Customer Success Manager

Position Summary:

As the Manager of Customer Success, you will play a strategic role in helping customers discover what's next in food and supporting them along their Food Innovation journey. Our Customer Success managers work at the intersection of consumer trends, culinary innovation, product development and commercialization.  You'll help our customers bring new ideas to life - from identifying growth opportunities to supporting the development of innovative menu solutions.  You'll collaborate with chefs, marketers, researchers, product development, supply chain and sales teams to turn insights into action and create meaningful business impact for our customers.

Major Duties and Responsibilities:

• Innovation Service Delivery: Delivers Ventura Foods' innovation services with consistency, excellence and impact.  Partners with Culinary, Product Development, Marketing and Sales teams to identify emerging food trends, develop innovation concepts and deliver customer-ready solutions to drive growth. Creates experiences, supports brainstorms and ideations, which brings the message of food innovation and manufacturing expertise to life in innovative, memorable ways.
• Customer Account Management: Acts as the primary innovation contact for assigned customer accounts.  Builds and maintains strong customer partnerships, increases strategic relationships with the key customers through proactive & regular innovation content. Blends analytical skills and confidence working with consumer and industry data sources with a natural curiosity within the food and innovation space.  Enjoys working to uncover relevant consumer data that supports customer needs and discovers new opportunities and presents those opportunities in compelling ways.
• Project Management: Develops a strong understanding of product design, commercialization and the end-to-end innovation process to effectively guide customer opportunities from idea to reality.  Works closely with Product Development, Culinary, Marketing and Sales teams to understand what it takes to successfully develop, launch and scale innovative solutions.  Serves as an advocate for customer innovation projects, ensures concepts presented externally are grounded in operational feasibility and positioned for successful execution.  Drives alignment, tracks project progress and helps transform insights into ideas and real-world outcomes.
• Communication Skills: Delivers food innovation, consumer and menu trends content aligned with an annual calendar, provides value-added and impactful insights to a broad customer base. Can synthesize insights from multiple sources into clear, compelling and actionable recommendations that resonate with customers and inspire action. Demonstrates exceptional written, verbal and presentation skills with the ability to craft impactful narratives.
• Cultural Fit: Contributes in promoting a culture of creativity and continuous improvement. Builds trusted relationships with customers. Collaborate across functions (Culinary, Product Development, Category Marketing, Research, Digital Marketing, Commercialization and Sales) to deliver against the customer needs.  Works in a team environment, able to proactively bring stakeholders and cross-functional partners along.

Education and Experience:

• Bachelor's degree in Business, Marketing, Communications, or a related field, is required.
• 3+ years of experience in innovation, marketing, customer marketing, category management or sales with innovation project experience, is required.
• Experience with customer facing activity and engagement, is required.
• Ability to travel up to 25%.
• MBA is a plus. 
• Experience working with national chain accounts, regional chain accounts, distributors, or food service operators is a bonus.
• Background in channel or insights driven marketing is nice to have.
• PMP certification would be good to have.

Knowledge and Skills:

• Strong interpersonal, verbal, written and presentation communication skills, along with relationship-building abilities.
• Strong planning and organization, project management and time management skills.
• Loves food, demonstrated interest in foodservice, restaurant and/or retail product innovation.
• Must be proficient with Microsoft Office applications. 
• Comfortable working in fast paced, highly matrixed organizations.
• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills.
• Ability to work collaboratively in a remote environment.