Partnerships Sales Manager

The Role

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, focussing on building long‑term, strategic and high‑value relationships with clients throughout the 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 contract caterers, events and visitor attractions. We are now looking to expand our market, entering new segments of the food‑away‑from‑home space – targeting in particular major quick‑service restaurants and food retailers, and initiating upstream sales of coated board and coatings. For both these new markets we will need to enter three‑way relationships with their preferred manufacturers and move to selling coated board and coating directly to these partners; therefore strong ability to manage complex multi‑stakeholder transactions is key to success. For maximum growth and impact we intend to target key brand players and build strong, long‑term partnerships with them.

We are looking for somebody who has proven big‑brand commercial acumen and a powerful ability to drive deals forward, but alongside this they need to be comfortable with technical topics and operationally minded to manage and interact with the manufacturers as well. A background in food‑service packaging, paper or coatings industries is ideal but not essential.

The role entails everything from proactive prospect outreach and pitching, to brokering technical trials and project management, to developing joint marketing material and on‑going relationship management as we build true long‑term partnerships.

Responsibilities

• Work directly alongside the Chief Revenue Officer and 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 priority brand leads, understand their needs, pitch the right products and find the internal champions that will get a deal over the line.
• Structure these partnerships with the support of the Chief Revenue Officer to maximise our commercial return, protect our Brand and IP, and ensure legal compliance.
• Work with the Head of Marketing to create and plan marketing assets and campaigns that strengthen our outreach, pitch and ultimately our retention of these new segment clients (QSRs and retail).
• Build your own list of prospects through LinkedIn search, attending relevant events and cold outreach, as well as picking up and developing warm leads from existing relationships in the business and introductions from business partners and key networks.
• Embed yourself into the industry, developing an encyclopaedic knowledge of the marketplace, so you can build a strategic view of the best partners in the food‑service 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.
• Work closely with the existing food‑service sales team to understand route to market and current contract catering partners to avoid overlap and find the best sales approach for each potential customer.
• Own the full sales cycle of multi‑year six and seven figure sales contracts.

About Us

Notpla is a family of regenerative packaging materials, made from seaweed and plants. Behind these products is a company of the same name, deeply committed to making the planet a healthier place. Winner of the prestigious Earthshot Prize, Notpla are famed for their innovative, scalable alternatives to plastic. These include the edible liquid bubbles – Ooho, their seaweed‑coated food containers, single‑use films and rigid materials. To date, their solutions have already replaced 16 million pieces of single‑use plastic from entering our environment.

Notpla Limited takes inclusion and diversity seriously. It is important for us that we live by our values and our policies outline how – We work better together. Notpla is committed to encouraging equality, diversity and inclusion among our workforce, and eliminating unlawful discrimination.