What We Are Looking For
- Experience: 12–15+ years of senior commercial, account management, or trade-facing leadership within luxury travel, hospitality, or a premium consumer sector.
- Demand Engineering: Proven experience owning and engineering a trade or partner-led enquiry pipeline.
- Scaling & Growth: A demonstrable track record of successfully scaling agent/partner growth and delivering rapid revenue growth.
- Commercial & Analytical Acumen: A proven track record of managing channel economics, P&Ls, and commission frameworks. You possess deep data literacy and advanced CRM/BI tool proficiency (HubSpot, Tableau preferred).
HEAD OF TRADE ACCOUNTS
Our Client is an award-winning, luxury safari company that operates an exclusive collection of luxury lodges and camps across Botswana, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The company specializes in providing authentic, highly personalized, and privately guided wilderness experiences. Their core offerings include luxury accommodation, tailor-made safaris and expert guiding.
Key Responsibilities
Trade Enquiry Engine & Pipeline Ownership
• Demand Architecture: Own the annual enquiry volume target for the trade channel. Take full strategic accountability for how volume is generated, qualified, and distributed.
• Partner Activation: Design and execute the partner activation strategy driving enquiry generation.
• Quality Standards: Define and enforce enquiry quality standards.
• Funnel Optimization: Establish speed-to-lead and enquiry handling standards alongside Reservations.
Strategic Commercial Leadership
• Channel Strategy: Own and articulate a clear, data-backed trade channel strategy.
• P&L Management: Manage the interplay between enquiry volume, conversion rate, average booking value (ADR), and gross profit contribution.
• Executive Voice: Contribute to board-level commercial planning as the authoritative voice on trade channel performance, risks, and opportunities.
Data Ownership & Commercial Analytics
• Data Model Ownership: Own the trade CRM data integrity (HubSpot), Tableau dashboard design, and the performance narrative delivered to senior leadership.
• Account Reporting: Build account-level reporting capturing pipeline health, GP contribution, revenue quality, conversion rates, and year-on-year trends.
• Risk Mitigation: Develop an analytical framework to identify high-potential accounts, at-risk accounts, and structural channel mix shifts with defined intervention triggers.
Strategic Account Oversight & Economics
• Top 10 Management: Personally manage the performance and strategic relationships of their top 10 trade accounts. Develop tailored account success plans with clear GP targets.
• Incentive Framework: Own the trade commission and override framework
• Account Tiering: Lead quarterly account tiering reviews and oversee the onboarding and segmentation of new trade partners.
Team Performance & Collaboration
• Leadership: Lead, coach, and run monthly performance review cycles for a team of Account Managers across all trade segments.
• KPI Alignment: Set individual and team KPIs reflecting both activity (training, CRM compliance) and outcomes (enquiries, conversion, GP contribution).
• Cross-Functional Synergy: Partner with Sales, Marketing, Product, and Reservations to align trade messaging, campaign timing, and product enablement.
Market Representation
• Brand Stewardship: Attend key industry events and lead fam trip/trade show selection with a strict ROI mandate.
The Head of Trade Account Management is one of their most important commercial leadership appointments. You will treat our largest, most complex revenue stream as a business within a business. You carry a dual mandate: engineer the volume and quality of inbound demand generated through the trade channel, and ensure that demand converts efficiently into high-value bookings through a world-class account management function.
We are looking for a rare combination: a strategic commercial leader who understands luxury travel deeply, a data-driven operator who can build a performance framework, and a demand generation architect who knows how to activate partner networks at scale.