Dealer Development Manager

🚗 We're Hiring: Dealer Development Manager

📍 Location: United Arab Emirates (Remote)

🕒 Employment Type: Full-Time

💼 Experience Level: Mid-Level to Senior

🌐 Work Arrangement: Fully Remote

About Us

We are a growth-focused organization committed to expanding and strengthening dealer and distribution networks through strategic market development, partner performance management, commercial planning, and operational excellence.

Our teams collaborate across Dealer Development, Sales, Marketing, Product, Finance, Supply Chain, Customer Service, Operations, and Executive Leadership to build a high-performing partner network that delivers sustainable revenue growth and exceptional customer experiences.

The Role

We are seeking an experienced Dealer Development Manager to lead dealer-network expansion, dealer performance improvement, partner relationship management, territory development, commercial planning, and network optimization.

The ideal candidate will have strong experience in dealer management, channel development, automotive or equipment distribution, sales, business development, or a related industry, combined with strong commercial, analytical, and relationship-management skills.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and execute the organization's dealer-development strategy.
• Establish plans for dealer-network expansion, optimization, performance improvement, and market coverage.
• Identify opportunities to strengthen market presence through new dealers, distributors, branches, and strategic partners.
• Analyze market potential, customer demand, geographic coverage, competitor presence, and dealer performance.
• Develop dealer-network plans based on market opportunity, sales potential, population, customer demographics, territory economics, and competitive conditions.
• Identify underserved territories and recommend opportunities for network expansion.
• Evaluate potential dealer candidates and assess their commercial, financial, operational, and organizational capabilities.
• Conduct dealer due diligence in coordination with Finance, Legal, Compliance, and Commercial teams.
• Develop dealer selection criteria, evaluation frameworks, and approval recommendations.
• Support negotiations relating to dealer appointments, territories, commercial terms, performance requirements, and operating standards.
• Coordinate dealer onboarding and appointment processes.
• Develop dealer onboarding plans covering systems, products, processes, training, branding, sales, service, and compliance.
• Ensure new dealers meet required operational and commercial standards before commencing business.
• Establish dealer performance targets covering sales, market share, customer satisfaction, profitability, inventory, service, and operational standards.
• Monitor dealer performance against agreed targets and business plans.
• Conduct regular dealer performance reviews and business-planning sessions.
• Identify underperforming dealers and develop structured improvement plans.
• Work with dealers to establish corrective actions, milestones, responsibilities, and performance targets.
• Monitor progress against dealer-development plans.
• Escalate persistent performance issues to senior management.
• Develop dealer incentive programs in collaboration with Sales, Finance, and Commercial teams.
• Analyze dealer incentives, rebates, bonuses, volume programs, and promotional schemes.
• Ensure incentive structures support profitable and sustainable dealer behavior.
• Monitor incentive effectiveness and recommend adjustments.
• Support dealer sales planning and forecasting.
• Develop dealer-level sales targets based on market potential, historical performance, product availability, and strategic objectives.
• Review dealer sales forecasts and challenge assumptions where appropriate.
• Monitor sales pipeline, order intake, retail sales, wholesale sales, and market share.
• Analyze sales performance by dealer, territory, product, model, customer segment, and channel.
• Identify opportunities for volume growth, cross-selling, upselling, and market penetration.
• Develop dealer-specific growth strategies.
• Work with dealers to improve lead generation, conversion, customer follow-up, and sales productivity.
• Support implementation of standardized sales processes and customer-management practices.
• Monitor dealer CRM adoption and customer-data quality where applicable.
• Develop dealer marketing and local-market development plans in collaboration with Marketing.
• Coordinate dealer participation in campaigns, promotions, product launches, exhibitions, events, and community activities.
• Evaluate local marketing effectiveness and return on investment.
• Ensure dealers maintain appropriate brand standards across physical and digital channels.
• Monitor dealer facilities, signage, branding, showroom standards, customer areas, and other brand requirements where applicable.
• Conduct dealer audits and network reviews against established standards.
• Identify facility, equipment, staffing, training, technology, and process gaps.
• Develop dealer improvement plans to address identified deficiencies.
• Work with dealers to improve customer experience and service quality.
• Monitor customer satisfaction, complaints, service response, retention, and loyalty indicators.
• Identify recurring customer-experience issues and coordinate corrective actions.
• Collaborate with After-Sales, Service, Parts, Warranty, and Customer Experience teams to improve dealer performance.
• Monitor dealer inventory levels and product availability.
• Coordinate with Supply Chain and Sales teams to optimize dealer stock levels.
• Identify excess inventory, aging stock, stockouts, and product-mix issues.
• Develop recommendations for inventory balancing, allocation, transfers, and promotional actions.
• Support product launches by ensuring dealers are appropriately stocked, trained, equipped, and prepared.
• Coordinate dealer readiness for new products, model launches, technology changes, and major commercial initiatives.
• Develop dealer training programs in collaboration with Product, Sales, Service, and Learning teams.
• Identify dealer capability gaps and recommend appropriate training.
• Monitor completion and effectiveness of dealer training.
• Develop dealer development programs focused on leadership, sales, customer experience, operations, and commercial performance.
• Maintain strong relationships with dealer principals, owners, general managers, sales managers, and other senior partner stakeholders.
• Conduct regular dealer visits, business reviews, strategic meetings, and performance discussions where applicable.
• Build trusted, professional relationships while maintaining appropriate commercial and governance standards.
• Act as a key escalation point for significant dealer-related issues.
• Support resolution of commercial, operational, customer, contractual, and performance-related disputes.
• Coordinate with Legal and Compliance regarding dealer agreements and contractual matters.
• Monitor dealer compliance with contractual obligations, brand standards, regulatory requirements, and organizational policies.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Performance will be measured through a combination of dealer-network, sales, commercial, customer, and operational KPIs, including:

• Dealer-network growth
• Market coverage
• Dealer sales growth
• Dealer target achievement
• Market-share growth
• Dealer profitability
• Dealer productivity
• Sales per dealer
• Sales per territory
• Dealer retention
• Dealer onboarding time
• New-dealer performance
• Dealer inventory health
• Inventory turnover
• Customer satisfaction
• Customer-retention rate
• Lead-conversion rate
• Dealer compliance
• Dealer audit performance
• Dealer-training completion
• Dealer-improvement plan completion
• Marketing ROI
• Dealer incentive effectiveness

Candidate Profile

The successful candidate should have substantial experience in dealer development, channel management, automotive distribution, equipment distribution, sales management, franchise development, or a closely related field .

Experience managing dealer networks across multiple territories or markets is highly desirable.

The candidate should be commercially minded, comfortable working with senior dealer stakeholders, and capable of combining relationship management with rigorous performance analysis.

What You'll Bring

• Proven experience in dealer development, channel management, distributor management, sales, or business development.
• Strong understanding of dealer and distribution-network economics.
• Experience developing and managing dealer-performance programs.
• Strong knowledge of sales planning, forecasting, target setting, and market development.
• Experience evaluating and onboarding dealers or channel partners.
• Strong commercial negotiation and relationship-management skills.
• Ability to analyze dealer financial and operational performance.
• Strong Excel and analytical capabilities.
• Experience with CRM, ERP, dealer-management, or business-intelligence systems.
• Familiarity with Power BI, Tableau, SQL, or other analytical tools is advantageous.
• Strong understanding of inventory management and distribution is advantageous.
• Experience developing incentive, rebate, or dealer-support programs.
• Strong understanding of customer experience and sales-performance management.
• Excellent communication, presentation, negotiation, and influencing skills.
• Ability to manage multiple territories, dealers, projects, and priorities.
• Strong problem-solving and conflict-resolution skills.
• Willingness to travel for dealer visits, network development, and business reviews where required.
• High level of integrity, commercial judgment, and accountability.
• Ability to work independently and effectively within a remote environment.
• Relevant degree in Business, Marketing, Sales, Management, Automotive Management, Supply Chain, or a related discipline.
• MBA or relevant postgraduate qualification is advantageous.
• Professional certifications in sales, channel management, automotive, or business development are advantageous.
• Experience working with UAE or wider GCC dealer and distribution networks is highly desirable.
• Arabic language proficiency is advantageous.