Senior Director - Client Strategy

About the team

As a part of Northwestern Mutual's Strategy function, the Client Strategy team helps enterprise leaders make decisions on the large strategic questions related to our clients, from evaluating market opportunities to influencing investment decisions. We are a centralized strategy team with the mandate to have an in-depth understanding of our client's needs and how our products, services, and distribution channel connect to meet those needs. Our success means we deliver better financial and emotional outcomes to every client.

We are actively seeking a strategist to join a team of high-powered leaders who are at the forefront of enterprise decision-making. The ideal candidate has extensive experience crafting actionable, enterprise-level strategies and executive presentation and storytelling, with a passion for imagining the future.

Primary Duties & Responsibilities

In this role, you will be defining industry-leading strategies to drive client acquisition and deepen relationships with clients. Our work leverages different methodologies based on topic (e.g., root cause analysis, scenario-based planning, etc.). This role drives discussions with senior leaders across the enterprise to make strategic investments with significant impact on the company's future direction and performance. You and your team will sit at the intersection of consumer insights, strategy, and business planning & operations to bring our differentiated go-to-market strategy to life.

Key focus areas include:

• Vision and strategy: Navigate complex business challenges by employing structured problem-solving to develop recommendations, create frameworks from scratch, and help facilitate decision-making with senior executives

• Executive communication: Prepare and deliver executive presentations (c-suite, board level), articulating insights and synthesizing complex ideas into exec-friendly discussion material; includes c-suite memo writing

• Voice of Client insights: partner with our research teams to conduct focus groups, surveys, etc to gather primary client research to inform strategies

• Research & analysis: partner with enterprise insights team to gather relevant insights and synthesize to inform strategy; conduct external research (e.g., megatrends, competitive analysis) to inform our strategic perspectives and keep a pulse on market positioning.

• Expert management and organization: Independently lead distinct bodies of work and/or projects, including anticipating business needs beyond immediate next steps and connecting the strategy to execution.

• Field stakeholder management: Spearhead conversations with our top financial advisors to understand best practices and build strategies that are accretive to the advisor and client relationship.

• Internal stakeholder management: Foster strong relationships with stakeholders, including digital product, other internal strategy teams, business partners, etc., ensuring alignment and support for key initiatives.

What this role needs...

• Extensive experience creating strategies; 5-10 years of experience in strategy consulting or corporate strategy

• Bachelor's degree

• A team player who's also an independent thinker

• A robust analytical skill set, curiosity to learn, and a penchant to think about the art of the possible

• Must be deadline driven, organized and able to multi-task

• Exceptional verbal, written and presentation skills; strong PowerPoint skills required; familiarity with writing executive memos.

• Financial services experience. Financial planning, wealth and asset management, and/or insurance experience preferred

• Executive and peer relationship building and stakeholdering

• Exceptional people management skills; ability to lead a small team with clear goals, coach strategic skillsets, and build positive team culture

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