Account Manager - Dairy Beverages

Requisition ID 48346
Position Type (US)Full Time
Career Function Sales 
Recruiter
Posting Type DNI

Leading to better encompasses all we do at Kerry, it's how we've become the worlds leading taste and nutrition company. Whether it's building and manufacturing sustainable solutions for food, beverage or pharmaceutical consumers, our commitment to lead the world to better nutrition drives us forward. With 24,000+ colleagues across the globe and 15,000+ Kerry products, your opportunities are limitless.

About the role

The Account Manager – Dairy & Plant Based Dairy Beverages holds full accountability for leading and directing sales execution against a defined set of customers aligned to the channel growth strategies. The role will drive the development and execution of the commercial go to market strategy and will be accountable for delivering sustainable top line growth and margin expansion to the business with new and existing customers. The role will work collaboratively with the marketing, culinary and RD&A teams to bring innovation and improved solutions to customers.

What would you do?

 

• Commercial responsibility and leadership across a defined segment of Dairy & Plant Based Dairy Beverage customers. Customers include emerging brands/medium CPG/co-manufacturers.
• Assigned customer’s sales P&L ownership & delivery against key performance measure aligned to Kerry’s growth pillars.
• Commercial contract & long-term supply and innovation agreements ownership and negotiation to manage margin and create clear avenues for profitability.
• Directly owning and building key relationships across stakeholder functions at each of the customers and internally with the key cross-functional colleagues.
• Deliver on a pipeline of sustainable growth for Kerry through a deep understanding of customers and their business strategies, their functional requirements and delivery of a business review process and framework for driving Customer Experience & Satisfaction.
• Develop and execute commercial strategies through the framework of robust account planning.
• Leading a clear and proactive pipeline of customer engagements to build a margin appropriate project pipeline to deliver year on year and long-term growth platforms.
• Maintain an external bias with a strong knowledge of customer needs, market trends and consumer preferences to enable prioritization of Kerry’s investments to drive growth.
• Ensure that appropriate resources and actions are recommended to address customer-based issues including competitive threats, product and service complaints, and information discrepancies.
• Lead in the development of customer specific annually budgeting & 5-year growth forecasts.
• Delivery against budget objectives and executing against appropriate actions to achieve and/or exceed sales budget targets.
• Continually gather pertinent information to allow Kerry teams to successfully make sound business decisions on the viability of commercial projects.
• Lead the progression of key customer projects by ensuring communication flow between customer and relevant cross-functional teams to execute on plan.
• Responsible for the overall accuracy of the customer demand plan and its impact on driving improved S&OP and OTIF%.

What will you need to be successful?

• Bachelor’s degree in business, Communications, Food Science, Chemistry, or related discipline. MBA is preferred.
• 4+ years progressively responsible, post baccalaureate experience in related Sales, technical or R&D roles within a food company.
• Experience in Ingredient, Flavors or Functional & Active sales channels, preferably with existing relationships within retail customers covering areas of dairy & plant based dairy beverage.
• Sales systems & operations knowledge: CRM, Customer Segmentation, Customer Lifecycles and Analytics.
• Working knowledge of the dairy complex & ingredients and the correlating price inputs as it relates to price risk management & margin management.
• Experience with building deep customer relationships and converting those relationships into increased sales, innovation, and top line growth.
• Communicate effectively with all stakeholders – employees, customers, peers, and external networks.
• Experience building strategic plans with demonstrated ability to formulate customer activation strategies and turn them into clear compelling, actionable plans and results that are informed by the external landscape and deliver year on year growth.
• Allocate and leverage resources against priorities, collaborating with peers to maximize and focus Kerry technology and resources.
• Make decisions informed by strong commercial understanding balanced with d