Director of Sales & Business Development

New Position! Safe Quality Food Institute (SQFI) is Hiring a Sales Business Development & Director (Hybrid Role)

Are you analytical with a focus on building and maintaining strategic partnerships? Are you skilled at driving growth through meaningful engagement with internal and external stakeholders? Join SQFI’s team and help expand one of the world’s leading food safety certification programs across North America.

Quick Snapshot:

In this role, you’ll develop and manage strong relationships with certification bodies and key industry accounts to promote SQFI programs, drive certification adoption, and achieve revenue targets. You’ll focus on strengthening and activating certification body (CB) partnerships and expanding SQF certification across key account operations, driving measurable adoption, retention, and revenue growth.

What You’ll Do in This Role:

• Partner with the Vice President, Business Development & Sales (VP) to activate CB business development teams to expand SQFI adoption throughout the United States.
• Establish joint growth plans with CBs, set clear KPIs and monitor their performance against agreed targets.
• Support strategic planning and reporting processes with accurate data on CB performance, scorecarding, and key account outcomes.
• Own and drive CB and key account growth programs end-to-end—setting the operating cadence (check-ins and QBRs), coordinating cross-functional execution, removing roadblocks, and delivering results.
• Partner with internal teams to develop campaigns, tools, and resources that enable KPI achievement.
• Use CRM (HubSpot) and business analytics tools to manage pipelines, track performance, and report on KPI progress to SQFI leadership.
• Represent SQFI at trade shows and other industry events.
• Work with VP to drive measurable adoption of SQFI certification across categories, sites, and regions within key accounts.
• Maximize partnership and revenue growth using data to identify opportunities, improve conversion, and deliver consistent performance against adoption, retention, and revenue targets.
• Act as a trusted advisor to key account stakeholders—strengthening relationships and aligning SQFI’s value proposition with their food safety and quality objectives to support retention and growth.

Education and Skills You’ll Need to Be Successful:

• A minimum of seven to ten years of business development experience within the food/consumer products industry with a solid understanding of the business development and sales process and dynamics.
• Bachelor’s degree in business, sales, marketing, economics, food industry, or related field.
• At least seven years of food industry experience.
• Working knowledge of how food safety certification programs work (including experience with SQFI and other food industry operations).
• Experience working for a global organization is a plus.
• Ability to travel as needed for partner meetings and industry events.
• Must be a quick learner with strong negotiating skills and the ability to sell the SQFI standard in a compelling way.
• Previous experience managing the growth and development of other team players.
• Must be a strong written and oral communicator who can network within different functions with various levels of leadership and others within our customer base as well as internal stakeholders. Strong presentation skills are a must.
• Proficiency using Microsoft Office 365 programs, specifically Excel and knowledge of business analytics tools and CRM information systems (such as Salesforce, HubSpot, etc.).
• Experience working in a sales environment responsible for meeting (or exceeding) assigned targets is a plus.
• Ability to influence and build alignment across diverse stakeholders with strong judgment, tact, and credibility.
• Must be a self-starter with a high level of intellectual curiosity, with a strong analytical and problem-solving mindset.
• Must be an organized, self-directed individual with excellent time and project management skills with an ability to prioritize and accomplish multiple tasks with strict attention to detail.

Why FMI and SQFI? At FMI, we are the champions for the food industry and the issues that make a difference to our members in the food industry. Our work touches the lives of over 120 million households in the U.S. and representing a $1 trillion industry with over 6 million employees. As part of FMI, our Safe Quality Food Institute (SQFI) is a thriving global food safety and quality program (currently in 40 countries across 6 continents) that is recognized by food retailers, brand owners, and food service providers worldwide. The SQFI team is collaborative, dedicated, and experienced, which impacts lives across the globe.

Our Benefits: We offer a generous benefits package that includes health benefits, 401(k), 11 paid holidays, paid leave benefits including three paid weeks of vacation (prorated based on your start date in year one), a summer hours program allowing you to work only four hours on Fridays during the summer (once your work is done), remote work opportunities two weeks at the end of August, the week of Thanksgiving and two weeks at the end of December, volunteer opportunities (if you want to give back to your community), the chance to join our employee wellness group and much more!

This position requires you to work out of our Arlington, Virginia office for a minimum of two full days per week. Position also offers a $175 monthly transportation allowance to offset your commuting costs.

Apply Now: If you’re excited to build meaningful partnerships, drive growth, and advance food safety across the industry, we encourage you to apply today.

Learn more about SQFI at www.sqfi.com and FMI at www.fmi.org.

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FMI is an Equal Opportunity Employer.