VP Customer & Commercial Strategy

Downers Grove, IL, United States

Who We Are

With over 11,000 employees at over 40 facilities across US & Europe, Hearthside Food Solutions is one of the fastest growing food companies and the industry’s largest contract manufacturer. Our secret to success? Our people. We know an investment in our people is an investment in our company. We strive to understand our team members and support them however we can. By empowering employees through skill development and career advancement opportunities, we emphasize a culture of continuous improvement – both for the business and our people. We want team members that will support us in owning safety together – speaking up when they see a problem. When we focus on our people and safety, it ensures we all are driving better performance as well as on time delivery to our customers!

What We Want to Give You

We offer a competitive wage and wide array of benefits including: • health/dental/vision insurance • flex spending accounts • short & long-term disability • paid holidays and vacation • bonus opportunities (referral, production, etc.).

Role Summary

The Vice President Customer & Commercial Strategy is a high-visibility strategic partner that supports the creation and execution of commercial strategies and initiatives, provides support for effective decision-making, and provides insights and competitive intelligence to market our business and achieve our growth objectives. The VP Customer & Commercial Strategy will create the “commercial engine” which is a framework for efficient and effective customer and category management. This position is part of the Executive Leadership Team reporting to the CEO and in close partnership with the Chief Customer Officer.

Responsibilities

Build and lead a team that executes on four main priorities to fuel our commercial engine – Market facing pressure, Business Intelligence, External Insights, and Digital Connectivity

Translate the vision and long-term goals of the business into customer and commercial strategies and business plans to provide a roadmap to disruptive growth for the organization

Track industry, customer, category and competitive trends, strategies and behavior, develop forecasting models to identify customer opportunities, business threats and solutions to create our competitive advantage and drive future growth

In collaboration with the sales organization, develop the go-to market (GTM) plans inclusive of our strategic customer proposition, pricing, channels to market, and customer targeting utilizing market research, analytics, insights and tangible benchmarks to achieve revenue and profit targets.

Lead the marketing activities of the company building awareness and strengthening our reputation while building a presence for HFS and outsourcing of manufacturing and assembly in the industry.

Support the sales organization with marketing material that highlight “why Hearthside” and builds a compelling competitive advantage story.

Execute a website rebranding that provides lead generation, capability content, and increased search results.

Develop Customer & Commercial Strategy routines and reporting to connect the strategic enterprise metrics through the sales teams with emphasis down to our customers and categories.

Provide key operational, people and financial insights to customer teams to enhance the customer value chain, becoming an invaluable partner and unlocking transformational projects.

In collaboration with Operations and Sales, identify opportunities to sell capacity and optimize network flexibility to leverage size and scale (i.e. by product line, geography, customer, etc.)

Utilize technology to become a virtual extension of our customers’ supply chain by enhancing our value proposition driving customer satisfaction, operational efficiency and stickiness through automation, digitization and information transparency.

Integrate with the customer's supply chain through superior service, technology-driven quality assurance, traceability, consistency, and brand recognition

Develop the commercial engine framework to drive our vision, strategies, and transformational change initiatives. This includes creating content, providing context, and helping build connections across the organization to create opportunities and growth

Partner with the business to establish customer commercial strategies and insight to help drive margin expansion through cost reduction, new product or service offering, go-to-market strategy, capital optimization strategies and strategic partnerships

Support the annual and 3 year business planning process with enterprise strategic objectives that support the financial goals of the company.

Qualifications

Minimum 7-10 year experience in the areas of customer management, commercial strategy and insights, marketing and commercial finance

Advanced knowledge of business software including Powerpoint, Excel

Effective verbal and written communications skills, for both internal and external audiences.

Detailed oriented

Minimum Skills Required

Entrepreneurial spirit and a self-starter who is eager and effective at solving problems

Strong interpersonal and team leadership skills

Ability to work in a fast-paced, highly independent environment and juggle multiple ongoing projects, responsibilities, and relationships. Able to easily connect with people with different backgrounds and skillsets and drive productive dialogue among your peers.

Comfortable holding team members accountable to project deadlines and identifying areas in need of support; Proven experience organizing and directing multiple team members

Exceptional organizational, time management, and verbal and written communication skills

Extremely versatile, dedicated to efficient productivity, organized and have the ability to multitask

Proven success in a business operations leadership role

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