Head of Partnerships

Job Introduction
**Remote/home working with occasional visits to either our Central London or Folkestone, Kent office. So, it’s important you live within a reasonable commuting distance**

Our people are everything to us. The way they deliver exceptional experiences every day for our customers, for their colleagues. The way they own what they do. Their 'Why's it like that?' curiosity. How they always think of others and work together to get things done. For us, for you, make do will never do. Good enough? Not even close. Come and do the best work of your life alongside lovely colleagues. Come to Saga.

And right now, we are seeking a Head of Partnerships to deliver growth for Saga by managing projects and people and deftly handling competing requirements to secure an exceptional outcome for our fantastic customers and colleagues.

You will find and establish a firm presence for Saga in new markets through partners and products that deliver exceptional experiences for our customers every day.

You will deliver the affiliate programme, using customer insight to develop, pilot and launch new propositions and your commercial and financial skills to complete and manage robust investment cases along with negotiating commercial contracts.

You will continually scan our insights and the market to understand key trends and establish Saga’s right to play and find points of entry for markets that align with the Saga brand and strategy.

You will lead with purpose, open-mindedness and integrity, bringing our stakeholders and colleagues along on the journey.

And in return, you can look forward to all the responsibility and involvement of an integral role, providing you with a rewarding and fast-paced career with an excellent benefits package.

Main Responsibilities
- Delivering on Saga’s affiliate vision which creates exceptional experiences across all products to drive business growth.
- Continuing to evolve understanding of trends impacting our demographic and where the Saga brand has a right to play in order identify opportunities.
- Affiliate partner scouting and relationship management to build and prioritise our pipeline, ensuring due diligence and onboarding has been completed and that the partner delivers to contracted service levels.
- Managing and coordinating the development and build of any affiliate pilots including the setting-up, monitoring and sharing of results fostering an inclusive and collaborative cross-functional culture around every pilot project.
- Recognising promising ideas and for our pipeline and discarding ideas which are ineffective, costly or beyond the scope of the company’s mission or abilities to develop.
- Approaching affiliate change both bottom-up (from individual initiative) and top-down (operationalising our strategy of excellent customer experience and building our brand, data and insight to become the superbrand for our demographic). Being the link both ways, presenting relevant concepts in as much detail as project teams require or as high level as needed in an executive committee discussing our Group strategy.
- Develop and own the marketing plan for all affiliate programs, driving an efficient CPA through our internal channels first.
- Monitor and continually improve performance of the affiliate portfolio, creating and delivering weekly and monthly dashboard reporting to understand how customers are engaging with and feeling about our products and financial performance of the portfolio.
- Assess risk to customers and brand through every affiliate program, maintaining risk registers, mitigation plans and leading on partner reviews and formal audits at an appropriate cadence.
- Encouraging creative thinking and finding ways to link up affiliates to serve customers across Saga’s business units.
- A solution focussed sense of curiosity and passion for innovation and relationship building.
- Excellent communication skills and strong interpersonal skills and able to work collaboratively work with others.
- Line management experience with the ability to lead with integrity and accountability.
- Stakeholder Management experience.
- Planning and organisation, project management, creation of marketing plans.
- Ability to manage multiple projects and workstreams, meeting challenging deadlines.
- Independent and highly self-motivated but able to work and lead a team of creative individuals.
- High attention to detail and accuracy with strong numerical and analytical skills.
- Analytical, presentation and report-writing skills.
- Ability to draw actionable insights, define action plans and follow execution through.

Our Saga Values:

- Precision Pace - Always owning and making things happen.
- Empathy - Always aware of others.
- Curiosity - Always asking why.
- Collaboration - Always one team, the Saga team

About The Company
Having spent our first 30 years focused on travel, Saga launched Saga Magazine and developed home and motor insurance and financial services in the 1980s