Trade Planning Assistant

We'd all like amazing work to do, and real work-life balance. That's waiting for you at Sainsbury's. From fragrance to car care, clothing and pots and pans, our General Merchandise team delivers all the non-food items for Sainsbury's, Habitat and Argos customers. This multi-brand environment means you get to work across most areas. You can also be a pioneer, because the team believes in being brave, iterating and learning as they go. They also develop deep connections to other departments, which opens up a lot of different career opportunities for you. What's certain is that you'll spend time on the shop floor to get closer to customers, and bring a broad perspective and the full support of your manager with you wherever you decide to develop next.
Why join us
By joining Sainsbury's as a Trade Planning Assistant, you will become an integral part of our dynamic and forward-thinking team, focused on maximising the potential of our GM business. You'll have the opportunity to collaborate with cross-functional teams, influence senior stakeholders, and contribute to aligning our commercial plans to drive customer satisfaction and achieve our ambitious goals. With a strong emphasis on planning, analytics, and operational excellence, you'll play a vital role in shaping the trade plan and supporting its successful implementation. At Sainsbury's, we value curiosity, collaboration, and agility, providing you with the space to make a difference and develop both professionally and personally. Join us to be part of a proactive and innovative environment where you can contribute to delivering exceptional value to our customers and drive growth in our business.

What you'll do
As a Trade Planning Assistant within Sainsbury's GM Commercial division, your role will be central to driving the success of our GM business by ensuring total alignment behind our Trade Plan priorities. You will work closely with cross-functional teams to coordinate and maintain the GM Trade Plan, ensuring clear weekly prioritisation by fascia to enable brilliant activation. With your strong commercial acumen and analytical skills, you will facilitate discussions and contribute insights throughout the trade planning process. You will also collaborate with stakeholders, communicating plans, milestones, and performance to keep them engaged and informed. Additionally, you will play a vital role in conducting competitor benchmarking, maintaining data integrity, supporting post-implementation reviews, and creating engaging materials to showcase the strength of our trade plan. With a proactive and self-starting approach, you will work on multiple workstreams in parallel, building
relationships, influencing outcomes, and identifying opportunities for improvement.

Experience and working knowledge of multi-channel retailing across either a commercial, analytical or operational discipline such as Commercial, Digital, Marketing, Retail and Supply Chain.
Ability to think both strategically and tactically, supporting the input of key learnings through the trade planning process.
Strong commercial acumen and analytical skills - you know how to work through ambiguity and evolving priorities at pace.
How to work effectively with a range of cross-functional teams, ensuring ARCI's are clear and expectations understood.
How to facilitate or lead discussions, utilising a range of coaching, presentation or communication styles to influence clearly aligned outcomes and ensure clear actions are committed to.
Highly competent in developing at pace a broad range of engaging, relevant content, or analysis, utilising a variety of tools including to but not limited to Microsoft Word, Powerpoint and Excel.
A confident self-starter, able to work on multiple streams of work in parallel.
Demonstrate ability to identify opportunities, solutions, and priorities.
Comfortable building new relationships and working collaboratively, whilst effectively influencing and communicating with a broad range of stakeholders across all levels
Anticipating risks and knock-on implications outside your team and division and defining the action plans and solutions.
High levels of curiosity, with a passion for discovering and sharing new insight or lessons learnt.
Committed to delivering value and business outcomes at pace. You should be comfortable challenging your own priorities and ways of working to ensure that we are set up to deliver customer value to our teams, in as effective and efficient a way as possible.
Willingness to role model and be active in developing a trial, experiment and learn culture.

We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer so you'll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there's always the chance to try something new - whether that's as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working. When you join our team, we'll also offer you an amazing range of benefits. Here are some of them:
Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to save 10% on your shopping online and instore at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat, and we regularly increase the discount to 15% at points during the year. We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover. You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 5% of salary, depending on how we perform.
Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance and you can buy up to an additional week's holiday. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, salary advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. And if you ever need it there is also an employee assistance programme.
Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks' pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks' pay for paternity leave.
Please see www.sainsburys.jobs for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).