Senior Account Manager
Home Textiles & Homewares
High Street retailer account
Salary: Dependent upon experience
Greater Manchester
Our client is a leading supplier of home textiles to the retail sector in the UK, who now have an excellent opportunity for a Senior Account Manager to join their growing Head Office team working on a major high street retailer account.
Purpose of role:
As Senior Account Manager a major High Street client, you will lead the Account Management team and manage the day to day running of given categories, meeting agreed KPI's to deliver exemplary service and meet the clients Supplier expectations.
Key Responsibilities:
- Align with the customer to understand their requirements in depth.
- Develop an understanding of their product ranges and the homewares market, including benchmarking and competitor analysis.
- Develop product ranges with buyers in conjunction with our in-house design team, to secure seasonal selections.
- Build strong relationships with the customer and manage key stakeholders through regular meetings and effective communication.
- Ensure effective communication of purchasing and logistics requirements for the account to the business.
- Arranging, attending, and documenting category meetings both in house and with the customer, identifying actions, facilitating customer's requests and ensuring we deliver to their requirements.
- Support our Design and Buying teams by providing relevant data, customer feedback and product knowledge to drive profit and positive new development that meets the customer's strategic brief.
- Negotiate prices to our costing methodology, to arrive at the agreed margin and present to Senior Management team for sign off.
- Build a comprehensive knowledge of the given product categories through competitor analysis and benchmarking. Present findings to internal stake holders and the customer seasonally, to demonstrate a full understanding of the categories in terms of scale and opportunity.
- Drive the Pre-Production process from concept through to delivery to store, ensuring stakeholders have completed all aspects of the critical path on time and raising any concerns to Senior Management prior to final deadlines, providing support to wider Account Management team where appropriate.
- Ensuring all customer related product documentation is completed on time, in detail and to the requirements, gathering information from relevant stakeholders where needed.
- Lead, develop, motivate and mentor the cross functional internal customer team to achieve and exceed business goals.
- Be the point of escalation for the account management team and offer support where necessary.
Key Competences and Experience:
- Ideally at least 5 years' experience of working within Supply Chain with progression to Account Manager Level.
- Ideally having worked with High Street / Supermarket retailers and experience of leading supplier meetings with Head office peers.
- Experience in a stock holding business.
- Must have an understanding of Far East manufacturing including costs / moqs / lead-times.
- Must have a solid understanding of and be able to create and drive a critical path.
- Confident with costings. Taking quoted prices and adding associated costs, with the ability to take action to arrive at an agreeable margin and have excellent attention to detail to ensure costs are logged and kept updated accurately.
- A good communicator and a strong team player.
- Previous experience within the home textile / ceramic product areas preferred but not essential.
- Excellent skills in Excel, Word, Office and Powerpoint.
In return our client offers a highly competitive salary and excellent career progression opportunities.
Apply online or for further information contact one of our specialist consultants quoting reference number: NJR15156