China Shipowner Commercial Manager

China Ship Owner Commercial Manager

Lloyd's Register

Location: Shanghai, China

What we're looking for

Perform appropriate targeting analysis to agree and set targets with sales leadership. Lead a team (where appropriate) in performing Sales Management against targets to attain new business and retain and develop specified clients in accordance with the Operating Principles for Sales. Promote LR, its products and services as directed.

The role 

1. Commercial Risk Mitigation: Manage commercial risk effectively within the team, to protect business stability, safeguard profitability and enable sustainable growth for LR in the long term.
2. Team Motivation & Leadership: Lead, motivate and inspire the Team to perform at their best, providing sales development and coaching where necessary, to create a high-performance culture.
3. Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with various internal, cross-functional teams (such as commercial operations, segments, plan approval, service delivery, marketing, finance, human resources and product) to ensure alignment with business goals and modelling professional behaviour by showing respect for each of the functions to foster an atmosphere and culture of effective and efficient teamworking.
4. Identify and Evaluate New Relationships: Proactively identify stakeholders whose strategic goals and market positioning align with LR’s objectives, including government departments and decision makers in China.
5. Evaluate Existing Relationships: Annually review existing senior relationships that LR has within China and assess their status and effectiveness and prioritisation. Where necessary, develop and execute a plan with the commercial and operations team to ensure the effectiveness of the engagement and relationship is maintained.
6. Customer Experience: Be a champion for the customer experience of doing business with LR in China, monitoring feedback and driving improvements to the customer experience where required, and fostering a customer centric culture within the commercial, operations and enabling functions teams.
7. Sales Forecasting: Manage and implement the sales forecasting and planning processes, establishing high standards of quality, accuracy and process consistency for the commercial organisation.
8. External Representation: Represent and promote LR within national and international conferences, associations, forums and other key events.
9. Business Planning: Implement commercial business strategy for China, ensuring that this is cascaded and translated into sales plans that support both the global strategy and local market opportunities.
10. Sales Target Development: Implement the sales targets of the team are fair and aligned with the target setting principles of the Maritime Sales Incentive Plan.
11. Sales Performance: Responsible for championing sales excellence as well as developing and executing strategic plans so that annual sales performance against agreed targets are achieved to protect and grow the business.
12. Communication: Articulate and fluent in both Chinese and English with outstanding communication and interpersonal abilities, able to influence multiple stakeholders, at all levels, both internally and externally and function within a matrixed organisation.
13. Health & Safety: Monitor and review health, safety and environment performance, observe behaviours in the workplace, taking appropriate corrective and preventive action as necessary and suggesting and implementing improvement activities.
14. Risk Register: Eliminate or minimise employee's exposure to risks by regularly reviewing the health, safety and environment risk register, applying appropriate controls, communicating results of risk assessment and ensuring health, safety and environment aspects are considered in the planning and execution of all LR activities.
15. Employee Engagement: Responsible for driving employee engagement within the commercial team and the wider China team to ensure that all employees understand and are engaged in the delivery of both the business and strategic objectives.
16. Culture & Team Management: Develop the China Ship Owner Commercial Team to grow capacity and capability through recruitment, performance management, succession planning and training to build and sustain a high-performance culture. Drive and encourage direct reports to do the same with their teams, as well as proactively understand team dynamics, diagnose and identify problems, and promptly lead corrective activities to solve them.
17. Continuous Improvement: Responsible for ensuring that the business structures and processes are effective in meeting the commercial requirements for both internal and external clients within China.
18. Account Plans: Ensure the team develops and maintains account plans for their prominent accounts, especially for the strategic positioning of key shipyards and the growth of Chinese shipowners.
19. Sales Management: Implement a cadence of pipeline reviews with team members to ensure pipeline hygiene and pipeline health, as well as focus on what actions are required to support the winning of key opportunities.
20. Salesforce Data Quality: Implement a strict adherence to Salesforce data quality and encourage Salesforce best practise required for a high-performance commercial team.

What you bring

1. A degree or equivalent from a tertiary organisation recognised by Lloyd's Register within the relevant field of engineering or physical science or qualifications from a marine or nautical institution and relevant sea-going experience as a certificated ship's officer.
2. Membership of an appropriate professional institution (I. Eng or equivalent).
3. Chartered or incorporated engineer status preferred.
4. Ability to communicate effectively at different levels within organisations and to influence successfully and openly at all levels – both inside our organisation and outside in the business.
5. Ability and understanding to participate, communicate, positively contribute and add value in marine technical discussions with clients and LR colleagues alike.
6. Ability to understand and assess complex and sometimes unfamiliar situations, visualise solutions and see through to resolution.
7. Enjoyment of building relationships, with the ability to pro-actively drive development of a network of key relationships internally and externally.
8. Strong commercial awareness. Ability to develop strategic action plans based on input from key persons.
9. Strong team spirit. Demonstrate professional people skills and promote a team working environment across the area of business.
10. Thorough understanding of the shipping market and marine environment to manage commercial focus and find new business opportunities.
11. Demonstrate motivational skills in directing colleagues to achieve business objectives.
12. Flexible approach to adjust role as the position develops.