Director Business Unit Control (Sales-Finance Co-Pilot)

Nestlé Nutrition is a world leader in nutrition, health and wellness.  Gerber Products Company joined the Nestlé Nutrition family in 2007 and together they have become a worldwide leader in early childhood nutrition. Gerber produces more than 400 food products that are designed to encourage the early establishment of healthy eating habits in children from birth to preschool.  Nestlé Nutrition and Gerber are committed to providing healthy products and brands. 

Find fulfillment personally and professionally by being part of a team that continues to enrich and establish healthy habits for children and consumers around the world.  You will find limitless opportunities to learn and advance your career along with competitive benefits.  Giving back continues to be a part of our tradition.  As the world’s leading nutrition, health and wellness company, our focus is not only about nourishing our customers, it’s about enriching you. 

Across our organization, we’re creating a workplace where camaraderie and support for each other is real and rewarded, speed is expected, and Passion to Win is essential as we do Anything for Baby!

Position Summary:

Gerber's Finance function delivers value beyond financial reporting and analysis.  Their role as strategic business partners is to drive decision-making, translate insights into meaningful actions, and enable great ideas to come to life. As part of a matrixed organization with a long-standing legacy, there is no shortage of opportunities to directly impact our customers and consumers. We're committed to helping the business achieve its potential by providing knowledge, expertise, and stewardship that transcends the traditional scope of finance roles. A healthy appetite for growth and learning is essential to our success; our tight-knit community embraces a mindset of continuous improvement to deepen our understanding of the business and drive real performance. As a member of our team, you will support one of the world's most well-known brand and embark on a career journey that enriches and accelerates your development.

This position is located in Arlington, VA.

This position offers the right person an exciting leadership opportunity to provide financial oversight to the customer teams, helping to facilitate key decisions related to sales and trade, with a focus on ensuring profitable growth and adequate return on promotional investment. Financial oversight includes detailed event level planning, trade spend review, financial forecasting, reporting, and ad-hoc customer analysis, with an emphasis on maintaining sound financial controls around trade spending. The successful individual will have a strong finance or accounting background, superior communication and people skills, the ability to learn quickly, a solid understanding of Nestlé (or the FMCG business) and the ability to deliver high performance work both within a team and independently.

Position responsibilities:

Promotional Plans:

• You will serve in a co-Pilot capacity to the VP of Retail Sales, focusing to support the Customer Development Managers during annual planning, ensuring alignment with Commercial Action Plans and return on investment thresholds for promotions.
• Ensure promotional events are properly set-up, updated and maintained throughout the year by Customer Development team members (based on contracts & yearly plans) in the corresponding system
• You will play a key role to challenge forecasting to increase forecast accuracy and will utilize trade analytics (promotion return on investment analysis) to increase ensure efficient allocation of trade to planning accounts

Monthly Business Reviews:

• Drive monthly Business Review process – including analytical review of monthly/ yearly forecasts and trade plan performance – leading to objective, timely and fact-based communication of volume/trade opportunities and gaps to Leadership.
• Lead trade analysts on post promotional analysis collaborating with Account Managers to drive promotional profitability improvement.
• Work closely with Customer Development team to understand consumption data to identify base and incremental volume trends and their impact on financial performance
• You will work in partnership with Sales Directors and Customer Development to understand variances to sales and trade goals, on both sales and trade, and develop solutions to ensure goals are met.

Ongoing Trade Related Activities:

• Review sales and trade rate objectives, identifying, analyzing and providing variance explanation, including understanding implications on customer profitability.
• Review Unauthorized Deductions and work closely with Customer Development team to enable payback. Review deduction report on agreed upon frequency, following-up as appropriate to ensure timely and accurate deduction clearing.
• Provide insight to improve forecasting accuracy through analysis of business results.