Principal Account Manager

Summary:

The Principal Account Manager owns the results on the Company’s largest national accounts, including Fortune 500 retail and restaurant brands. These accounts are won and under contract, so the job is not to sell them, it is to make them succeed: strong relationships, reliable service, high satisfaction, and full retention. This person sets the direction for each account and is accountable for keeping it, keeping it satisfied, and making sure LES delivers what it promised at every site. The role carries no profit and loss ownership and no sales quota, but this person is responsible for the overall financial health of the assigned accounts. Success is measured by account retention, customer satisfaction, service performance, and account financial health.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Own the relationship and the overall success of a defined set of the Company’s largest national accounts. Set the direction for each account while Key Account Coordinators and Customer Service handle day-to-day requests.
• Build, maintain, and execute a written account plan for each account. The plan maps the customer’s decision-makers and influencers, sets service performance goals, tracks the renewal timeline, and lists the known risks and the actions against them.
• Build and hold trusted relationships with the customer’s procurement, facilities, operations, and finance leaders. Stay close enough to know their priorities before they turn into problems.
• Travel regularly to visit account locations in the field and to meet customer corporate teams in person. This is a field-facing role, not a desk role.
• Run regular business reviews. Show service performance against the metrics the customer cares about, raise issues early, and present the plan to fix them.
• Track service delivery against contract terms and service level commitments across every site. Hold LES operations accountable for hitting them.
• Own escalations. When a site is missed, a billing dispute opens, or a complaint comes in, take it through to resolution and report back to the customer.
• Own the overall financial health of each account, including revenue retention, billing accuracy, payment status, pricing compliance, and margin. This person does not hold the account P&L, but is accountable for keeping the account financially healthy. Flag problems to commercial leadership early and drive them to resolution.
• Protect the account at renewal. Know the contract dates, the competitive exposure, and the customer’s satisfaction level well before the renewal window opens.
• Capture organic growth as it comes up, such as new store openings, added locations, and additional services the customer needs at sites LES already serves.
• Coordinate new location onboarding and service rollouts. Work across operations, field teams, dispatch, and billing so the customer deals with one company, not five departments.
• Keep account records, contacts, service history, and activity current in the CRM so the rest of LES can see the full picture of the account.
• Report account status and risk to commercial leadership on a set schedule. No surprises.
• Represent the customer’s interests inside LES and represent LES’s interests to the customer. Hold both lines.

Knowledge, Skills and Ability Requirements:

• Proven record managing large, multi-site national accounts in the tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue.
• Strong relationships with senior customer stakeholders in procurement, facilities, and operations.
• Able to build a detailed account plan and execute against it, including mapping the decision-makers and influencers across a large, multi-site customer organization.
• Able to read a service performance report, a billing statement, and a margin analysis, and explain what each means to the customer and to LES leadership.
• Comfortable holding internal teams accountable without having direct authority over them.
• Calm and credible under escalation. Resolves problems rather than passing them along.
• Clear in writing and in person. Can run an executive business review and write a status report a busy customer will actually read.
• Organized and disciplined, with reliable follow-through across many open items and many locations.
• Fluent with CRM and reporting tools. Comfortable with data and with Excel.
  
  

Education and/or Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience (Required).
• Ten or more years of business-to-business account management or sales experience, with at least five years managing multi-location regional or national accounts in restaurant, grocery, retail, or facilities services (Required)
• Demonstrated record of retaining and growing large accounts and of keeping customer satisfaction high.