Head of Marketing Planning

Xero is a beautiful, easy-to-use platform that helps small businesses and their accounting and bookkeeping advisors grow and thrive.

At Xero, our purpose is to make life better for people in small business, their advisors, and communities around the world. This purpose sits at the centre of everything we do. We support our people to do the best work of their lives so that they can help small businesses succeed through better tools, information and connections. Because when they succeed they make a difference, and when millions of small businesses are making a difference, the world is a more beautiful place.

**How you’ll make an impact**

The Head of Marketing Planning & Integration will be responsible for driving planning and program excellence across our marketing teams and initiatives that will support and increase informed collaboration with global and regional marketing teams across Xero. This role will have ownership of key planning and operating models that allows Xero to deliver effective marketing programmes to achieve our commercial goals
- Drive an effective marketing planning approach that ensures seamless execution and achievement of our marketing goals and objectives, capacity planning, budget management, measurement and including any necessary tools, systems and processes
- Ensure key stakeholders have visibility of real-time plans at any time with corresponding performance status
- Dynamic process enabling rapid (real time) response to opportunities and to manage poor returning investments
- Ensure Xero develops and deploys excellence in; the measurement and management of marketing investments
- Identifying any plan gaps versus our goals and working with teams to close those gaps
- Identifying opportunities to consolidate or streamline initiatives and collaborating with relevant teams to explore and execute
- Driving cross marketing programs and initiatives to ensure positive outcomes and seamless execution to maximise customer value

**What you’ll do**:

- Lead and support a team of marketing program integration specialists
- Provide strategic and operational leadership on the design, management, governance, measurement and adoption of marketing planning and integration models created
- Enable marketing teams to ensure adoption of best practices planning approaches
- Lead EGM and XLT level reporting for regional and other marketing teams
- Drive the consultation, collaboration and engagement across the key impacted teams, including leadership buy-in, and engaging other resources as required
- Identify challenges or opportunities where we are likely to miss targets and/or there is an opportunity to improve effectiveness or impact of marketing activity and work with relevant teams to address and action
- Responsible for the ongoing process to support maintenance of plans ensuring real time accuracy and credibility
- Drive cross marketing programs and initiatives to ensure positive outcomes and seamless execution to maximise customer value
- Pilot projects where required, to establish learnings prior to broader implementation
- Manage communications, education and training required to implement and maintain planning and integration models, maintaining accuracy of content in resources supporting this

**Success looks like**:

- Most effective deployment of marketing spend and initiatives that is reasonably possible
- Accurate and accessible real time view of previous, current or future marketing activity across all relevant stakeholders
- Achievement of marketing goals through effective planning, gap identification, ongoing improvements and resource support from program integration specialists
- Effective and efficient implementation of cross marketing initiatives, with strong project management, collaboration, documented learnings and results

**What you’ll bring with you**:

- ** Critical competencies**:

- A pragmatic and structured thinker with the personal confidence and presence to be able to interact and influence effectively with both executive management and highly skilled individual contributors
- Creative change driver, never wanting to settle for good enough or the status quo
- Curious, resourceful, and analytical with a big picture mindset
- Collaborative with high business acumen and very comfortable with ambiguity
- Ability to quickly build trusted and effective relationships across the business
- Optimistic and organised, able to pivot quickly based on shifting priorities without dropping the ball on important but not urgent programs of work
- Excellent interpersonal skills with the ability to contribute meaningful and accurate advice
- Takes #ownership of problems and executes a pragmatic and collaborative approach to their resolve
- **
Experience**:

- Previous marketing and project management/program implementation experience
- Experience developing, running and maintaining marketing planning rhythm and artefacts to ensure cross functional alignment
- Proven experience