Salesforce Platform Associate

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.

Opportunity

Our product helps retailers (ex: Auchan, Casino, Tesco, Ocado...) digitize their commercial relationship with their 1000s of suppliers (ex: Nestlé, Unilever and countless SMBs...). Retailers load a directory of their suppliers onto the platform, and the platform then automatically reconciles them with the 5000+ suppliers already integrated – or invites them to onboard the platform on a freemium basis. If some suppliers are unresponsive, our onboarding team calls them to investigate. This requires the seamless execution of onboarding and training campaigns through marketing automation tools (Customer.io, Hubspot). Once onboarded, and in order to accelerate their collaboration with retailers, suppliers are guided to become power users of the platform. This requires using analytics (Segment.com, MixPanel, a custom integration on an in-house analytics system) to monitor their progress and derive learnings on how to further improve UX (Satismeter, Elev.io...). Once they have become power users, we score them based on various criterions in order to prioritize the work of our Inside Sales team in Salesforce. We measure progress along the sales cycle until a transaction is made (Stripe, Salesforce CPQ). Those analytics are aggregated to be presented through dashboards to the entire company, from the individual contributor up to the board.

As you can see, systems are a critical part of our marketing, commercial and financial efficiency. Your role as Salesforce Administrator is fundamental to the overall performance of Alkemics. This is a significant opportunity to be a key enabler for all the teams of a high-growth company. Collaborating with the leadership team and our internal Foundation Team, you will contribute to Alkemics’ growth by designing, implementing, maintaining and improving the entire marketing, commercial and financial software stack, based on leading tools like Salesforce.com and Hubspot. You will be a prime contributor to the design of this stack. You will work as part of the engineering team to tightly integrate this stack with the product.

Moving forward, systems will become increasingly important in deriving insights to inform and impact the strategy of the company.

Key responsibilities

• Key contributor to Roadmap, design and specification of systems.
• Implementation and maintenance/support of systems.
• Optimisation and enhancements of systems and processes (ex. workflow automations...).
• Interfaces to production systems and other tools.
• Overall responsibility for design, setup and accuracy of reporting and dashboards.
• Overall responsibility for access, licence and user management of these tools.
• Opportunity to expand to a Sales Ops role.

Key requirements

• Minimum of 1 year of experience in a Force.com environment and developer toolkit - Apex, VisualForce, Web Services/SOA & Metadata APIs
• Qualification in IT or engineering a plus.
• Force.com developer certificate or demonstrable expertise of Salesforce systems.
• Ability to engage and work closely with business owners to meet their demands.
• Process and data driven with a clear orientation towards best practice.
• Previous exposure to sales/customer processes in a high volume B2B/B2C environment a big plus.
• Working language is English, knowledge of French a plus.
• Ultimate collaborator with proven problem-solving skills and an ability to work cross functionally at all levels.
• Exposure to multicultural environments.