Account Manager at Nokia

General Purpose

Sales Professional with technical and business understanding of telecoms solutions, responsible for generating orders and revenues by selling Nokia’s solutions to customers.

Main Responsibility Area

• Acts as a main contact point for Airtel Africa, in particular for IP and ON Transport business.
• Understands customers’ strategic direction and associated business plans
• Implements Nokia’s account strategy.
• Identifies, develops & wins new sales opportunities for Nokia
• Sales and marketing support with wide technical system level expertise and deep business understanding.
• Expert in selling/marketing and system solutions knowledge. Contributing to relationship management.
• Creating long-term business development plans and positioning of technology strategy, solutions and products to match with customer needs.
• Develops understanding of customers’ key business drivers and uses this knowledge for creating profitable business opportunities and growth in market share for Nokia
• Fulfills Nokia’s process for presales offer lifecycle management and quarterly forecast
• Proactively identifies, develops & wins Nokia business in line with Nokia growth and profitability targets; and grow market share.
  • Managing Deals
  • Understands the customer’s commercial, operational & technology challenges & opportunities.
  • Translates market knowledge into business opportunities
  • Negotiates and closes deals to achieve orders’ targets.
  • Owns the accounts pipeline/funnel and opportunity data in pipeline management tool.
  • Develops account plans and ensures Nokia’s multi business groups’ resources are aligned to execute the plans.
  • Identifies efforts that will have the greatest strategic impact
• Account Management
  • Builds & manages trust-based, long-term relationships with customers’ Technical, Logistics departments and management teams.
  • Positions Nokia as a preferred solution and services partner.
  • Articulates in clear and effective manner value proposition of services to customer
  • Negotiates Customer contracts in alignment with commercial and legal organizations (Acceptance, SoR, payment terms, etc.)
  • Communicates clearly the progress of monthly/quarterly initiatives (account plan, LE etc.) to internal and external stakeholders

Key Interfaces:

• CBT/CT Head
• CO Head of Sales
• Business Groups Pre-sales and Delivery
• Head of Technologies
• Strategy & Sales Ops
• Pricing Manager
• Legal
• F&C
• Customer CxO
• Customer procurement

USE ONE OR MORE OF THE BELOW KEY COMPETENCIES BASED ON THE BG SALES REQUIREMENTS

Key Technology Competencies and interaction with Business Group (ION)

• Co-develops ION Sales Strategy plan, review opportunities and funnel and problem solve on new opportunities within and outside existing portfolio
• Proactively requests ION BG support and receives coaching as appropriate from BG HoSs
• Shares best practices with ION and CO community
• Deep understanding, and ability to convey, the unique selling points related to the IP & ON solutions: (IP routing, Optical transmission, Video solutions, EPC)
• Excellent knowledge of the ION Products and Services catalogue.
• Good command of the typical business cases involving IP, ON and EPC product and solutions.
• Knowledge key-selling points of the main IP & ON competitors

Requirements

• Master's degree in engineering, telecommunications, business or a related field.
• Ability to communicate efficiently in both English and French.
• Minimum of 5 years experience in leading relevant teams in areas of account management, products, solutions and services sales experience in the telecommunication industry. Overall experience in telecommunication industry, 15-20 years
• Experience and knowledge of the Africa Telecom industry and experience in managing relationship with Airtel Group.
• Proven track record in meeting and exceeding sales targets within assigned territories.
• Efficient with CRM tools (CRM / Salesforces.com for pipeline / funnel management) and MS tools (Excel, PowerPoint and Word).

Key Competencies

• Consultative Selling & Customer Business Understanding
• Nokia end to end portfolio knowledge & natural interest to keep up to date on technological and market evolution as well as competitors’ activities
• Relationship Management and ability to identify all stakeholders and understand their communications needs and feedback
• Ability to lead cross-functional teams under time constraint / stress scenarios.
• Winning mindset, embrace challenges.
• Smart tendering, negotiation and Sales techniques, Sales Process Understanding.
• Understanding of the major key-points of Nokia’s standard contracts.
• Strategic mindset.
• Competitor Intelligence and Market Insight.
• Customer Business Case and Solution Creation, Sales Presentation.
• Bid Management, Customer Pricing, Sales Negotiation.