National Account Manager in Birmingham

Food & Nutrition - Blended Products £40,000 to £60,000 Basic salary (DOE) Plus Bonus and car allowance and amazing benefits. The role looks after powdered beverage blends (i.e. hot chocolate and lattes). The role primarily involves the business-to-business selling of powdered beverage blends such as hot chocolate and lattes to foodservice customers such as coffee roasters and brands, fostering close customer relationships through regular customer interactions, and driving business growth through close collaboration with the team. This role offers the successful candidate an excellent opportunity to utilise and develop their technical and commercial management skills, within a dynamic multinational company environment.

Your responsibilities:

• Managing, nurturing, and growing a portfolio of existing and prospective customer relationships through regular touchpoints (e.g. site visits, exhibitions, trade shows, etc.), and by directing them, where appropriate, to our portal.
• Proactively identify and deliver new business opportunities, ensuring a healthy pipeline is maintained in collaboration with Product Managers and Application Technologists in the Food business unit.
• Working closely with the wider Food team, reciprocating support and technical expertise to respond to customer’s formulation and technical questions, whilst also proposing solutions to enhance our product offering based on your understanding of our customer needs.
• Developing a sales strategy in line with budget expectations, continually monitoring sales, opportunity pipeline, and other KPIs to ensure that budget and margin targets are achieved, using data insights to identify and take appropriate and timely action accordingly.
• Understanding customer needs in order to propose solutions to enhance our product offering and increase product penetration.
• Regularly contributing to portfolio gap analysis, working with the Development Manager in identifying new Principals accordingly.
• Developing project proposals in conjunction with colleagues to establish target applications/innovations for promotion to the appropriate customer groups.
• Introducing and promoting new product offerings from principals utilising all potential unique selling points, attending relevant internal and Key Principal product application training as required to ensure the appropriate level of knowledge of the Food business unit product portfolio is developed and maintained.
• Work with Product manager, Supply Planner and Manufacturing plant to help ensure customer requirements are met.
• Conducting market research and identifying current and upcoming trends within the powdered drinks market to ensure we remain relevant to our customers and suppliers.
• Following up on repeat orders to ensure both customer and supplier supply chains remain within agreed timescales.
• Setting up new customers on Salesforce and our portal.
• Progressing product setup, product enquiries and business opportunities in a timely manner, fully utilising the CRM system (Salesforce) to enter and update customer information, adding samples, opportunities, quotations, price renewal campaigns, etc. where these are not otherwise directed through automated channels.
• Rolling out mini product promotion campaigns (outside of those Group-led) with the support of the UK Marketing & Communications Team.
• Supporting special projects as defined by business needs and agreed with Business Unit Manager.
• Any other ad hoc tasks as required.

Ideal Candidate:

• A commercial background is essential, ideally gained through experience within the Food and Beverage sector.
• A degree in a scientific discipline (preferably Chemistry), or equivalent industry experience, is essential.
• Experience with business-to-business sales of hot chocolate, coffee or tea is highly desirable.
• A dynamic self-starter with excellent communication and interpersonal skills that enable effective interactions with commercial and technical contacts from a range of companies and internal stakeholders.
• Driven by the need to achieve sales growth, and has a resilient, persistent approach when faced with difficulties and challenges.
• Numerate and analytical, with the ability to utilise data to inform actionable strategies to deliver sales targets and meet the Company’s goals.
• Self-motivated, disciplined, with good organisation, prioritisation, and time management skills. Able to work under pressure to meet deadlines and to prioritise accordingly.
• A team player, working collaboratively with both the team and other internal stakeholders to enable IMCD’s success.
• Dynamic presentation skills and able to execute in one-to-one situations as well as large groups.
• IT literate with a working knowledge of Microsoft Office including Outlook, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint, and experience of working with CRM systems (ideally Salesforce).

This role would be of interest to someone with experience in: Sales, chemicals, Chemistry, account management, Food, Food industry, coffee, powdered beverage blends, FMCG.

If you possess the skills and experience listed above and would like to find out more, send a copy of your CV to PBA Sales Recruitment. Due to the nature of our business we will only reply to those candidates who we feel have the relevant sales experience for this role.