Account Manager

POSITION PURPOSE:

Develops and maintains relationships with existing ethanol plants and other ICM customers. Through these relationships, the account manager creates sales opportunities of ICM products and services by identifying and qualifying potential opportunities. Initializes, develops, and partners with ICM departments and other ICM partners as needed to close sales and enhance customer communication and overall sales experience.

ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS AND BASIC DUTIES:

• Manage defined sales territory and drive growth of ICM products and services.
• Build strong relationships with strategic contacts at customer facilities – plant level and corporate level as appropriate.

• Understand, anticipate, and communicate customer needs.

• Understand and discuss financial and operational opportunities with the customer to move customer in the ICM sales process while limiting the early engagement of other internal resources (e.g. Project Development, Technology Commercialization, Technology Development, etc.).

• Understanding of key benefits of technology to customers’ plant operations and ability to convey financial return on investment as well as operational advantages.
• Display a good working knowledge of ICM technologies while recommending best practices using a consultative sales approach.
• Interact with customers on a technical level for problem solving purposes.
• Develop customer relationships to understand needs/direction of customer and deliver message to internal stakeholders.
• Develop account strategies and recommendations to build enthusiasim for ICM products and service.
• When necessary, identify and utilize appropriate resources to implement sales account strategies by leveraging other ICM relationships and channels.
• Participate in development of short and long term sales forecasts and a plans to achieve them.
• Prepare annual review of strategies for priority customer accounts.
• Understand industry challenges and stay up to date with market information, including technical and financial market requirements and economic and political activities.
• Obtain and maintain working knowledge of ICM’s culture and internal processes such as:

• Efficiently document activity and mange assigned accounts.
• Maintain prompt and accurate sales pipeline forecasting.
• Increase and maintain knowledge of plant operations through participation in strategic customer start-ups, reoccurring training offered by ICM, and interaction with ICM subject matter experts from Technology Commercialization and Technology Development to understand and articulate the opportunity ICM technology can provide to customer’s operation.
• Provide competitive product, commercial, and market feedback to the company.
• Support execution of projects with project management staff and contribute to the overall team effort of ICM.

Knowledge & Experience:

• 3 years minimum of consultative technical selling experience preferred
• Technical process, chemical, manufacturing, research knowledge preferred
• 6 months Ethanol plant or other processing plant operations knowledge preferred
• 6 months Project Management or other construction management knowledge preferred

Education/Certification:

Bachelor degree in Engineering, Business, or Marketing preferred or equivalenttechnical and business experience

Travel:

Ability to travel to plants as needed, averaging about 50%.