Head of Consulting

The Client:
A world leading loyalty marketing agency and part of a highly successful, financially secure, global umbrella group.
Purpose of the Job:

This is a newly created role to help grow the agency’s business globally by developing and enhancing the ability to provide a consultancy-lead selling capability across the agency’s global office footprint.

With the vast level of loyalty knowledge and experience across its offices, the agency is able to offer this expertise, insight and experience to its clients as part of early-sales stage consulting engagements with prospective clients of the agency.

This is fundamentally a consulting project selling, specification, design and delivery function requiring considerable experience in delivering insightful and profitable projects. This will include external situational analysis, internal capability analysis, business and customer data manipulation and interrogation using known and proven consulting / marketing tools, models and practices.

A truly global role requiring international collaboration and communication daily, based in London but with the need for occasional, maybe more frequent international travel and non standard hours to work with offices in other time zones.

Key Responsibilities:
• Own the specification, design and management of the agency’s consultancy-lead sales process, interrogating client situation and requirements to propose effective consulting projects that deliver genuine insight for the customer and significant profit for the agency.
• Specify the production and quality of all team documentation to the highest possible standards of consulting process and delivery, content presentation, layout and look and feel.
• Engage internal direct and matrix managed resources from the agency, the Group and external sources and combine them as an effective team onto the key project deliverables as utilises their specialist knowledge and delivers a collaborative team output.
• Lead and support the Regional Directors, General Managers and senior staff in the sale and delivery of consulting projects that deliver bottom line profit and critically lead to the proposal of further services work that the local office can undertake ideally without further support.
• Collaborate with the head office and global teams connecting and sharing knowledge and insight gained from these projects and using it to move forward our global business and loyalty capability.
• Building templated consulting processes, business models and documents to improve our commercial efficiency, delivery effectiveness and overall speed to delivery for consulting projects.
• Specifying and interpreting market research, data analysis, social media listening and other insight generation activities.
• Own the consulting team management including people development, commercial management, insight generation and contribution to agency and Group objectives.
• Building, maintaining, developing a network of virtual consultants outside of the agency and managing their contractual engagement on projects
• Support for sales and marketing activities including social media content posting, white paper generation, event presentations and attendance, support at sales meetings / calls
• Managing an ongoing schedule of internal communication and reporting.

The Candidate:
Working as part of a small, focussed and highly interdependent central consultancy team in support of the very large, diverse and somewhat independent global business requires someone with resilience and independence, effective task prioritisation and excellent interpersonal skills.

The likely candidate will have significant sales, marketing and ideally loyalty management consulting experience in a disciplined and commercially effective environment, with exposure to global markets and teams outside of the UK.

• Masters or higher Business related qualification
• 4 + years in a leading international consulting business
• You will be a senior, experienced and credible business consultant with demonstrable project specification and management knowledge and insight, ideally within a loyalty context
• Working with stakeholders and clients at the top of the agency’s global business, you will provide confidence through charisma, people skills and excellent internal personal communications
• Experience managing or supporting B2B consultancy- lead sales and marketing pitches
• Proven ability to manage a P&L, pricing projects profitably and controlling cost in line with budget
• Where necessary you will enjoy taking centre stage in the sales process and leading consulting workshops however you will be equally happy providing expert advice and training for others to do so
• It is essential you are able to build a network of business relationships both directly and via remote touch communications with cultural understanding and sensitivity
• Confident with the latest business software you will use it effectively and specify requirements of the team
• Working knowledge of loyalty marketing and agency sales processes
• PMO / project controls management experience
• Project pricing and cost management
• Business numeracy and financial management skills.