Manager Key Accounts

About Kennametal

With over 80 years as an industrial technology leader,Kennametal Inc.delivers productivity to customers through materials science, tooling and wear-resistant solutions. Customers across aerospace and defense, earthworks, energy, general engineering and transportation turn toKennametalto help them manufacture with precision and efficiency. Every day approximately8,700 employees are helping customers in nearly 100 countries stay competitive.Kennametalgenerated$2.1 billionin revenues in fiscal 2023. Learn more atwww.kennametal.com. Follow @Kennametal: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube.

Manager Key Accounts

Location - Remote within the United States

Travel - up to 50%

Job Summary
Builds, manages, and maintains effective long-term relationships with assigned large key account customer base to meet or exceed annual sales and profitability targets. Typically has a limited number of key/strategic accounts and cultivates relationships with clients at the management level (senior or executive) with a national or International focus. This role supports KMT regional sales engineers and inside sales personnel at local key customer sites as required to drive success throughout key customer organization. This position is responsible for identifying, developing, and closing new sales opportunities including contracts, discount structure and/or marketing programs. Serves as a primary interface for all products, strategy, programs, support, marketing, and training for key customers.

Key Job Responsibilities

• Builds solid customer relationships with strategic large accounts typically involving complex national customer, multi-national enterprise and/or major global account.
• Creates demand for the organization's products and services by raising the KMT profile with customers.
• Leads regular status and strategy meetings with the customer's senior management team to align products/services with customer needs.
• Addresses customer action items and concerns within timely manner.
• Develop strategy, sales plans, budgets to achieve sales goals with Key Accounts.
• Identifies new sales opportunities for growth within assigned accounts.
• Gathers key customer input for new product development and communicates to product management team.
• Supports new product development programs through identification of field trial sites and actively solicits key account customer feedback to support product launch and value proposition development.
• Develops, drives, communicates strategies to close the sale and grow the business to achieve/exceed revenue, margin, and overall sales and margin targets.
• Partners with regional segment management who gather business intelligence and business trends to set strategy and create demand for organizations products & services.
• Partners with regional sales teams and local sales staff to develop implementation plans to execute sales strategies and programs for specific large, complex, regional key/strategic large accounts.
• Supports inside sales partners assigned to local key account sites.
• Supports enterprise selling and global account initiatives and manage contacts and price harmonization.
• Utilizes customer relationship management (CRM) tools to document and manage customer activity.
• Completes required sales training modules (CRM, large account management, etc.)

Requirements

• 8-10 Years in related industries or materials
• 5+ years of sales experience preferred, particularly in large direct and/or channel accounts with proven complex relationship skills.
• Bachelor of Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Materials Engineering or related field / experience required.
• Knowledge of business unit industries is preferred: Metal Cutting
• Ability to create demand through insight, influencing, planning & organizing
• Self-starter and self-sufficient requiring little supervision for decision making, account planning and advancing sales discussions
• Excellent interpersonal skills including active listening and building trusting relationships.
• Excellent business sense and decision-making skills leveraging data and strategic thinking.
• Completion of structured selling courses / training program preferred

Equal Opportunity Employer