ACCOUNTS MANAGER (HORECA) SALES & MARKETING Permanent

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Customer strategy development, implementation and alignment.
• Delivery against strategy, achievement of regions commercial objectives.
• Translate channel strategy into volume targets based on objectives within the region.
• Work with customers to identify opportunities to grow volumes and distribution.
• Liase closely with customers to share vision, understand customers’ needs, build trust, develop and implement customer plans.
• Liase with internal stakeholders to co-ordinate elements such as forecasting, stock availability, pricing and deliveries.
• Track & manager customer plans against identified KPI’s.
• Drive innovation and continuous improvement.
• Regularly review and adjust customer strategies where relevant.
• Achievement of sales volume, contribution margin and market share objectives.
• Achievement of NPD launch objectives.
• Display strong understanding of the drivers of sales.
• Conduct market mapping to understand segments within the market.
• Understand customers’ needs and develop short, medium and long-term growth strategies within a specific customer based on identified needs and opportunities.
• Monitor sales objectives per category and per customer in the region.
• Manage product and pricing with different customers and identify opportunities to maximise profitability.
• Input into the budget process and weekly / monthly forecasting.
• Adherence to budget and achievement of forecasted volumes within the agreed range.
• Submit and track three month rolling forecast by product, SKU and category.
• Align volumes to business capacity to mitigate against the building up of overstocks, take corrective action where necessary.

QUALIFYING ATTRIBUTES

Qualifications

• A business related tertiary qualification
• Food service or food science qualification will be an advantage.

Experience

• 7 years experience in Sales within the FMCG environment of which at least 3 years has been in the HORECA channel.
• A strong understanding of how the HORECA channel in South Africa is structured as well as existing contacts in the channel will be an advantage.
• Experience within a local FMCG business will be preferable.

Skills

• Strong Microsoft office specifically excel and powerpoint skills
• Strong interpersonal skills and can work effectively with all functions in the business including external stakeholders.
• Must display strong analytical skills and is able to create process where it does not exist.
• The individual must show attention to detail and must be able to deliver strategically as well as operationally in the role.
• Must have strong problem solving skills.

Competencies

• Ability to innovate and create, demonstrate ability to build and use key relationships, flexible and open to change is most important and optimising business performance in order to achieve results.