Alkemics is a SaaS collaboration platform for brands and retailers, helping them to launch products. The company’s mission is to connect every brand to every retailer. Alkemics’ core functionality enables users to effortlessly share product information and marketing content across the whole product lifecycle, from B2B (logistics, pricing etc.) to B2C data (marketing attributes, rich content, regulatory data).

In France alone, an average of 1 million products are launched every year, each with up to 500 attributes and made by one of 20,000+ manufacturers. Prior to Alkemics, this product data and marketing content had to be manually sent on Excel files to each retail channel where the products are sold. Alkemics disrupted that space and automated the process – creating a hard to refuse proposition for the ecosystem. Once a retailer is on-boarded, invites are sent to that retailer’s suppliers to join the platform on a freemium basis. These manufacturers can then be monetised through upselling increased functionality such as ERP connectivity, reportings, etc.

Alkemics was founded in Paris in 2011. With 98 out of the top 100 CPG manufacturers (Nestlé, Unilever, L’Oréal) and the largest retailers (Casino, Auchan, Carrefour, U Enseigne, E.Leclerc, Marionnaud…) using the platform, Alkemics now holds a very strong and unchallenged position in the French market. The business is now expanding internationally, starting with the UK and Ireland. Along with international growth, the focus of the business is to leverage its platform and client relationships to build an end-to-end collaboration platform where products are discovered, negotiated and listed. Alkemics raised a total of $28M from tier-1 investors Index Ventures, Partech Ventures, Serena Capital and Cathay Innovation. The latest funding round took place in September 2016 with a view to fuel the company’s rapid expansion. The business has 60 employees, working predominantly in technology.

Background
Platforms have conquered almost all areas of C2C and B2C markets. This trend has spread to the B2B sectors, driving tremendous value and economies of scale. Today, thanks to a captive user base, Alkemics is in a strong position to “platformize” the notoriously difficult retail space. Brands are keen to have their products discovered in a more efficient and elegant way. Retailers are interested in negotiating and listing products more quickly. Brands want to better control the product introduction in each store. SMBs and individual retailers that do not have large buying and merchandising functions are in need of powerful solutions. This will allow Alkemics to support a large share of the vast retail market, representing $200Bn/year in France alone.

As Alkemics is solid (yet still growing) on technology and product, the company is now formalising and structuring its business functions. Strategic customers are identified by the business and investors as the trigger to accelerated growth and the next main focus. To address this, Alkemics is now looking to formalise and significantly expand its customer success team.

Your role is fundamental to the overall success of Alkemics as growth accelerates. This is a significant opportunity to be at the forefront of the continuing disruption of the retail market.

Strategic Customer Success is a new function at Alkemics, created as we are deploying projects that are business-critical and cross-functional within customer organizations. As the company is expanding to new markets, high performers will get exposed to international and multi-country accounts.

Role:
Collaborating with the sales team, you will drive Alkemics’ growth by transforming a closed commercial major deal into a successful project for the customer. You will drive adoption and satisfaction with the end goal of achieving the organization transformation required to digitalize their supplier relationship. You will be responsible for building a comprehensive strategic network throughout a focused number of strategic accounts. You will be fully integrated into the customer landscape, spending time as part of the customer teams to impulse and coordinate the right projects to help customers achieve their objectives, with the support of our professional services team.

You will interact with top-level decision makers in order to ensure a fluid change management bridging the gap between implementing a technological solution and generating business change to leverage sustainable value for the customer.

You will closely work with the product and engineering team, based in Paris, to enable a tight feedback loop between customer feedbacks and product roadmap.

Our product helps customers transform their organization to keep up with the accelerating pace of retail. It is a business-critical part of their operations, used by numerous teams. This requires delivering and measuring value all across the organization, from CxO to end-users. Projects systematically require coordination inside the customer (ex: purchase department, pricing team, IT team) and/or between different customers (ex: joint project between a brand and a retailer) and/or with our teams (ex: professional services). This requires strong project management skills, the ability to sell projects internally and the ability to make decision makers shine. As the company is rapidly expanding, Alkemics is seeking a strategic customer success director with an entrepreneurial mindset, who has a strong affinity for team work.

Key responsibilities:

• Building partnership relations with customers, all across the organization, from CxO to end-users.
• Managing projects in a thorough and effective way, in order to maximize value for customers and speed of adoption.
• Evangelizing decision makers and beneficiaries.
• Proving value through detailed cost-benefit analysis.
• Helping users and decision makers shine through success stories and case studies.
• Collaborating with the product team to share customer feedbacks and becoming increasingly fluent on product capabilities.
• Tracking progress on our CRM tool, and contributing to the consolidation of materials in our collaboration tools.

• 7-12 years customer success, consulting or account management experience.
• Proven history of being a consistent top performer
• Excellent at driving customers and projects in complex projects requiring cross-functional coordination and stakeholder alignment
• Ability to grow trusting relationships with CxOs
• Sharp project management and customer management skills
• Experience with agile and/or lean project management
• Good communication skills to interact with senior executives across large organizations
• Experience in Retail or FMCG is a plus
• Perfectly fluent in both English and French