Germany – Hamburg | Country Head of Research & Client Services

About us:

MetrixLab is a fast-growing global market research and insights company that’s challenging the status quo of insights. By blending evolving technology with passionate experts, MetrixLab helps global and local brands to drive more impact, and forges partnerships to drive sustainably equitable growth. From creative testing to brand tracking, and packaging to e-commerce optimization, MetrixLab’s range of solution suites adapts to fit all types of budgets, timelines and business needs.

Active in more than 90 countries, MetrixLab is a proud partner to more than half of the world’s top 100 brands and part of Toluna.

About the role:

As Head of Research and Client Services for Toluna office in your country your mission is to provide an outstanding experience for clients, to ensure profitable account growth while leading and growing a talented team of client facing experts (researchers and client facing project managers).
You will work very closely with the Managing Director and all other business units in your country to drive growth of the market, while leading a dynamic, motivated and high performing research and client services team.

Key Responsibilities:

Drive growth of the business and meet budgeted commercial and research KPIs

• Work closely with the country Managing Director to drive growth of the market, across all commercial KPIs that are set within each annual budget.
• Active management of revenue progression and revenue backlog planning to ensure your market is on track to hit revenue goals.
• Forecasting and leading headcount management to ensure you have the right size and skillset of team to successfully deliver revenue growth as set within each annual budget.
• You are responsible for managing, growing and strengthening the relationship with clients, by instilling a feeling of trust, quality and reliability in our delivery, coupled with outstanding service and efficient cost structure.
• Work closely with the Managing Director and Research & Client Service leader/s to make sure they all feel heavily invested in delivering business growth.
• Celebrate the most significant successes within the market that contribute to the growth of the business.
• The role encompasses a commercially driven mindset linked to an impeccable mastery of client servicing process. The role is responsible for ensuring clients’ expectations are met in a timely, efficient manner; thereby ensuring that the revenues for the businesses are delivered against plan, with high quality standards and ensuring profitable growth.

Clients’ servicing and relationship

• Drive a client centric mindset throughout the team and ensure that clients are delighted through their journey with the customer facing teams.
• Ensure the high quality of deliverables in your market.
• To act as the most senior leader in your country in client meetings, with the necessary gravitas, empathy, and communication skills to deal effectively with significant client concerns and issues.
• To be fully involved in the strategy around any Key Accounts in your country.
• To promote the usage of technology both to our clients through our DIY offering and internally for efficiency gains and scalability.

Team management

• Drive the integration of Research and Client Services team within Toluna, Harris and MetrixLab to create a One Team feeling.
• Proactively drive initiatives to keep your team engaged, motivated, recognised and rewarded.
• Once team is established:
  • Oversee the combined Research & Client Services team in your country.
  • Responsible for attracting and retaining top talent.
  • Developing high performing leaders and wider teams with coaching, mentoring and training initiatives.
  • Develop annual resource plans (headcount needs, efficiency changes) based on commercial budgets.
  • Focus on efficiency building through the usage of technology and clear KPIs to monitor the activity.
  • Ensure adoption of technology, research solutions and automation.
  • Monitor and improve key performance metrics for the team including but not limited to client satisfaction, productivity and efficiency, motivation and revenue data.

Drive close partnership with all business units, particularly the Commercial team

• Work closely with all leaders of the various business units in the market, driving a strong sense of collaboration and comradery with all business units.
• Build a particularly strong relationship with the Managing Director in your market, building ways of working together that allow for strong business growth and strong retention and satisfaction across both the sales & research teams. Lead the business together with the Managing Director and in turn show the rest of the country how you expect sales & research to work together.
• Establish a cadence for recurring meetings with Managing Director (weekly or fortnightly) and manage an agenda that allows the team to prioritize initiatives, identify misalignment and flag any global constraints.
• In collaboration with finance and the Managing Director, coordinate a collaborative approach to developing a country operating budget.
• Collaboratively discuss and execute on sales strategy, from a research/client service perspective.

Jointly build a strong culture in the market with your Managing Director, communicating regularly

• Work with the Managing Director and other business units to facilitate the monthly town halls to update the local organization on performance, key developments, and key initiatives.
• Build a strong culture and strong team mentality, through all communications, working closely with other business unit leaders.
• Work with HR and other functional leaders to publicly recognize positive behaviour /performance.
• Conduct ad hoc town halls as needed when disruptive events occur (e.g. major exec departure).
• As needed, work with HR, Finance & Legal to ensure that corporate policy and regulatory initiatives are consistently applied and followed by local team members.

Collaboration with other teams

• Maintain high level of collaboration with key stakeholders:
  • Operations: work closely with peers across Operations to ensure needs of clients in the country are fully met and there is an effective and efficient way of working on projects with your Operations counter parts.
  • Product & Solutions: work hand in hand with the Product and Solutions team to drive developments that are meeting clients’ requirements and enabling efficiency gains and scalability within the team.
  • Knowledge & Development/Learning & Development: active collaboration to optimize onboarding of new starters and setting up training calendars for the year by level; working with the Career Coach to enable coaching and mentoring initiatives in your market as relevant.

Minimum Qualifications Requirements:

• A natural, charismatic leader with a positive change mindset to drive the successful integration of the combined research and client services organization in your market.
• Must have demonstrated success in managing across multiple teams, providing management guidance and career development to team managers and holding direct responsibility for building & leading a growing organization.
• 10 plus years of demonstrated quantitative marketing research and project management experience with a proven track record of managing projects to successful conclusion, in a direct client facing role.
• 10 years plus of client facing roles, including managing Key Account relationships.
• Proven experience in all operational aspects of professional services management and delivery – project and program management, SLA management, business processes, delivery and customer-focused metrics, scoping and delivering both highly customized and standard service engagements.
• Appetite for technology enabled business and to leverage automation and templates to bring efficiency and scalability in the operating model.
• Excellent team player: Earns a reputation for leading peers and teams towards the overall organizational objectives. Able to resolve conflicts calmly and effectively. Contributes positively and establishes collaborative relationships within the team.
• Analytical Skills: Strong analytical skills covering a wide range of business environments (functions and processes) requiring a very high level of judgement/perspective to evaluate priorities.
• Results Orientation: Ability to innovate solutions to exceed performance objectives while maintaining company’s standards and values, for self and others.
• Knowledge Management: Knowledge about latest trends of business, markets, products and technology. Can develop a direction and articulate a vision for the future leveraging this knowledge.
• Communication and Collaboration: Must have exceptional verbal and written communication skills in order to play an integral part in client communications as well as internal planning and decision-making. Must have experience in a highly collaborative work environment, involving frequent communication and joint decision-making with peers in other functional areas and across country/regional boundaries.

Application process:

Please send in your applications along with a CV and motivation letter to: [email protected]

Contact details:

Address: Toluna office : Großneumarkt 50, 20459 Hamburg, Germany.

Contact: T +49 (0) 40 669 625 000, F +49 (0) 40 669 625 299 | www.tolunacorporate.com