Field Sales Managers

About Apollo Agriculture Apollo Agriculture is a tech-enabled commercial farming platform that helps small-scale farmers maximize their profits. We provide optimized financing, high-quality farm products, and digital advice. Our mission is to ensure that small-scale farmers are able to unlock the economic value of their land, and in turn, boost their incomes while feeding a growing continent. Apollo Agriculture has emerged as Africa’s leading agricultural fintech, growing our revenue 10x since our Series A. We now have our capable teams spread across our offices in Nairobi, Amsterdam and Bangalore, and are helping our farmers  increase their profitability 2-3x. Having recently closed our $40M Series B financing, we are focused on expanding geographically, enhancing our products and technology, and continuing to build our world-class team.

About the Role Apollo is seeking a Field Sales Manager based in, or willing to relocate to the rural area of their assigned wards, to own the management and support of field officers (FOs). This role will be responsible for sales performance management, and  training and development of field officers in the assigned  wards, with the aim of ensuring the FOs hit their individual targets, therefore supporting the company to hit our overall commercial goals. This role will work closely with the FO team both in classroom settings and in active field settings to identify any challenges, spot opportunities for growth and ensure the field officers consistently excel in their roles.

Responsibilities

• Sales ownership. Own the achievement of our target number of farmers we need in the assigned wards and drive growth with this as the main metric.
• Field officers performance management. Evaluating field officers (FO) cohort output to determine performance health, ensuring targets are met around metrics like number of active field officers, FO productivity etc. Identifying different sales performance levels in the team and implementing different measures to support them to succeed e.g. rewarding and recognizing high performance, providing one-on-one coaching etc.,
• Sales activations. Identify and execute high impact sales activations that will drive sales performance e.g. van roadshows, market activations, farmer group activations etc
• Sales budget. Own and manage the sales budget for the assigned wards to ensure adherence to budgets, cost effectiveness and optimized utilization.
• Field Officers Training. Training new FOs, and providing continuous training to the team through bi-weekly meetings. This will also include providing and managing tools of trade such as company-issued phones, marketing collateral etc. Ensure strong communication to and from FOs.
• Insights collection and dissemination. Share bi-weekly reports to identify key insights from time spent with customers and field officers to share and implement with the wider team e.g. best practices leveraged by high performing agents, feedback from customers on their Apollo experience etc.

Requirements

• Have 2+ years experience in sales and marketing in the rural environment, ideally with a focus on supporting and facilitating sales teams to succeed
• Excellent communicator with well developed interpersonal skills to relate with, guide and motivate field  agents, and deliver continuous training throughout the duration of seasons
• Have an understanding of field agent sales performance metrics and how to influence their outcome by working directly with agents to encourage or correct Sales approaches
• Have the drive to understand and build relationships with customers in your region, collecting insights and feedback that will drive sales strategy and agent training
• Highly organized with strong execution, prioritization and collaboration skills.
• Have a working knowledge of platforms needed to deliver on responsibilities - Google Drive, Google Sheets/Excel, Google Slides/PowerPoint etc.,
• A diploma or graduate in business related disciplines would be ideal, but not required