Our client is a premier developer, operator, and asset manager of rental housing in Sub-Saharan Africa. They are looking for a Senior Relationship Manager (Universities, Partnerships & Alliances). The role is vital to constantly engage with key stakeholders at the universities, to gather deeper insights on the intake numbers, sessions, courses being planned, and identify areas and opportunities to offer accommodation services as a value add to the universities as mutually beneficial partnership.

Job Responsibilities

Occupancy and Revenue Reneration

• Anticipating demand for accommodation across target univ/colleges through constant engagement with different stakeholders, to prepare various promotional campaigns to ensure predictive ramp up/stabilization/backfilling across all the properties, through generating high quality leads. The stakeholders include various foundations, HELB, MoE, Commission of University Education, TVET Authority, Kenya Association of Technical Training Institutions (KATTI), who can influence directly or indirectly property stabilization.
• Stabilize properties within a fixed time frame by advance planning and sales initiatives that drive early bookings through the university alliance channel through the implementation of signed memorandum of understandings for deploying formally agreed engagements/interventions.
• Tactically creating promoters/positive influencers within the eco system of universities and colleges to spread awareness/promote referrals.
• Reach out to high schoolers through various interventions presenting the value preposition for accommodation services

Campaign Management

• Continuous On boarding, engagement and retention of key stakeholders/influencers/brand promoters within the univ alliance eco system.
• Aligning various promotional/awareness campaign aimed at customer acquisitions with the university/college calendar (intake, events-academic and nonacademic)
• Deploying key mutually beneficial interventions, which support lead generation for us and enhances brand visibility for partnering univ/college
• Designing and implementing university alliance tactics to grow the partner portfolio database.
• Continuously analyzing trends based on univ calendar, property churn, occupancy, demographics of residents, referral effectiveness, to improve campaigns.
• Development and implementation of university alliance and retail partners onboarding Matrix to ensure exceptional experience.

People and Culture

• Develop and drive a Customer Centric culture in all staff in the department to deliver exceptional experience at every touch point.
• To ensure and establish/Build effective and efficient departmental systems, processes and procedures to deliver the business objectives
• Ensure the department is adequately and optimally resourced in terms of people, equipment, software, training and any other facilitation to achieve the Business Objectives.

Other Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in business management/administration. An MBA will be an added advantage.
• 10 years working experience, with at least 5 years as an Institutional/Corporate Relationship Manager
• Leadership and supervisory skills.
• Strong analytical skills with the ability to collect, analyze, and interpret data.
• A customer-centric approach to understand and meet the needs of internal and external stakeholders.
• Proficiency in using Microsoft Office suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook) and other relevant software applications for data analysis, report generation.
• Excellent communication, negotiation, and relationship-building skills, with the ability to engage effectively with diverse stakeholders.
• Ability to work in a fast-moving, fluid team setting with multiple stakeholders.