Customer & Market Knowledge

• Act as the "expert in the customer", maintaining strong knowledge of assigned customers, the Retail sector and relevant market developments.
• Maintain awareness of competitor activity, customer trends and emerging commercial opportunities.
• Provide relevant customer, competitor, product and pricing feedback to the wider business.
• Actively contribute customer and market expertise to product development, range reviews and strategic commercial initiatives.

Collaboration

• Work collaboratively with Purchasing, Product, Marketing, Internal Sales and other departments to deliver the best overall solution for the customer.
• Share relevant customer and market knowledge across the business.
• Support wider customer opportunities or projects where mutually agreed and where Field Sales expertise can add value.
• Promote a customer-first approach whilst respecting agreed customer ownership across the wider Sales team.

Planning & Performance

• Maintain accurate and timely CRM records, customer plans, pipeline and sales forecasts.
• Prioritise activity against agreed strategic customers, prospects and commercial opportunities.
• Agree and deliver key monthly commercial objectives with the Head of External Sales & Key Accounts.
• Monitor performance against agreed sales, margin, retention, pipeline, new-business and customer-development objectives.
• Prepare and communicate relevant sales, customer and market information as required.

Customer & Prospect Ownership

• The role will directly manage a defined portfolio of strategic existing customers and agreed new-business prospects. The role will also identify and pursue qualifying new organisations within agreed markets where these are not established accounts managed elsewhere within Morplan.
• Existing customer ownership across other Morplan sales teams remains unchanged. Collaboration between teams is encouraged where this provides benefit to the customer or business, but the objectives will be structured around their own customers, prospects and available new-business opportunities.

Key Measures of Success

Performance will be assessed across both commercial results and effective sales activity, including:

• Sales and gross margin performance
• Customer retention and profitable account growth
• New customers and opportunities won
• Pipeline value, quality and conversion
• Development of key customer contacts and relationships
• Increased product/category penetration
• Quality and effectiveness of customer engagement
• Progress against agreed account plans and monthly priorities
• Accurate CRM, pipeline and forecasting

Person Specification

Experience

• Proven experience within an external role is imperative (Field Sales, Key Account Management or Business Development).
• Demonstrable experience of managing and developing significant customer relationships.
• Experience of identifying, developing and converting new-business opportunities.
• Strong experience of consultative selling, commercial negotiation and opportunity management.
• Experience of working autonomously across an assigned customer base or geographical area.
• Retail, fashion, shopfitting, consumables or related industry experience would be advantageous.

Skills & Knowledge

• Strong sales and commercial capability.
• Excellent relationship-building, communication and influencing skills.
• Strong negotiation and presentation skills.
• Effective planning, prioritisation and organisational ability.
• Ability to identify customer needs and translate them into commercial opportunities.
• Strong customer, market and commercial awareness.
• Competent use of CRM systems and Microsoft Office.

Personal Attributes

• Customer focused
• Commercially curious
• Proactive and results orientated
• Self-motivated and able to work autonomously
• Confident and credible
• Collaborative
• Adaptable and resilient
• Strong sense of ownership and accountability

Qualifications

• GCSE (or equivalent) English and Maths.
• Full UK driving licence.
• Relevant sales or customer-service qualification desirable.

The above responsibilities are not exhaustive and reasonable additional duties relevant to the role may be required as the needs of the business develop.