Job Details

Position: Area Business Manager
Company: Sun King
Location: Ugheli, Rivers State
Type: Full Time

The team you would join:

The Area Business Manager will lead sales, collections, and distribution operations in the area they are assigned for the direct distribution of Sun King Solar products sold on Pay-As-You-Basis (also called and recognized as the “EasyBuy” business unit) through a network of agents called “Energy Officers.” EasyBuy technology and services allow customers to purchase units by paying for their solar products in small installments, thus ensuring they are extremely affordable for off-grid or rural customers. The Area Business Manager is ultimately accountable for generating sales, ensuring collections are timely and accurate, and keeping the entire direct distribution growing rapidly in a sustainable manner.

What you would be expected to do:

Hire & Retain Energy Officers: Hire, train, and maintain a team of at least 40 active Sun King Energy Officers in the area. Use multiple avenues for finding the right talent to sell Sun King EasyBuy products with the help of village influencers such as the village heads, teachers, religious heads, doctors, farmers, and others, as applicable. They help to create a reputation and goodwill for the mission of Sun King to provide a clean, affordable, and reliable source of energy in their areas.
Training of Energy Officers: Provide training to the Energy Officers on several aspects of the business, such as sales, collections, products, technical, inventory, and logistics related. Ensure that they are fully supported and led in the best professional manner, demonstrating the highest levels of integrity, ethics, and professionalism while dealing with customers.
Provide role clarity to Energy Officers: Provide complete clarity to Energy Officers related to their day-to-day tasks, sales, and collections plans, routes, and targets. This includes ensuring energy officers have a pre-agreed sales route/area to sell in; they understand how to demonstrate and sell Sun King products, they have the confidence to be able to present and resolve basic customer queries on the spot, and they have access to the Area Business Manager at all times in case of questions and concerns.
Daily field visits: Have a weekly touchpoint with every Energy Officer in your area – either through in-person meetings, making a sale to the customer in your area, or having a call. Resolve all possible issues faced by the Energy Officers and report them to your Regional Business Manager, every week. Ensure that the first 5 sales of each energy officer are done along with the Area Business Manager in the area, of each energy officer to ensure that the core sales and collection process is fully understood by each energy officer.
Work with Energy Officers: Conduct joint fieldwork with a group of energy officers to provide sales and collection training on a weekly basis and drive EO engagement. This includes doing night activations, market activations, and visiting local communities and gatherings such as SACCOs, Self Help groups, retail centers, and markets to make group sales.
Exceed your sales & collections targets: Meet or exceed sales and collection targets established and agreed on the 2nd of every month by your Regional Business Manager. Provide daily, weekly updates on sales, EO recruitment, customer issues, and resolutions, as desired and agreed with your Regional Business Manager.
Drive robust field sales processes: Review collection progress with your energy officers daily and provide adequate training to them on driving better collections in your areas. This includes customer and area profiling, ensuring regular and timely collection follow-ups, resolving customer issues to ensure they make payments, and ultimately repossessing the systems as a last recourse in case the customer defaults.
Remain externally focused: Keep an eye on competition within your area and ensure you take adequate measures to protect and grow our business from competitive pressures. Proactively inform your leadership team and take measures to ensure Sun King remains a paramount brand name in solar products for your area.
Resolve customer issues: Provide world-class support to your customers as it relates to product delivery, training on how to use and make payments, installation, after-sales warranty issues. Ensure that you work with your Energy Officers to establish clear expectations and processes to resolve all customer issues within 24 hours.
Control Marketing & Other Support spend: Provide adequate marketing support & equipment (such as smartphones) necessary to all your Energy Officers. Ensure we get maximum return on investment for all the costs we incur in areas of marketing, supply chain, store maintenance, and smartphone issuance.
Review meetings with Energy Officers: Conduct weekly table meetings with Energy Officers and ensure that you have RBM present in those meetings to resolve any outstanding customers or EO issues. Coordinate, plan, and organize the meeting to have maximum attendance and progress. Recognize outstanding performers from time to time and ensure the motivation of Energy Officers is maintained at an all-time high.
Grow Retail presence: Ensure the retail network in your Area grows with the help of an Area Retail Coordinator, hired under you. Ensure all retail-related activities are followed per process and the base of high-selling retailers grows exponentially within your area of operation.

You might be a strong candidate if you:

Has a degree in a business-related field or equivalent and at least 3 years of hands-on experience in sales.
Has excellent Computer knowledge with comprehensive knowledge of Excel and PowerPoint
Has extensive Customer Care experience
Has high innovative skills, thinks out of the box, tests out opinions, cost-conscious
Is excellently skilled in planning, organizing, prioritizing, maximizing value, and seeing the big picture
Is able to develop trust, skillfully builds relations, works on internal & external relationships
Listens well, coaches others, and is disciplined in their learning practice
Has Operation Excellence (keeps promise, is decisive, seeks to be informed, and gives excellent customer satisfaction.

What we offer (in addition to compensation and statutory benefits):

An opportunity to grow as a professional in a dynamic, fast-growing, high impact industry;
The chance to work in an open-minded, collaborative culture surrounded by enthusiastic Greenlighters who are driven by the challenge of continuously innovating and growing a smart, sustainable business with a profound impact on the world;
A truly multicultural experience: you will have the chance to work with and learn from people from different geographies, nationalities, and backgrounds.
Structured, tailored learning and development programs that help you become a better leader, manager, and professional through the Greenlight Academy.

We place great importance on sustaining a diverse, inclusive work environment.

We believe that diversity (of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, national origin, personality type, perspective, and all the other fascinating characteristics that make us different) enriches innovation and our competitiveness in the market.

We strive to ensure diverse perspectives inform critical decisions, and we actively work towards ensuring all Greenlighters feel like they belong. We also know that sustaining an inclusive workplace requires conscious effort and is a continuous journey, not an end-state.

Greenlight recruits, employs, trains, compensates, and promotes individuals based on experience and demonstrated job performance, regardless of race, color, religion, sex, marital status, sexual orientation, national origin, HIV/AIDS status, disability, or any other protected characteristic as established by law.

About Greenlight Planet

Greenlight Planet designs, distributes, and finances the purchase of solar-powered home energy solutions for the world’s 1.3 billion under-electrified consumers. We are market leaders in the distributed off-grid solar industry, and our Sun King™ products have enabled 76 million people around the world to access clean, reliable, solar-powered light and energy at home.

Sun King products range from portable solar lamps to more robust multi-light solar home systems, to solar-powered televisions and fans, and energy-efficient inverter bulbs. Our products drastically improve the quality of life for those that lack reliable electricity access: they help extend the number of productive, income-generating hours in a day; they enable children to study after dark; they allow families and communities to gather safely to socialize after sunset; and when replacing field-based sources of light like kerosene lamps, they reduce exposure to indoor air pollution.

We reach our customers through two distinct business models: a vast network of more than 300 distribution partners across 40 countries, and through our EasyBuy™ Direct sales channel, where we sell directly to consumers in India, Kenya, Myanmar, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia through a network of more than 15,000 commission sales agents. Our customers have the option to purchase these products upfront or to pay for them through an installment payment plan over a period of 4-18 months through our Sun King EasyBuy™ line, our technology-enabled ‘pay-as-you-go’ (PAYG) systems.

Greenlight employs close to 2000 people in 11 countries across sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. We are passionate about serving off-grid customers, and we are driven by the challenge of continuously innovating and growing a smart, sustainable business with a profound impact on the world.

Greenlight is committed to gender equality in the workplace. Women represent 47% of Greenlight’s workforce.