Customer Specialist
As a Customer Specialist, you play a pivotal role in driving our clients’ success at our customers’ retail locations. Your primary responsibilities include owning the HQ relationship with key customers. You will work closely with Key Account Managers (“KAMs”) to manage the implementation of clients’ strategic annual plans with our customers.
In this role, you are the customer expert. You will develop accurate promotional plans and drive successful annual reviews using data and insights. You will drive operational excellence with the customer by ensuring accurate purchase orders, implementation of cost changes and client/customer contract uploads in customer systems. You will work with the customer, face-to-face, in their retail stores, ensuring our clients’ promo activities and strategic sales initiatives are executed.
What we offer:
- Full-Time Benefits (Medical, Dental, Vision, Life)
- 401(k) with company match
- Training and Career Development
- Generous Paid Time-Off
Responsibilities:
- Implement budgets (company and client income/expense) by operationalizing all plans in-store through timely on-ground execution of activities
- Responsible for achieving P&L targets, company/client income, and expense budget goals for multiple clients at a customer
- Align clients’ strategic sales plans to customer priorities, consumer preferences, and client plans
- Conduct data analysis to lead customer presentations using expertise on customer needs and strategy to win in multiple categories
- Implement client strategic annual plans for the customer by driving distribution, pricing, shelving, and promotional volume for an assigned set of customers
- Track retail pricing and indirect order guides to critically analyze category performance
- Lead issue resolution in-store to accurately reflect clients' plans (planned vs. implemented) and effectively address them by swiftly resolving the identified discrepancies
- Monitor the distribution of new products or SKUs for clients at assigned customers and proactively maintain the distribution of existing SKUs and products at stores
- Drive engagement with multiple stakeholders at a customer’s HQ via buyer meetings to understand customer needs; then align customer goals with client initiatives to get winning results
- Represent our KAMs and aligned client strategies to various customers, with regular store visits to assess key trends, opportunities, and competitive threats to the client portfolio
- Analyzes and consistently monitors customer data reports; actively communicates customer performance metrics vs. forecast targets with respective KAMs
- Drives cross-collaboration among all internal teams (e.g., administrative support functions) to ensure seamless execution on client system changes (e.g., deductions, POs, contracts, etc.)
Qualifications
- Bachelor's Degree or equivalent experience in Product Innovation, Marketing, or related field
- 3 to 5+ years of experience in on-ground/field sales
- Excellent sales data platform and customer systems knowledge
- Outstanding written and oral communication skills
- Strong organizational and interpersonal skills
- PC skills- including a working understanding of spreadsheets (Excel), word processing (MS Word)
- Work experience in applicable field (i.e., sales and marketing agency, Customer, Client)
- A proven track record in sales is helpful