The Engineering team is seeking for a Sales Support Manager who is passionate about proposal generation and management. In our business generating a proposal to our customers satisfaction is the key to securing business.

Success in this role requires pedantic affiliation to accuracy, structure, detail and an ability to collaborate effectively across teams.

The Sales Support team partners closely with the Sales team and the Product Management team as a bridge for strategy implementation. The Sales Support team is a high performing team proficient in product knowledge and engineering expertise. The knowledge width spans across the entire product portfolio, they are vertical market specialists and have deep understanding of commercial and contractual terms.

The Sales Support Manager will lead and harmonize the team to support the regional Sales strategy and the business growth strategy. Your leadership is required to take the team forward in; technical expertise; new and innovative ways to achieve the goals and objectives, with customer satisfaction as the key motivation.

Essential Duties/Principal Responsibilities:

• Implement strategies to elevate the team’s engineering and product competencies as well as the enhancement of their understanding of the various vertical markets.
• Enable the team to handle tenders from both direct and indirect sales channels with efficiency and effectiveness.
• Strengthen the team to effectively manage tender/bids process and facilitate specific bid strategies (commercial & technical).
• Facilitate seamless support for the sales team throughout the entire pre-sales journey,
• Ensure timely and professional assistance for customers through the pre-sales (quote or tender/bid) phase, thereby enhancing overall customer satisfaction.
• Management the effective and efficient implementation of Selection/Configuration/Pricing/Quotation tools.
• Generate dashboards of the key metrics that indicate the team performance, market sector performance, profile of proposals, hit rate, etc.
• Develop and manage the pre-sales autonomy of our partners and distributors to ensure they are able to address enquiries from their customers and markets with minimal support from the Sales Support team.
• Capture Voice of Customer (VoC) to discover key customer challenges and insights including that from their target end markets, to drive the continuous improvement in the pre-sales process.
• Develop and document differentiated value propositions and collateral for sales/service/rental offerings that allow Sales teams to strongly advocate for Xylem solutions.
• Manage discount structures as per the Delegation of Authority (DoA) and market boundaries as the Cross Boundary Business (CBB) policy.
• Enforce Xylem compliance rules and regulations to the pre-sales process
• Continuous Improvement - Identify opportunities to improve ways of working to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of tools, knowledge and expertise in the team and to increase value to the customer.
• Identify and understand areas for customer satisfaction improvement, influence stakeholders and implement measures to drive improvement.
• Implement defined metrics, processes and best practices in improving service quality to customers (response time, quality of response, accuracy of proposal, etc).
• Stronger leadership required to build and maintain a high performing team.

• Bachelor’s Degree or Diploma in Engineering (Preferably mechanical or chemical).
• A minimum of 5-7 years’ experience in engineering (equipment selection), Sales or Sales Support/Internal Sales.

Core Competencies

• Strong leadership, interpersonal and presentation skills.
• Strong competency in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills (English).

Advantageous Skills

• Experience using Pricing tools (Pricing & Quotation)
• Salesforce experience
• Operational knowledge or understanding of iScala and SAP
• Fluency in a second language (French or Afrikaans)