Commercial Planning & Promotions Manager

Embarc•Sacramento, CA

18d

About The Position

The Commercial Planning & Promotions Manager is the operational backbone of embarc's commercial engine. This hands-on role owns the annual, quarterly, and monthly promotional calendar across all stores, aligning promotions, seasonal campaigns, product launches, and store activations with sales priorities. The role manages planning, discount builds, quality assurance, store communications, and digital deployment in close partnership with brands and teams across Product, Retail, Finance, and Marketing. The manager balances the calendar, holds teams accountable to commitments, and ensures stores have what they need to deliver a seamless customer experience. The role owns promotions from strategy and planning through execution and post-mortem, reporting on performance and using results to inform future campaigns. Work includes briefing creative, deploying assets, checking discount builds, and updating the website as needed.

Requirements

At least 4 years of experience in multi-location retail promotions, commercial planning, or merchandising operations.
A track record of owning a promotional calendar.
Working knowledge of promotional economics, including discount depth, margin impact, and acquisition versus retention.
Fluency with Excel, dashboards, and AI tools, including the ability to automate routine work and turn data into decisions and actions.
Strong communication and writing skills.
Experience leading people, including direct reports, contractors, or cross-functional teams.
Experience building or fixing a process that other teams adopted.
Hands-on experience with retail and e-commerce tools, including the ability to build, publish, and troubleshoot directly.

Nice To Haves

Experience in cannabis, grocery, convenience, or specialty retail.
Experience with brand co-funded promotions and chargebacks.

Responsibilities

Own one master promotional plan covering fleetwide campaigns and location-specific variations.
Lock promotion details before build or creative work begins, and identify gaps, overloads, and conflicts across categories, brands, and stores.
Run the weekly Commercial Planning meeting, including setting the agenda, surfacing risks and decisions, and owning follow-ups.
Define promotional offers, timing, objectives, and investment with Product, Marketing, Retail, and Finance.
Design promotions to meet goals such as driving traffic, growing basket size, or bringing back lapsed customers.
Partner with the Brand Partnerships & Assortment Manager to shape the promotional mix with brands.
Work with Product to assess discount depth in relation to margin and customer value.
Brief the CRM team on promotions so offers reach the right customers on time.
Own promotions from planning through post-mortem, including deliverables completed by other teams.
Brief designers, collect final creative assets, and deploy them to stores, the website, and in-store screens.
Brief discount programming and verify builds in POS and online before launch.
Update the website with campaign banners, landing pages, and promotional details.
Reconcile inventory, pricing, marketing, and operations inputs before launch.
Make the go/no-go decision and ensure quality assurance is complete before anything goes live.
Partner with Retail Ops to confirm stores are launch-ready, with assets live and promoted products stocked and visible.
Own the weekly store communication standard.
Manage discount use and spend against plan across all stores.
Build repeatable promotional playbooks for new store openings, new markets, competitive responses, and seasonal moments.
Report promotional results, including sales, margin, traffic, average order value, new versus returning customers, and store-level execution.
Deliver promotional performance recaps to brands.
Design store-specific tests, assess results, and turn findings into recommendations for future cycles.