Commercial Manager in Manchester

Ready to Lead a Strategic Retail Partnerships and Drive Significant Growth?

We're looking for an experienced and commercially astute Commercial Manager to take ownership of some of a Morrisons account

This is a high-impact role where you'll have the opportunity to shape customer strategy, influence senior stakeholders, lead commercial negotiations, and deliver profitable growth across an ambitious product portfolio. If you thrive in a fast-paced FMCG environment and enjoy turning insight into action, we'd love to hear from you.

About the Role

As Commercial Manager, you will be responsible for managing key customer accounts, owning the commercial agenda, and delivering sustainable growth across volume, value, margin, and profitability.

Working closely with cross-functional teams including Finance, Supply Chain and Marketing, you'll build long-term partnerships with customers while ensuring strong commercial performance and strategic alignment.

This role offers significant visibility across the business and provides an exciting opportunity to influence both customer and organisational success.

What You'll Be Doing

• Lead and develop relationships with major retail and grocery customers.
• Build a deep understanding of customer strategies, business models and category priorities.
• Develop and implement customer growth strategies that deliver mutual value.
• Translate customer opportunities into actionable internal business plans.

Commercial Ownership

• Own customer P&L performance and deliver agreed budget targets across volume, revenue, margin and profitability.
• Manage promotional investment and customer profitability with strong commercial discipline.
• Identify risks and opportunities and implement proactive action plans to maximise performance.
• Lead commercial negotiations and pricing discussions, including net price increase implementation.

Forecasting & Business Planning

• Lead the monthly forecasting process across sales, volume and profitability.
• Work collaboratively with Finance and Supply Chain teams to ensure forecast accuracy.
• Develop annual customer budgets and longer-term strategic plans.
• Monitor performance against targets and implement corrective actions where required.
• Drive distribution and commercial success of new product launches.
• Identify opportunities to develop customer-specific propositions and initiatives.
• Champion profitable portfolio growth and category development.
• Deliver projects that create value for both customers and the wider business.

Stakeholder Management

• Lead cross-functional customer business unit meetings and ensure alignment across teams.
• Influence senior internal stakeholders and customer decision-makers.
• Build strong networks across all levels of customer organisations and internally.
• Communicate customer developments, opportunities and challenges effectively.

What We're Looking For

We're seeking a highly commercial, analytical and relationship-driven professional who combines strategic thinking with strong execution capabilities.

• Minimum 5 years' commercial sales experience within FMCG, food, or a related consumer goods sector.
• Experience managing major UK grocery, retail or large-scale customer accounts.
• Proven track record of delivering growth, managing budgets and achieving commercial targets.
• Experience developing customer strategies and implementing commercial plans.
• Strong understanding of forecasting, budgeting and financial analysis.

Key Skills

• Excellent negotiation, influencing and relationship-building skills.
• Strong commercial acumen with a solid understanding of P&L management.
• Ability to interpret complex customer, category and financial data.
• Exceptional analytical and numerical capability.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills.
• Ability to manage multiple priorities in a fast-moving environment.
• Strong stakeholder management and cross-functional leadership skills.

Technical Capability

• Advanced Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint and Office skills.
• Experience using retailer and market insight platforms
• Comfortable working with large datasets to drive decision-making.

You can base yourself out of several sites in the UK- Yorkshire North West or Scotland - Our client operates hybrid - 1 day on average on a site