Account Strategist — Chicago

Posted June 17, 2011

We are looking for high-energy individuals with outstanding interpersonal skills to join our Account Services team as an Account Strategist, responsible for obtaining, managing, and strengthening partnerships with a broad base of clients ranging from medium to large organizations. This position also serves as a client advocate to the internal XPLANE Team and champions XPLANE’s offerings to the client. You must be able to focus on the client’s overall business strategy but also work with the project teams to resolve issues during client projects. The ideal candidate will be a motivated self-starter who meets or exceeds sales targets, is results oriented, and is great with follow-through. You should have proven experience working in a client-facing account management role with demonstrable account growth resulting from your efforts.

Essential Duties:

• Develops, manages, and maintains relationships with existing and potential medium-sized and large corporate clients. Reviews and defines client’s needs and pricing arrangements.
• Follows up on leads, creates proposals and closes the sale. Works with senior account managers and project managers to accurately scope, price, and resource projects.
• Monitors and advises business development team of competitive movement. Maintains sales management database, including client contact information, activity history, tracking wins/losses and monitoring individual sales goals. Assists in the creation of accurate revenue forecasts and in the resolution of client billing issues.
• Creates and presents new XPLANE service offerings. Works with marketing to develop new sales materials and case studies for clients.
• Facilitates teamwork between the client and project management team. Shepherds client through XPLANE’s organizational and creative process. Represents client’s interests to the project team. Resolves any client concerns with project deliverables.
• Frequent travel – up to 50%, domestically and, on occasion, internationally.

Requirements & Responsibilities:

• 5+ years prior experience in account management, sales or business development. Creative services experience preferred.
• Bachelor’s degree in Business or Marketing preferred.
• Advanced business acumen. Experience in quickly discerning a client’s needs, business, and core values. Ability to comprehend complex business issues.
• Expertise in business development, including cross-selling, prospecting for leads, identifying appropriate solutions, negotiating sales price and closing the sale. Previous experience selling and managing accounts in consulting and/or creative services is a big plus.
• Excellent interpersonal, presentation, and teamwork skills. Excellent written and oral communication skills are required to communicate with diverse groups and individuals. Ability to work well under pressure.

Supervisory Responsibility – Medium
Individuals in this role will occasionally oversee the work of others but will serve as the client liaison to the team.

Client Responsibility – High
Individuals in this role will continually have contact with XPLANE clients, and are accountable for client satisfaction.

Decision-Making Responsibility – Medium
The decisions a person in this role makes can have direct impact on client satisfaction, XPLANE financials, and project metrics.

Job Competencies:

Client Management
Build relationship with clients to create and capture value. Listen and understand clients’ needs. Demonstrate credibility, responsibility, reliability, and trustworthiness to clients.

Job Knowledge-Sales
Utilizes persuasiveness, negotiations, presentation skills, and appropriate interpersonal styles and methods to gain agreement or acceptance of an idea, plan, activity or product. Mastery of the concepts and skills needed to perform the work and capacity to learn more. Understand how XPLANE works and what it does and be able to interpret it for use within the context of the client’s needs.

Judgment & Decision Making
Makes decisions while exhibiting judgment and a realistic understanding of issues; ability to use reason, even when dealing with emotional topics. Weighs alternative courses of action and makes decisions that reflect factual information and are based on rational and logical assumptions that take organizational resources into consideration.

Organization & Planning
Establishes a course of action for self or others to accomplish a specific goal. Takes a methodical approach to planning and guiding project processes and resources from start to finish.

Motivation/Initiative
Self-management, takes responsibility for personal job performance. Has demonstrated record of being a self-starter and self-motivated. Actively seeks opportunities to make a contribution rather than passively accepting situations. Takes action to achieve goals beyond what is necessarily called for; originates action. Maintains a high level of interest and enthusiasm for job responsibilities.

Interested? Go here to apply: http://xplane.catchthebest.com/apply/6b2b/7dae.