 8+ years of demonstrated successful leadership experience in a highly competitive multi-unit environment. Relevant sectors include retail, healthcare, and pharmaceuticals.
• 8+ years’ proven track record of influencing others with and without authority
• 8+ years’ experience leading under pressure, adapting to changing dynamics in real time, and finding solutions that satisfy multiple ‘customers’ of the business.
• 8+ years’ experience understanding and breaking down highly complex situations to deliver impactful solutions in real time.
• 8+ years’ experience effectively demonstrating excellent verbal and written communication skills, very strong interpersonal and presentation skills.
• 8+ years’ experience collaborating effectively across different business functions, different perspectives, and different styles of leadership.
• 8+ years’ experience demonstrated ability to lead a large organization and manage a multi-million-dollar business unit to achieve financial and business results