Key Account Manager, Nonwovens

PURPOSE OF THE JOB

In this role, you get to work with a group of strategic customers that go to work every day excited to sell the products that you provide as a finished good product to their customers. What if you were not just a salesperson, but a trusted business advisor that solves problems and provides solutions? Your customers will be large building material manufacturing companies that need our products and trust the OC brand.

Join an organization that believes that every employee owns a piece of our bold growth goals and ultimate success. We are a market-leading innovator that has placed on the Fortune 500®. Owens Corning is devoted to delivering sustainable solutions across our three business segments while striving to ensure our people and products make the world a better place. We take pride in having an inclusive and diverse workplace with employees around the globe. A holistic sense of community exists across our entire organization as our talent grows globally. We are a company that fully recognizes the importance of paving a path to a sustainable and safe enterprise through investing in our people. Our desire to make an impactful difference in the world flows from top down to all levels of the organization. By being a company that instills pride within each and every employee, we aspire to build market-leading businesses; global in scope - human in scale.

Working closely together with his/her peers and the OC functional matrix (business leadership, Strategic marketing, S&T, Product Engineer, SC, CST & Operations), the Strategic Key Account Manager, defines & executes a Key account strategy for the accounts of his/her portfolio, in accordance with the short, medium and long-term business objectives. The role is responsible to monitoring and delivering the PVM results defined in the plan and LRP while maximizing revenue, volume, and gross margin.

The Strategic Key Account Manager is accountable for understanding the customer needs & overall market trends to collaboratively create and introduce solutions that bring value to the customer and capture fair value for Owens Corning. The role will be responsible for leading a cross-functional key account teams with a Owens Corning enterprise mindset building connections up and down the customer organization to best position Owens Corning to deliver business results.

The successful candidate should be able to collect, understand and act upon relevant data, including customer insights, competitor insights and economic and industry data; as such contributing to the Regional NWS strategy and our overall long-term success in this market.

You could expect traveling up to 50-60% depending on season of the market and business activity.

Reports to : Sales Leader, Nonwovens, North America

Span of Control : This position provides leadership and supervision to the NA Strategic Key Accounts and serves as a contributor on the regional leadership team

Job Responsibilities

Live the Safety Stand of Owens Corning and adhere to safety responsibilities

• Implements a personal safety action plan and review with his/her leader
• Ensures rigorous understanding & compliance to standard safety procedures and OC corporate policies
• Act as an OC steward inside or outside of the group facilities to promote safety on his/her daily activities
  
  

Knowing Our Customers

• Develops an intimate insight and knowledge about his/her key accounts and the related nonwoven market in general. Identifies trends, values creation opportunities and key actions to execute of his/her commercial plan and overall Key Account strategy.
• Owns the relationship with his/her strategic key accounts and builds a strong network at all levels within their organization connecting the dots with their OC functional counterparts; based on personal integrity, trust and respect. Continuously expands business wider and deeper with desire to achieve exposure to key personnel, strategic goals, operating model and business plans.
• Has frequent interactions with customer stakeholders & within the OC Matrix to coordinate alignment for actions and applies strategical tactics and key actions when required.
  
  

Strategy development

• Supports development of a long-term strategy with short and middle term milestones in coordination with the main stakeholders (product management, strategic marketing, S&T, CST, supply chain, and Operations)
• Participates and brings value to the design & execution of the regional growth strategy by collecting relevant data (customer insights, competitor insights, economic and industry data, etc) to understand customer needs and challenges
• Partnering with Product management, Application Engineers, and others he/she analyzes and incorporates the customer data to ensure the competitiveness of our solutions and help customers win by offering new insights and perspectives
• Partners with PM, CE, and others within the organization to define customer segmentation model and appropriate customer offer/activities based on needs and organizational goals
• Works with PM and CE closely to support creation of value proposition in the customer language to deliver truly differentiated value to the strategic key accounts
  
  

Executing Strategy

• Manages his/her strategic account portfolio in accordance with the NWS regional commercial strategy to optimize revenue, gross margin and reach the overall growth target
• Executes & delivers the strategy for his/her key customer(s): sales targets and tactics to reach goals while leading a KAM team (i.e. cross functional team supporting his/her account(s) (SC, CE, product Mgt, S&T, Application engineering, Ops by removing barrier to execution, escalate for resources allocation & fast decision making when needed
• Develops and plans account activities; prioritizes and coordinates opportunities; develops, communicates and monitors sales forecasts to ensure accuracy and execution. Track variances and analyze.
• Displays account leadership by using the SAMA competency model
• Supports the Commercial Director for the creation and execution of the annual sales plan.
• Seeks to understand potential short-term threats or opportunities.
• Manages the forecast process for his/her key accounts, follows up on the day-to-day sales and checks performance vs. plan.
• Coordinates frequent reviews on his/her key accounts and updates account plans
• Utilizes pricing analytical tools and frameworks on a regular basis to suggest pricing decisions in collaboration with Commercial Excellence, Finance, and Product management to drive margin improvement for OC
• Prepares and updates high-quality key account negotiation planning/playbooks throughout the year to drive successful negotiations of LTA’s (Long Term Agreements)
• Leads effective negotiations within the guidelines of consultative selling principles - teaching customers, tailoring our proposal and taking control of the negotiation
• Effectively drives the profitability of individual customers aligned with the overall market segment strategy
  
  

Understanding Customer Needs

• Identifies customer’ unmet needs
• Provides solutions where our company’s capabilities overlap with the needs of our customers using an enterprise mindset
• Working with Strategic marketing - Understands customer objectives well enough to describe the value we create in their language, not ours and translate it in a $ value
• Confidently influences stakeholders at all levels within the customers’ organization
• Provides consultative selling expertise to customers by acting in a “Trusted Advisor” role:
• Partnering with customers to understand how our value drives their competitive position
• Supporting customer in identifying and overcoming resistance to change within their organization
• Helping customers formulate their buying criteria
• Demonstrating curiosity to identify customer insights and opportunities to capture fair value for Owens Corning
• portfolio
• Utilizes appropriate market intelligence information to stay current on emerging market trends
  
  

Job Requirements

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS :

• A minimum of 5 years of sales experience in a B2B environment
  
  

Preferred Experience

• A proven track record in Account Management experience, managing and growing large accounts
• Experience in the NA building materials market preferred
• Nonwovens segments and application knowledge/experience preferred
• Experience communicating value proposition from the perspective of the customer
• Experience building/managing customers and relationships at all levels of an organization
• Solid sales track record in a business to business environment for technical products with long sales cycles
• Experience in financial tracking, sales forecasting, and margin enhancement
• Participation in the development of strategic plans
• Strong experience in customer contract negotiations seeking the win:win scenario
• Experience operating in a multi-cultural business across geographic boundaries preferred
• Experience increasing margins through aggressive management of price, mix and volume
• Marketing and selling new products and services; attracting new customers
  
  

Knowledge, Skills & Abilities

Knowledge and Skills

• Strategic account management
• Indirect leadership and influence
• Team player: knows how to contribute toward team success
• Competitive, highly motivated and results driven, with a strong work ethic
• Strong business and financial acumen with demonstrated analytical ability
• Strong negotiator & ability to manage complex & long term contractual relationships
• Demonstrated ability to think strategically and execute strategic directions
• Broad operating style, ability to adapt across cultures, environments and styles
• Demonstrated ability to develop an intimate knowledge of customers, competition, and the market
• Value Selling & Communication
• Creative, uses a wide variety of methods/techniques to solve problems
• Project Management (with ability to create rationale business cases)
• Ability to understand technical concepts and applications
• Ability to travel up to 60% of the time
  
  

Abilities And Personal Characteristics

• Customer oriented
• Excellent presentation skills
• Compete on analytics: can leverage data, ideas and experience to come to sound decisions
• Results driven
• Energetic and engaging
• Autonomous and self-starter
• High integrity