Key Accounts Manager at SunCulture

About the role

As the Key Account Manager, you will oversee the relationships of SunCulture with its most important commercial clients. As the ideal candidate, you will be apt in building strong relationships with key clients by strategically meeting their requirements. Key Account Management functions will drive the achievement of sales quota based on assigned key objectives/metrics relevant to key accounts. The goal is to contribute to sustaining and growing our business to achieve long-term success.

Key Responsibilities

Relationship Management 

• Develop comprehensive, consistent, and senior relationships at multiple levels (Strategic, Tactical & Operational) with a portfolio of major clients and ensure touch-points work
• Quantify company value to clients and work closely with internal teams to ensure client satisfaction
• Manage expectations, monitor service levels, and implement any action plans that are needed to mitigate risk 
• Resolve any issues and problems faced by clients and deal with complaints to maintain trust
• Serve as point of accountability and the link of communication between key clients and internal teams, including facilitating inventory and logistics, after-sales support, and technical backstopping
• Negotiate contracts with key clients and establish a timeline of performance

Business growth

• Expand the relationships with existing clients by continuously proposing solutions that meet their objectives, identifying new opportunities, and creating new value 
• Play an integral part in generating new sales and/or up-sells that will turn into long-lasting relationships
• Contribute to building brand awareness by representing the company professionally and communicating appropriately; understanding all products, capabilities, and ways of working and differentiation
• Recruit, onboard, and manage the performance of your team.
• Manage partner in-house training to ensure that all relevant staff are developed to a high standard of proficiency to scale sales, marketing, and aftersales management of SunCulture’s systems

Market Intelligence

• Acquire a thorough understanding of key client aspirations, capacities, and requirements
• Track, analyze, and benchmark distributor as well as competitor activity and performance to understand the implications of external environment changes on the business and enhance decision making. 
• Identify opportunities to leverage new partnerships, emerging technologies, systems, capacities, and applications to drive improved value

Operations Management

• Develop, implement and maintain management reporting tools to effectively measure client conformances
• Optimize partnership acquisition operations/processes to minimize the time between launch and market maturity  
• Propose and implement transactional cost reduction processes
• Prepare regular reports of progress and forecasts to internal and external stakeholders using key account metrics
• Design and enforce best practices for how teams build trusted relationships and influence decision-makers 
• Provide actionable feedback on all aspects of the organization for continuous scale and improvement. 
• Collaborate with the technical and business departments to continually improve systems for collecting, analyzing, and reporting data
• Ensure operations are aligned with SunCulture’s processes as well as applicable local regulations, policies, and practices
• Participate in innovation, offer, product, and feature development ideas processes as required
• Facilitate the generation of new leads through the production of client proposals and grant applications and development of a client pipeline 

Does This Sound Like You?

• Fluent English speaking skills, fluent French is a plus 
• 5+ years in Key Accounts Management experience, with an advantage if worked in a distributed team environment in solar, engineering, or any related field.
• Strong trainer capabilities 
• Africa International Distribution experience 
• Strong listening and questioning skills – outstanding communication and interpersonal skills
• Vision to understand customer needs and translate them into practical solutions
• Ability to drive change
• Proven planning and project management skills
• Disciplined time management and ability to work under pressure
• Able to analyze results and identify and explain any variances from targets
• Ability to follow and ensure compliance with operational processes
• Highly developed social, interpersonal, and communication skills.
• Excellent team working and team developing ability.
• Disciplined in time management and ability to work under pressure without supervision
• Strong computer skills in, google sheet/Doc, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and database management
• Excellent English writing and grammar skills