Company overview

Our client operates globally as one of the world’s largest combined air services providers. With offices in the UK, USA, Australia and UAE, they supply premium baked goods, meals and snacks to the travel industry. They focus on partnering with world-class manufacturers customising products and packaging to suit individual customer needs while managing a complex supply chain with the highest levels of precision.

Job purpose

The role will take a strategic lead in the development and implementation of a globally consistent transformation approach to the creation of sales demand and the generation of sales revenue growth and margin improvement including the development of people, processes and tools to implement this and lead any necessary changes arising from the adoption of this approach.

The role will support the development of segmentation models to enable effective sales strategies to be developed, built upon identified customer needs/references/discriminators /decision criteria/ issues & challenges.

The role will develop strategies to identify, engage with and secure global priority Airline & Caterer targets and establish our client as the leading global provider of pre-packed food products to the passenger travel market and beyond in order to deliver a robust pipeline of future projects and deliver a reliable & sustainable high rate of growth.

Key responsibilities

Demand Creation

• Identify and develop project opportunities and demand generation strategies, through to conversion of leads into projects.
• Promote and participate in demand creation initiatives e.g. substitutions, specification management & selling process
• Develop and execute strategic sales plan in conjunction with the managing director, New Product Development (NPD) and creative to achieve sales targets and expand our customer base
• Work with the regional VPs and account management to create demand & project and revenue opportunities through targeted ‘campaigns’ and leveraging
• Involved in strategic development of solutions for prospective clients and leading sales activities to prospective clients through face-to-face meetings and presentations
• Identifies specific target audiences and supports marketing in technical communication activities (conferences, papers etc)
• Develop customer centric proof-point development plans for identified priority target accounts
• Collaborates with marketing team, NPD and industry solutions experts to understand the product, the buyers and the competitive landscape
• Partner with marketing to analyse competitor activity and use data to formulate proposals for changes in strategy
• Build a dashboard for commercial performance focused around a set of key indicators, which are a mix of key activity indicators and key performance indicators (KPI) that can be captured and reported automatically through the customer relationship management system
• Establish pipeline management practises in line with agreed KPI’s to build the pipeline with airlines and caterers.

Account Management

• Strategy and account planning for key accounts
• Acquire deep knowledge and insights into the customer businesses and develop strategic alliances with key decision-takers and decision-influencers up to and including main board level
• Proactively develop and maintain relationships with airlines, caterers and other targets to secure new business opportunities
• Understand their business development plans and how our client can support and enable them
• Ensure all customer and prospective records and information is kept current in appropriate systems maintaining up to date CRM data to manage opportunities and the pipeline in a structured way
• Creation of customer proposals/technical development and amendment of specifications

Regional Sales Leadership

• Grow market share, achieve and exceed sales & gross margin targets.
• Take accountabilities for all budgeted costs and involvement in contract negotiations with prospective airline clients and caterers
• Fills/primes the pipeline by leading customers to test/trial/choose our products and solutions by managing the process of pipeline priming & lead generation as well as managing project and client-based opportunity assessment
• Align team goals with the sales strategy to drive innovation that meets commercial needs whilst exceeding consumer expectations
• Establish appropriate goals and measures for short- and long-term sales and overall growth in line with company vision and targets, and regularly evaluate results against these performance standards to ensure profitable growth.
• Forecast, monitor and evaluate sales performance of key accounts and self

Qualifications and training

• Educated to graduate level or equivalent experience

Knowledge and skills

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Extremely well organised
• Ability to prioritise workload, multi task and work to deadlines
• Ability to work on own initiative
• Strategic thinker capable of identifying patterns and simplifying complex data and market challenges.
• Track record in developing project acquisition strategies and conversion into real projects
• Prior experience in building, leading and managing demand generation teams across international regions strongly preferred
• Experience in specification-driven and substitution sales
• Experience creating and managing a large budget and structuring and using CRM to build and report pipeline, sales and activity metrics
• High attention to detail and accuracy skills, ability to gather and analyse information
• Extensive knowledge of demand generation, direct and indirect sales activity, strategic selling and account management techniques
• An effective relationship builder who has worked in an environment or sector undergoing substantial and rapid change and growth
• Strong business and commercial acumen
• Strong negotiation and closing skills

Specific aptitudes / skills

• Strong IT skills: Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook
• CRM – either Salesforce or MSD
• Navision or ERP experience
• Understanding of PowerBI
• Regular travel across EU and other regions required
• Sensitive to cultural and national differences in style and communication