Vendor Sales Director - AI Solutions

Group Vendor Sales Director – AI Solutions

UK based role – Ideally London and surrounding

Competitive Basic salary + Bonus + Car

Position overview

• The vendor sales team (VST) sits within the sales organisation and acts as a forward-looking senior team of relationship sellers, managing the overall relationship at a group level of Computacenter’s largest, strategic vendors. The team are focused on establishing and maintaining the highest level of partnership and sales collaboration to maintain continuous profitable growth.
• The VST is able to engage across all areas of Computacenter’s interaction with vendors and is responsible for aligning mutual strategies / commercial engagements / agreements / group contract management and complex deal negotiations at a group level. This is achieved by working across the sales communities, Group Partner Management (GPM) and relevant CC teams.
• The VST is responsible for creating group sales growth plans with clear measurable goals that deliver long-term profitable growth, future-proof relevance protection and managing the end-to-end relationships across all levels of the partnership. Sales plans must include all sales areas (TS, MS and, where possible, PS) and applicable vendor margins, investment opportunities & marketing programs.
• Coordination between partner management is a critical success factor and integral to the agreement with all programmatic agreements / discussions.
• This team has significant autonomy and requires the individual to work at all levels within the organisation – from grass roots to CXO.
• Revenue & pipeline tracking is a critical function to enable timely management of opportunities, investments and potential action plans to address performance gaps/opportunities
• Matrix management is the fundamental role of the VST to ensure all teams within Computacenter are aligned with vendor strategies & action plans – with clear ownership & accountability across all teams

What you’ll do

Strategy / Operational Efficiency & Service Quality / Relationships

• Contributes to business strategy in accordance with the Computacenter key strategies and corporate objectives to help grow and develop the business and prioritises projects and objectives accordingly
• Has a deep knowledge of the vendor’s requirements and controls commitments and timescales to vendor
• Serves as a role model for high quality vendor management & sales engagement
• Functions as the senior decision maker / resolver on complex issues and customer escalations, in coordination with local partner management and country sales units.
• Establishes productive relationships and networks at different levels to build and maintain internal and external customer relationships
• Effecting sell-to strategies for vendor engagement ensuring AI vendors understand Computacenter capabilities and differentiators from other SI /VAR competitors
• Understand all potential levers available to support cross solution AI deals – including MDF / rebates / Additional revenue support / POCs / Demo kit etc
• Assist in the identification of vendor led demand across vendor sales teams

Technology Focus Area

• AI Solution sales motions that enable CC sellers to engage with leading-edge AI vendors across all five solution areas with specific focus on Nvidia / Intel / AMD and Qualcomm.
• AI Edge – workplace
• AI Core – datacenter and netsec
• AI Cloud – cloud and apps

Adherence to policy

• Acts in accordance with Computacenter Information Security Policies and report any potential or actual Security events or other Security risks to the organisation
• Knows, applies and ensures that QHSE (Quality, Health, Safety and Environment rules, procedures, instructions, good practices and operating procedures are applied by all its teams
• Participates in the investigation of any incident or accident and proposes corrective actions
• Monitors performance indicators

Performance Indicator

• Vendor growth targets – by line of business (revenue & contribution)
• Vendor share of wallet – by line of business / customer segment (AI)
• Incremental revenue / soft margin streams identified and billed (not programmatic response rebates)
• Management of a matrixed organisation and the ability to manage KPIs across multiple geographies
• Projects/programmes effectively resourced, delivered and driven to increase profitability and secure growth
• Compliance with policies and procedures

What you’ll need

Essential

• Relevant qualification and 10+ years professional experience in a senior account management and/or comparable role
• Each vendor sales director must be experienced in relationship selling, sales negotiation and commercial contract negotiation in the technology sector. He or she would benefit from existing relationships and experience pertinent to the aligned vendor to enable fast-start progress once in position.
• Experience of leading multi-disciplinary, matrixed teams in multiple locations with similar process scope and working in hybrid mode
• Demonstrates a deep understanding of current and emerging market trends, geographic and cultural needs
• Strong experience with reports and other management tools
• Experience in project management
• Demonstrates experience in handling conflict management successfully
• Understands how key business drivers relate to one other and are impacted by competing course of actions
• Understands the impact that processes have on overall business objectives
• Understands interdependencies across business functions
• Ability to build effective and constructive relationships
• Proven ability to build and develop cross-functional teams that are widely respected for their overall contribution to an organisation
• Gains acceptance of ideas and suggestions from senior decision makers
• Demonstrates expert ability to influence the organisation and all stakeholders
• Negotiation skills
• Strong ability to successfully manage escalations as senior decision maker / resolver
• Team-oriented thinking and working
• High level of competence in moderating and motivating teams
• Ability to prioritise own workload and delegate
• Good command of spoken and written English, French or German
• English skills if not native language
• Preferred multi language capabilities – although not essential
• MS Office applications
• Willingness to travel

Desirable

• Solid knowledge of the IT industry and the ability to mirror customer requirements to IT solutions
• HIGH level understanding of AI vendors and solutions
• Experience in Service Management or Sales
• Experience in working with IT vendors