Senior Strategic Account Manager at Afresh
As the Senior Strategic Accounts Manager, you will serve as the General Manager for our company’s most critical assets: the partnerships with one of our largest customers. This is a senior individual contributor role that demands exceptional strategic acumen, political navigation, and financial ownership. You will be responsible for transforming these relationships from vendor-customer to indispensable, long-term partners, ensuring Afresh is central to their mission to revolutionize fresh food operations.
Key Responsibilities
Strategic Partnership Mandate
Sole Owner of Revenue, Retention, and Expansion Targets: Directly own the financial health and growth of a strategic account portfolio. Your mandate is to secure 100% retention on an existing super-enterprise account while driving year-over-year expansion through the identification and development of new sales opportunities.
C-Suite Relationship Management: Establish and maintain relationships with a multi-threaded network of executive sponsors, up to the C-suite level (e.g., CEO, COO, CIO), to ensure sustained advocacy and clear alignment on multi-year strategic goals.
Customer Quarterback: Serve as the single point of accountability for all external interactions, owning the comprehensive view of all customer-facing initiatives and internal priorities.
Continuous Strategic Discovery: Lead consistent and frequent executive-level discovery sessions to maintain a deep, evolving understanding of the customer’s strategic business priorities, critical pain points, and target ideal state. You will act as an internal translator, articulating the value of Afresh's solution suite in the customer’s own language and financial terms to ensure solutions are perfectly mapped and advocacy is organic.
Trusted Advisor: Serve as a thought leader in the retail/grocery technology space, advising clients on how to leverage Afresh's AI to achieve massive business transformation, specifically in driving profitability and efficiencies across their fresh supply chain.
Executive Business Reviews: Design and lead sophisticated, data-driven Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) that focus on achieved ROI, joint operational metrics, and forward-looking strategic planning, not just product updates.
Internal Advocacy & Alignment
Executive Coordination: Act as the primary orchestrator between the customer's leadership and Afresh’s executive team, specifically coordinating our CEO, President, and Chief Revenue Officer to assist with complex stakeholder mapping and relationship building.
Product Strategy Alignment: Partner closely with Afresh’s Product organization to ensure our development roadmap remains aligned with the critical, high-impact needs of our largest customers, influencing the future direction of our technology roadmap.
Operational Excellence: Collaborate with our Operations team to monitor system performance, identify opportunities for optimization, and ensure the customer realizes the maximum value and benefit from their Afresh investment. Help the team prioritize the efforts most aligned to the customer’s strategic needs.
Mentorship & Coaching: Act as a mentor and thought partner to the broader Account Management team, providing coaching, sharing best practices, and developing playbooks for complex enterprise engagement.
Commercial Execution
Commercial Leadership: Lead highly complex, multi-million dollar negotiations for multi-year renewals and expansion contracts, including developing and navigating unique commercial structures and legal terms.
Full Sales Cycle Ownership: Run the full sales cycle for new opportunities within the existing account footprint (upsell/expansion/cross-sell), from identifying need to negotiation and closure. Leverage our Product, Marketing, and Sales Engineering organizations as needed to ensure a seamless sales cycle.
Strategic Commercial Defense: Proactively analyze the account's total addressable spend and potential "build vs. buy" threats. Develop creative and non-standard commercial architectures to maximize long-term revenue while neutralizing incentives for in-house alternatives.
Marketing: Develop internal and external communication plans to broadly disseminate the value of Afresh's partnership throughout the customer's organization.
Partnership Evangelism: Systematically transform executive sponsors into active, high-impact evangelists. Ensure executive sponsors will act as industry referrals. Drive joint marketing initiatives, including co-authored case studies, executive video testimonials, and joint press releases, to leverage customer success as a powerful market validator.
Skills and Experience
The following represent the skills and experience our ideal candidate possesses. We encourage candidates to apply, even if they do not fulfill all the listed criteria.
8+ years of progressive experience in enterprise sales or strategic account management within a technology company that services legacy industries, with an emphasis on supply chain or retail/grocery related technology or on technology for mission critical parts of your customers’ operations.
5+ years of dedicated experience managing a portfolio of the most strategic accounts, with a proven history of owning multi-eight-figure ARR accounts.
Demonstrated track record of achieving high retention (95%+) and significant expansion within a strategic account base.
Proven ability to understand complex technology solutions and platforms, and a demonstrated track record of using value selling to address the needs of different economic decision makers within an organization.
Exceptional executive presence, proven success in engaging and influencing C-suite leaders across various functions (e.g., Technology, Operations, Merchandising, Finance).
Proven ability to navigate organizational complexity and internal politics to drive cross-functional alignment on behalf of the customer.
Experience in coaching or mentoring sales/account management professionals.
Proven ability to operate with autonomy in a fast paced start-up environment.
Excellent verbal and written communication, presentation, and relationship management skills.
Ability to travel up to 40% to meet the needs of a strategic, geographically dispersed customer portfolio.
BA/BS required.