Coatings & Paperboard Partnerships Manager

At Notpla, we create disappearing packaging carefully engineered for a healthy planet. Founded on the belief that nature knows best, we’re an innovative, ideas and action-oriented scale-up developing and manufacturing packaging solutions from seaweed and plants that disappear naturally. We are currently looking to recruit a Partnerships Manager to join our revenue and sales team, focusing on building long term, strategic and high value relationships with clients throughout the coated board, packaging and food service industries.

At Notpla, we strongly believe in our mission and our employees' ability to help us achieve our goals. We encourage everyone who joins us to develop and grow and take responsibility for your domain without micromanagement. Our objective is to foster a fantastic business culture that is reflected in our working policies and environment. Besides offering exciting roles and a great working environment, Notpla provides competitive salaries, the potential for EMI Share Options, a zero-carbon pension scheme, discounts with local businesses, and subsidised social activities. Our flexible working policy allows you to work at your own pace. We are a social business with regular clubs and events, and we are proud of how our diverse workplace has created a community that is all pushing towards the common goal of making plastic disappear.

Notpla Coating is an entirely natural and plastic free coating for paper boards. Over the past few years we have been building brand awareness and driving demand for our product by selling finished goods (boxes, trays, clamshells) to the foodservice market, predominantly focusing on stadiums, business and industry. We are now looking to broaden our approach in two key ways: entering new segments of the foodservice market such as QSRs and retail, and initiating upstream sales of coated board and coatings. For both these new markets we will need to select key brand players to target and build strong, long term partnerships with them - be they world leading QSR chains, or major manufacturing and converting companies that hold larger ticket contracts.

We are looking for somebody who has proven commercial acumen, natural affinity for technical topics and a powerful ability to drive deals forward, ideally with a background in foodservice packaging, paper or coatings industries. You will need to have exceptional relationship management abilities as you enter into multi-year, multi-layered deals with some of the biggest brands and industry players. In this role you will also need to have strong project management skills, and have a desire to see your sales past completion of contract; including brokering technical trials, developing joint marketing material and taking these relationships through to true long term partnerships.

As well as the above your other day to day responsibilities will be:

• Work directly alongside the CEOs to support the development of strategic partnerships, supporting them with the deal development from the beginning of the sales cycle, right through to full delivery and the continued management past the initial point of sale.
• Approach targeted brand leads, understand their needs, pitch the right products and find the internal champions that will get a deal over the line.
• Work with the Chief Revenue Officer to structure these partnerships to maximise our commercial return, protect our Brand and IP, and ensure legal compliance.
• Work with the Chief Revenue Officer and the Head of Marketing to create a playbook of how we pitch Notpla to QSRs, including developing any relevant sale & marketing material.
• Embed yourself into the industry, developing an encyclopaedic knowledge of the marketplace, so you can build a strategic view of the best partners to in coatings and paperboard industry - understand their needs, so you can advise them as to how to best implement and truly embed the Notpla products and ethos into their thinking.
• Manage the back and forth of technical information sharing between partners.
• Work with technical team members and clients to manage the technical and commercial work plan, so you can effectively manage the relationship once past the point of initial sale.
• Own the full sales cycle of multi-year six and seven figure sales contracts.

Salary: Negotiable