Retail/CPG Senior Customer Success Manager

About Alkemics

Alkemics is a B2B business platform enabling retailers to discover, negotiate and launch new products from their 1000+ suppliers.

In Europe alone, millions of products are launched every year, each with up to 500 attributes and made by one of 300,000+ manufacturers. Prior to Alkemics, establishing a commercial relationship required numerous back-and-forths between retailers and brands, physically (in trade shows, for instance) or pseudo-digitally (fax, email, XLS templates...) and between various teams (procurement, category management, quality, CSR, e-commerce, marketing...). Because of this painful process, it often took more than 60 days to launch a product. This situation is unsustainable at a time where consumers are demanding a broader product choice, more local products, where Amazon and Alibaba are raising the bar of omnichannel efficiency, and at a time where Lidl and Aldi are setting a standard for productivity.

Alkemics disrupted the space with a fully digital platform where brands create and share their product catalog. Retailers can explore those catalogs and run business workflows, searches or reportings to select, negotiate and list those products in their assortment. Once a retailer is on-boarded, invites are sent to that retailer’s suppliers to join the platform on a freemium basis, enabling quick network growth.

Alkemics was founded in Paris in 2012. With 98 out of the top 100 CPG manufacturers (Nestlé, Unilever, L’Oréal), the 7 largest retailers in France (E. Leclerc, Carrefour, Casino, Auchan, U-Enseigne, Cora, Metro…) and 4 of the largest UK retailers (Tesco, Ocado, Waitrose, Sainsbury) using the platform, Alkemics now holds a very strong and unchallenged position in the French and UK market. The business is now expanding internationally, starting with DACH and BENELUX. Along with international growth, the focus of the business is to leverage its platform and client relationships to build an end-to-end B2B marketplace with the ultimate vision of ordering directly within the platform.

Alkemics raised a total of $50M from tier-1 investors Index Ventures, Partech Ventures, Serena Capital and Cathay Innovation. Its latest funding round took place in April 2020, bringing in Highland Europe, a leading Growth VC. The business is made of 100 employees and is growing extremely rapidly.

Background

Online marketplaces are now commonplace for C2C and B2C markets. This trend has started in B2B sectors too, driving tremendous value and economies of scale. Today, thanks to a captive user base, Alkemics is in a strong position to “platformize” the notoriously difficult retail space. Brands are keen to have their products discovered in a more efficient and elegant way. Retailers are interested in negotiating products more quickly. Brands also want to better control the product introductions within each store.

Your role

Our product helps retailers and manufacturers digitalize their relationships to keep up with the accelerating pace of retail. Multiple teams at each customer coordinate on our platform to run business-critical operations. Collaborating with the sales, marketing, product and services teams, you will contribute to Alkemics' growth by turning a technological solution into sustainable value generation for customers:

• You will help customers adopt our platform, transform their processes and re-organize around our platform to fully digitize their B2B relationships.
• You will integrate into the customer landscape, spending time with their teams to impulse and coordinate the right projects.
• You will evangelize customers, all across the organization, from CxO to end-users. Your understanding of retail will be key to build meaningful conversations with decision makers.
• You will identify and understand customer's business objectives and strategic projects - and turn them into value-creation opportunities and upsells.
• You will setup and manage those projects in a thorough and effective way, in order to maximize value for customers and speed of adoption.
• You will prove the value delivered by those projects through detailed cost-benefit analysis.
• You will help users and decision makers shine through success stories and case studies.
• You will feed learnings back to Alkemics to further consolidate our sales materials and educate the team.
• You will work closely with the product and engineering team to enable a tight feedback loop between customer feedbacks and product roadmap

• 7-10 years of experience in E-Commerce, Digital project management, category Management or Key Account Manager for major retailer or CPG company
• Proven history of being a consistent top performer
• Excellent at driving customer in complex projects requiring cross-functional coordination and stakeholder alignment
• Ability to grow trusting relationships with CxOs
• Sharp customer management and project management skills
• Good communication skills to interact with senior executives across large organizations
• Perfectly fluent in both English and French