National Account Manager - Convenience/Wholesale

We’re on a journey to become the most dynamic soft drinks company. Supported by a 240-year brand history, Britvic Ireland has become one of the leading players in the Irish FMCG market. We pride ourselves on setting high standards, being courageous and to think outside the bottle.

We offer Ireland’s consumers a range of family favourite and global premium brands such as Robinsons, Ballygowan, J2O, TK Red and Club Orange. We exist to help people enjoy life’s everyday moments.

About the Role: 
We currently have an opportunity for a National Account Manager to work within our Away from Home Channel. This role will report into the Head of Sales and will be responsible for leading the development of the Convenience and wholesale customer account base.

As National Account Manager, you will be responsible for the negotiation, development, and execution of customer specific strategic and tactical plans to deliver company volume, revenue and profit targets, market share and effective management of commercial investments along with inspiring and motivating internal cross functional teams and external customers to flawlessly execute our commercial propositions.

You will also be responsible for accelerating our contact strategy across key Convenience and Wholesale customers and Key Retailer groups.

This will require weekly travel  across Ireland with specific weekly travel to Head Office in Dublin.

Key Role Priorities:
Core Behaviours: 

1. Candidates will need to demonstrate all Britvic leadership DNA behaviours including: 
2. Ensuring People/Planet/Performance is brought to life everyday
3. Work collaboratively with a win-win mindset cross functionally across Britvic Ireland and across our other BUs
4. Influencing internal and external stakeholders to a senior level

Key Responsibilities: 

1. To deliver customer strategic plans ensuring balancing strategic alignment between Britvic and the customer. 
2. To build and expand a contact strategy with customers to enable identification of further business opportunities.
3. Work collaboratively with the wider Britvic Ireland MFST (Multi-Functional Selling Team) teams to ensure that your customer has an individual annual plan that delivers against channel commercial goals and strategic direction, prior to the commencement of the financial year.
4. To build outlet-level execution plans and work collaboratively with customers to negotiate delivery of the plan. Frequently this may be in the format of a high quality JBP.
5. To be responsible for deployment of the quality distribution (or execution) plan and for feeding flex requirements back to the Planning & Execution team as part of collaborative and dynamic management of the central calendar of activity.
6. In instances where price increase is required, to be accountable for pre-conditioning, creation and execution of the plan and objection handling associated with the proposed change.
7. To be responsible for working with the Customer Logistics teams to ensure accurate forecasting of customer volumes to assist total business planning accuracy.
8. To ensure that high quality preparation is done prior to customer meetings and that customer meetings are appropriately structured to maximise business opportunities. Following up within 24-48 hours all actions.
9. Ensuring account team engages with both customers and internal stakeholders to develop and deliver commercial goals
10. To pro-actively track performance of your customer, implementing course correcting tactics as necessary & driving a dynamic, cross functional, collaborative ways of working to maximise the performance of the relevant business area.
11. To ensure that appropriate time is spent in trade to:

• Build knowledge, understanding & insight
• Evaluate execution & compliance
• Accompany field team members to ensure that the account plan is realised in trade.
• To attend relevant internal and external meetings & conferences as required

Process & Financial Management  

1. Achievement of budget on Revenue, volume, Trading Contribution (TC) and Average Retail Price (ARP)  
2. To be responsible for P&L administration namely ADF/PD and LTD management in conjunction with Finance.
3. Delivery of forecast on time and accurately. 
4. To administer allocated budgets ensuring that money is spent in line with guidelines agreed with channels and brands and that return on investment is maximised.
5. To be responsible for the creation of JBP and to work collaboratively with Finance in ensuring appropriate level of internal sign-off is adhered to within audit guidelines.
6. To be responsible for taking a proactive approach to credit management in conjunction with Finance.
7. To be responsible for ensuring that central pricing and promotional guidelines are always adhered to.
8. To manage all of the above responsibilities and associated business processes using recognised customer relationship management (CRM) tools e.g. XTEL, SAP, Kantar, Nielsen etc.

Knowledge, Skills & Experience Required: 

1. Compelling, inspirational communicator, with the ability to lead from the front
2. Integrity
3. Strong commercial acumen to enable delivery of powerful Britvic commercial propositions within customer specific account plans
4. Understanding and confidence with P&L management and with management of both volume and profit forecasting processes
5. Strong selling and negotiation skills
6. Excellent interpersonal skills and written and oral communication skills to enable the development of highly effective internal and external partnerships
7. A highly developed influencing style and comfortable with constructively challenging and being challenged
8. Proficient in personal planning and time management
9. Experience of budgetary ownership – overhead & trade investment
10. Experience of customer JBP/contract renegotiation
11. Ability to develop strong and trusted customer relationships maintaining our status as one of their valued supplier partnerships 
12. Self-starter, accountable, driven, and open to thinking differently
13. Outstanding business partner, ability to earn trust and respect quickly
14. Strong commercial acumen to enable development of powerful business commercial propositions which can be developed into internal and external focused execution plans
15. Excellence in Excel along with understanding and confidence with internal systems (such as SAC (SAP Analytics Cloud), XTEL, Nielsen, KANTAR)
16. Good IT skills including Microsoft packages
17. Strong communication and interpersonal skills, including presentation and influencing skills
18. Ability to work in a matrix manner across the organisation, up down and sideways
19. Proficient in personal planning and time management 
20. A proven team player

We believe we are stronger together and that’s why we’re committed to providing equal opportunities to all applicants and employees. We know that by building a truly inclusive environment where everyone feels celebrated, safe and respected - diversity and wellbeing will naturally thrive