Head of Agency

Reporting to: Chief Commercial Officer

Location: Catalyst (formerly Northern Ireland Science Park), Titanic Quarter, Belfast

Note: This position is now closed.

The Company

Established in 2005, IRP Commerce is one of the leading technology companies in Northern Ireland and one of the UK’s foremost ecommerce platform providers. The company has won the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 award multiple times.

The company’s platform and approach has allowed mid-market businesses based in the UK and Ireland to transact more than £1 billion GBP and has powered the largest sites in a number of markets. Clients include retail, manufacturing and distribution businesses in both the B2C and B2B sectors.

The company has had a heavy R&D focus producing some of the most exciting software in the ecommerce industry. It has also had good commercial traction and is committed to expanding its commercial reach across the UK, Ireland and beyond.

The company’s commercial model involves supporting multiple specialist ecommerce agencies whilst also building strong relationships with direct customers and technical partners.

To help the company achieve their goals, the company is now seeking an experienced and highly-motivated Head of Agency.

This role represents a huge opportunity for a talented commercial individual to play a key part in the development of one of Northern Ireland’s leading technology companies.

The Role

As Head of Agency, you will help identify, develop and manage Agency partners to work with us and our clients. Our mission is to build a web of IRP Centres of Excellence that not only provide new IRP instances but also work on each IRP store in a manner that echoes the core values of IRP – profit-focussed and data-driven excellence in ecommerce.

Our plan for 2021 is to build out a small and focussed network of eight Agencies across the UK and Ireland. This role will be focussed on not only acquiring the new Agencies but also bringing in to play an Agency standard of performance that will help both Agency and client understand the true value of the IRP platform and the IRP approach.

This role will work closely with the Head of Customer Success to ensure that the clients obtained by and managed by the Agencies are of good quality and are trading optimally.

Key Responsibilities

The Head of Agency will be mapping out the majority of the key responsibilities in line with the CCO over the first few months of tenure. On a high level the focus will be on partnership development, delivery and performance measurement. The key responsibilities of this role are:

• Work with the CCO and Head of Customer Success to develop our partnership strategy and approach – including KPIs to help us track, learn and iterate our strategy as we grow.
• Develop Agency-focussed account based marketing strategy and execute.
• Acquire new Agencies and onboard them.
• Develop and manage Agency relationships in order to meet the organisation’s objectives.
• Negotiate and manage partnership agreements with agencies, ensuring that they benefit from the resources we offer and work.
• Develop Agency onboarding material.
• Develop Agency training material and content.
• Develop Agency marketing collateral.
• Develop a partner contact base using a CRM system to record status of relationships, response and involvement levels from partners, and key agreements.
• Report regularly and analyse Agency partner take-up and effectiveness.
• Work with IRP World team to develop and manage Agency partnership portal.
• Create partnership materials including web content, presentations, newsletters and regular email content for partners.
• Manage and flag risks (escalating to more senior colleagues for support and intervention, where required).

Essential Criteria

Qualifications and experience:

• Partnership/ account management professional with 3+ years experience in building and maintaining mutually beneficial partner relationships - either paid for or in-kind.
• Likely to be resourceful, proactive, pragmatic and energetic. Happy to work on your own as well as collaborating with others – and not phased by working with a level of ambiguity.
• Demonstrable interest in sustainability and behaviour change.
• Ability to multi-task and determine priority projects and assignments.
• Eager to experiment and learn.
• Experience of managing contact management systems.
• Experience in building email and digital marketing campaigns and understanding of GDPR preferable.
• Experience of partner management and how to maximise relationship productivity.
• Experience of running impactful events would be useful.
• Strong project management skills, with attention to detail.
• Excellent attention to detail and organisational skills.
• Confident networking skills – happy to email / call / meet new contacts and develop relationships with them.
• Confident, clear and concise when presenting internally, externally and over the telephone. Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Clear understanding of ecommerce.

How to Apply

Send your CV to: