Customer Account Manager - Wholesale (Away From Home Ice cream)

ENGINEERINGUK; Kingston upon Thames; Hybrid; GBP 30,000 - 60,000

Job description

Customer Account Manager - Wholesale (Away From Home Ice cream)

Employer: Unilever
Location: Kingston Upon Thames, England, United Kingdom
Salary: Competitive
Closing date: 1 May 2025

Job Purpose
This role sits within the wholesale team, the beating heart of our Away From Home Ice cream business. We are a £70m plus part of the business with the aim of being the fastest growth channel. With a fantastic support team now in place to help the successful candidate deliver against some ambitious objectives, we are looking for someone who loves to make things happen and is ready to push the boundaries as we establish our new ice cream business.

Sitting in a wholesale team of 4 you will lead our growth agenda across 5 key wholesalers who cover Wales, the Southwest and the Midlands. As well as full end to end responsibility for your accounts you will be a pivotal leader working with our channel teams in Convenience, Leisure and QSR's to drive ice cream sales through our partners.

This role involves a high degree of customer facing time across your accounts and needs a candidate with a love of spending time with customers and turning insights into action plans.

Responsibilities

• Full responsibility for the business' P&L in managed convenience for the UKI market, driving revenue, profitability, and market share in alignment with Europe & ANZ strategic goals.
• Ensure that your account portfolio delivers against both short-term financial targets and long-term strategic growth goals.
• Gain internal buy in from key senior stakeholders and unlock necessary budget.
• Work with the Convenience, Leisure and QSR channel leads and be the face of ice cream in front of your customers. Collaborate to develop a holistic future fit strategy and winning JBP.
• Create and manage the rolling activity plan incl. promotions and continuously monitor the performance of your ice cream business.
• Build strong, sustainable customer relationships with your customers and facilitate engagement at a more senior level in those customers.
• Manage perfect execution of the activation plan by leading the key internal teams and focusing on the extensive activation plan across the channels.
• Guide shopper and trade marketing team on total spend and appropriate investment levels based on ROI and commercial insights.
• Proactive development of your skills and competencies.
• Lead by example across the wider Away From Home Ice Cream team, showcasing the behaviours we expect across the organisation, supporting others when needed.
• Organising your workstreams to maximise customer facing time and business delivery.

All About You
Essential:

• Strong communication and analytical skills.
• Business fundamentals: strong commercial acumen, internal reporting accuracy, stakeholder management, and, at the category level, developing and executing the category growth plan.
• Strong attention to detail and track record of delivering in role.
• Ability to prioritise and manage workload, delivering to a deadline with accuracy.
• Self-motivated and able to work to a brief with minimal supervision.
• Love of being competitive and winning vs the market.
• Influencing and relationship building both internally and externally at different seniority levels.
• Analytical ability to draw insights from data.

Desirable:

• Experience in wholesale.
• People management experience.
• Building and delivering strategy.
• Experience of managing convenience retailers.
• Experience of ice cream/frozen category.
• Experience of making new business pitches and winning contracts.

Team Membership
Team: AFH team (Wholesale)
Leader: AFH Customer Director
Also has key interfaces with: Brand Managers, Category Managers, Customer Care Team (Finance, Supply Chain).

About Unilever
Unilever is one of the world's leading suppliers of Food, Home and Personal Care products with sales in over 190 countries and reaching 2 billion consumers a day. Unilever has more than 400 brands found in homes around the world, including Dove, Tresemme, Lynx, Lifebuoy, Shea Moisture, Persil, Domestos, Ben & Jerry's, Magnum, Marmite, The Vegetarian Butcher, Graze and Pot Noodle.

Faced with the challenge of climate change and the need for human development, we want to move towards a world where everyone can live well and within the natural limits of the planet. That's why our purpose is 'to make sustainable living commonplace'.

What We Offer
Not only do we offer a competitive salary and pension scheme, we also offer an annual bonus, subsidised gym membership, a discounted staff shop and shares. You'll have the opportunity to work directly with our renowned and exciting brands in a flexible and hybrid working environment.

Whilst the role is advertised on a full-time basis, we would be happy to discuss possible flexible working options and what this may look like for you. We are a key advocate of wellbeing and offer a variety of support for our people including hubs, programmes and development opportunities. We strive to achieve a family-friendly and inclusive workplace and to, above all, create possibilities for all.

Diversity at Unilever
Diversity at Unilever is about inclusion, embracing differences, creating possibilities and growing together for better business performance. We embrace diversity in our workforce. This means giving full and fair consideration to all applicants and continuing development of all employees regardless of age, disability, gender reassignment, race, religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation, marriage and civil partnership, and pregnancy and maternity. We are also more than happy to provide reasonable adjustments during our application and interview process to enable you to present your best self.

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How is Unilever tackling this?
Many of Unilever's recruitment sites publish a warning to candidates about recruitment fraud. The Cyber Security team also proactively scan for signs of people setting up fake Unilever sites and act to close them down.

What can I do?
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