Location: Manchester
Position: Full Time/Permanent
About the role
The Agency Partner is a senior, high-impact position responsible for managing and scaling our relationship with major UK media agency groups. This role is more than expertly servicing existing accounts; it is a proactive, hunter-style position focused on growing new business and expanding our footprint within agency portfolios. You are the face of our brands, tasked with ensuring we are the "first-call" partner for planners and buyers. By leveraging data to inform decisions, you will identify untapped budgets and drive the diversification of revenue across our print, digital, social, and creative solution suites.
This role has been designed to bring a new level of strategic rigour to our agency interactions. The Agency Partner will:
- Drive Growth: Shift the needle from traditional transactional spend to long-term, high-value strategic partnerships.
- Master the Pipeline: Lead the charge in pipeline management, ensuring that every lead is nurtured and every opportunity is mapped with precision.
- Champion Salesforce Excellence: Serve as a benchmark for the team by maintaining a meticulously updated Salesforce pipeline, capturing deep intelligence on competitors and product feedback.
- Be a Talent Magnet: Contribute to a high-performance culture that helps us retain, develop and attract top talent within the competitive UK media landscape.
Main Responsibilities
Revenue & Business Development
- New Business Acquisition: Proactively hunt for new revenue opportunities within your assigned agency patches, targeting non-endemic brands and dormant accounts.
- Revenue Diversification: Upsell our full ecosystem of products—including branded content, data products, and events—to move away from reliance on spot-market spend.
- Data-Driven Pitching: Use audience insights and case study data to build sophisticated, ROI-led responses to agency briefs.
Operational Rigour & CRM
- Pipeline Management: Maintain a transparent and aggressive sales funnel, providing accurate weekly and monthly revenue forecasts to leadership.
- Salesforce Discipline: Ensure 100% CRM accuracy. This includes logging all meetings, calls, and detailed client information, as well as tracking competitor information and product insights to help steer our commercial roadmap.
- Performance Management: Take ownership of your personal and team KPIs, participating in regular performance reviews to ensure all commercial targets are met or exceeded.
Collaboration & Influence
- Internal Collaboration: Work closely with the Strategy, Creative, and Ad Ops teams to ensure seamless delivery and client satisfaction.
- Market Intelligence: Be the "eyes and ears" in the market, feeding back agency sentiment and competitor moves to the product and editorial teams.
- Stakeholder Management: Build deep, multi-level relationships within agencies, from junior planners to C-suite investment leads.
Person Specification
Experience & Skills
- UK Agency Network: A deep and active network of contacts across the major agency groups and leading independents in the UK.
- Commercial Drive: A proven track record of exceeding multi-million-pound targets through proactivity and strategic negotiation.
- CRM Power User: Highly disciplined in Salesforce (or similar CRM), with a firm belief that data hygiene is the foundation of successful sales.
- Analytical Ability: Proficient in using data to inform decisions, with the ability to translate complex analytics into simple, persuasive commercial arguments.
Personal Attributes
- High-Performance Mindset: You thrive in a target-driven environment and are committed to continuous self-improvement and performance management.
- Collaborative & Diplomatic: Able to navigate internal complexities to get the best result for the client and the business.
- Entrepreneurial Spirit: You treat your agency patch like your own business, constantly looking for ways to innovate and diversify revenue.
Our Commitment
We are committed to increasing diversity and maintaining an inclusive workplace culture. We welcome applications from all qualified candidates regardless of their ethnicity, race, gender, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, age, marital status, or disability.
We are Disability Confident Committed. Please let us know if you require any recruitment documentation in other formats or if you require reasonable adjustments to be made during the recruitment process. Please be assured that any such information will be held separately to your recruitment application and will not be considered as part of the selection process.