Customer Development Manager

At Britvic, we make, market and sell great-tasting soft drinks, offering refreshments to billions of consumers worldwide. We're constantly refreshing and reimagining our business, ensuring it's innovative and evolving while staying true to our vision – to be the most dynamic soft drinks company, creating a better tomorrow. We've been home to iconic brands for over 100 years, and our relevance is anchored in an authentic heritage. Delivering our vision is down to the passion of our people, and we create conditions for everyone to thrive and grow. From our international supply chain and network of partners, we export to over 100 countries, offering opportunities for our people and businesses to grow.

Job Overview

As the Customer Development Manager Spar (MAT Cover), you will be responsible for the primary interface with Spar Head Office & largest RDC, leading the central Joint Business Plan (JBP) terms process & negotiation and the regional JBP and account planning for A F Blakemore. This role will ultimately deliver the company volume profit and share targets in your customers through agreed strategic and tactical plans. You will build customer-specific strategic plans, work collaboratively with the Marketing & Category teams to ensure each customer has an individual annual plan that delivers against channel commercial goals.

Key Responsibilities

• Negotiate with the customer and deliver a Joint Business Plan by account which helps deliver against both Britvic and customers' key strategic pillars while achieving the Key Target Metrics of Net Revenue, Trading Contribution, Margin, and share targets.
• Responsible for deployment of the point of purchase plan and feeding flex requirements back to the Planning & Execution team as part of collaborative and dynamic management of the central calendar of activity.
• Ensure high-quality preparation prior to customer meetings and run meetings effectively to maximize business opportunities.
• Proactively track performance of your accounts, implement course-correct tactics as necessary & drive a dynamic, cross-functional, collaborative way of working to maximize business area performance.
• Responsible for the collaborative forecasting process to deliver the most accurate forecast both internally and externally, while owning the delivery of the forecast and correcting as things change.
• Be a role model and provide the right balance of support and challenge to develop the skill set of the 2 x Band A executives in the team.
• Fully accountable for P&L of accounts within your area of responsibility, building and agreeing an investment plan for the channel to drive the Annual Operating Plan objectives.
• Administer allocated budgets ensuring money is spent in line with guidelines agreed with channels and brands and that return on investment is maximized.
• Manage all responsibilities in association with any cross-functional teams and aligning any investment or forecast impacts in line with the usual Britvic process.

Knowledge, Skills & Experience

• Strong grasp of Britvic systems and the forecasting and rate management cycle.
• Creative thinker able to challenge live plans and find ways of delivering additional benefit.
• Compelling, inspirational communicator, with the ability to build relationships.
• Strong commercial acumen to enable development of strong BSD commercial propositions which can be developed into account plans & implementable in outlet execution plans.
• Understanding and confidence with P&L management.
• Strong selling and negotiation skills.
• Ability to work both as an individual and as part of a team – to support and help drive better team performance through the balance of support, leadership and challenge.
• Highly developed influencing style and comfortable with constructively challenging and being challenged.
• Experience of budgetary management – overhead & trade investment.
• Experience of customer terms/contract renegotiation (desirable).
• Experience of customer performance review process and external scorecard management (desirable).

Account Details

• Number of accounts managed: 2 (Spar Central & AFB)
• Annual volume managed: 14m Litres
• Annual trading contribution: £4m