Experienced account, project and customer success manager
I’ve gained a great deal of new skills and experience during my career thus far. Along the way: I’ve received a customer award; 2 ‘Employee of the Month’ awards; I’ve gained exclusivity of a category, which the company had never had before; I’ve managed to secure a meeting with a buyer that my company had been trying to engage with for 5 years previously; and I’ve hit or excelled every annual target I’ve been given – even surpassing it in 8 months in a new sector in which I had no prior experience. Find out more below.
My skills & experience
Customer relationship management and customer success come naturally to me. I’ve got experience in managing high value accounts ranging from £1m to £32m. I’ve won a customer award from a large UK retailer, and I am regularly complimented on my work by partners or clients – both verbally and in writing. I’ve spent a significant proportion of my career working in the Head Office of partners or clients, as the primary contact for their employees who required my company’s services. I also have experience using customer management tools such as Salesforce and Raiser’s Edge.
I’ve project managed in every role I’ve had. I’ve gained experience in a varying range of projects, such as managing products for new store openings, sourcing new products for clients and campaigns, building websites for SMEs and managing corporate sponsored charitable programmes. I have experience with Gantt charts, and project management tools such as Wrike, Trello and Smartsheet.
I’m not your stereotypical new business manager / sales hunter. I like to take a softer approach, leaning on my psychology degrees and building an immediate type of trust. This has been successful for me, and has so far resulted in key successes such as winning one piece of business worth £1.2m and winning exclusivity of a category for my company. I am very familiar with sales pipelines and am experienced with Salesforce.
As an account and project manager for a food company and a company that supplied the largest UK grocery retailers, risk and issue management was of upmost importance. Countless times I’ve managed possible risks and I’ve resolved numerous issues that have threatened to disrupt a project. To prevent one such issue, I’ve even driven for 7 hours after work one evening to ensure a new store had a particular product in time for their opening the following morning.
I am confident and comfortable presenting in front of a small group of potential clients or a room full of people. In my role as a corporate account manager for an East London charity, I regularly attended evening events held by global banks or law firms and spoke to large groups of invitees. In other roles, I’ve also gained experience in delivering presentations to buyers.
I started working for an online digital marketing company in September 2016 project managing the build of new websites for small and medium businesses and enterprises. As well as consulting with clients about what content they’d like and how they’d like their website to look, and briefing developers and designers, I also advise clients on how best to market their product, service or business on their website and I work closely with our partner to ensure we are meeting key milestones.
In almost every role to date, I’ve gained experience in data analysis and gap analysis. In one such of my roles, I was managing over 2,000 SKUs for a partner and was responsible for ensuring forecasts and projections were as accurate as possible, as well as being targeted for growth of categories within the SKUs. In another role, I developed a gap analysis tool to allow me to sift through thousands of lines of detail to identify trends or missing opportunities.
In my current role, I advise clients on how best to optimise their business online, and research and provide copywriters with keywords and key locations to inject into copy.
In my current role and previous roles, I’ve earned experience in proofreading press releases, website copy and high value proposals and bids. I have an eye for detail when it comes to QA checks, particularly when building websites with complicated functionality.
In my role as a Senior Corporate Account Manager for a charity, I directly line-managed our Marketing Officer. I had ultimate responsibility for all published marketing materials, website and social media posts and was responsible for the development and progression of the Marketing Officer.
Leaning on my psychology degrees, I have a natural ability when it comes to negotiating. With experience of working with 3 of the 4 largest UK grocery retailers whereby price is arguably the most important factor, my negotiating skills have developed further.
I have been writing and piecing together proposals and briefs in every role I’ve had over the last 9 years. My experience of writing compelling partner proposals for a charity has only benefitted me – particularly so because as a charity, the partner does not gain any goods or services in return. In my current role, I write briefs for developers, designers and copywriters – all of which require a unique and different style to ensure accuracy of the required project.
“Ross is one of those guys that everyone in the workplace instantly warms to; he’s friendly, good fun to be around and has a great work ethic. When he started at Community Links he made a good impression fast during what was a high pressure period of change. Ross calmly went about it his work and took it all in his stride without even breaking a sweat. He forged good, strong relationships with his peers but most importantly he forged relationships built on trust with his corporate accounts who had nothing but good things to say about him. Ross will always go on to do great things and I think all of my former colleagues would agree with me when I say he’ll be an asset to any company that is fortunate enough to hire him.”
Jon Rodriguez
Fundraising and Project Manager