Customer Growth & Retention Manager

Customer Growth & Retention Manager

Reports to: Operations Director

Expected OTE: £30,000-£40,000+, with further earning potential as the customer base grows

The Role

We are looking for a commercially minded Customer Growth & Retention Manager to take ownership of our existing customer portfolio.

We currently have approximately 900 active customers. This role is about making sure those customers stay with us, feel valued, continue to use us and, wherever possible, grow their business with us.

This is not a traditional customer service or new-business sales role.

Our Customer Service team will continue to handle day-to-day operational needs. The Customer Growth & Retention Manager will take a proactive, commercial approach, building relationships, identifying increases or declines in activity, spotting growth opportunities and recognising retention risks before they become problems.

You will own the existing customer portfolio, working closely with the Operations Director and wider team to protect and grow its value.

Key Responsibilities

Your responsibilities will include:

• Proactively managing relationships across approximately 900 active customers.
• Making regular outbound calls to understand how customers are performing and how we can support them.
• Monitoring customer shipping activity, spend, revenue and profitability.
• Identifying customers who are downtrading and understanding why.
• Spotting opportunities to increase activity, spend and profitability.
• Identifying customers at risk of leaving and putting retention actions in place.
• Reactivating customers whose activity has reduced or stopped.
• Conducting regular customer reviews with key and developing accounts.
• Ensuring customers understand the full range of services available to them.
• Identifying cross-sell and upsell opportunities where they benefit the customer.
• Working with Customer Service and Operations to resolve recurring issues affecting retention.
• Maintaining accurate notes, actions and customer information within the CRM.
• Building a structured contact programme so customers are contacted at an appropriate frequency.
• Reporting on customer trends, risks, opportunities and portfolio performance.
• Supporting the Operations Director with the overall customer retention strategy.
• Helping develop processes that improve customer loyalty and lifetime value.

What Success Looks Like

The successful person will be measured on the overall health and commercial performance of the customer portfolio.

Key measures will include:

• Customer retention rate.
• Gross profit retention.
• Growth in gross profit from existing customers.
• Reduction in customer downtrading.
• Increase in customer uptrading.
• Reactivation of dormant or declining customers.
• Number and quality of proactive customer conversations.
• Completion of agreed customer review activity.
• Identification and management of customers considered at risk.
• Overall portfolio profitability.

The focus is not simply on making a set number of calls, but on the quality of relationships built and the commercial results generated.

Earnings

Expected earnings for the role are approximately £30,000-£40,000 OTE, with performance-related earnings linked directly to the profitability of the existing customer portfolio.

As the customer portfolio and profitability grow, the earning potential of the role grows with it.

Protect the customer base, grow the customer base and share in the success.

The exact definition of qualifying profit and the performance-related payment calculation will be clearly documented as part of the remuneration structure.

The Person We Are Looking For

We are looking for someone who is naturally good with customers but also commercially aware.

If a customer who normally ships 100 consignments suddenly ships 60, you will want to know why.

If a customer starts growing rapidly, you will want to understand what else we can do for them.

If a customer has not heard from us for several months, you will take responsibility for changing that.

You will ideally be:

• Confident speaking to customers over the phone and on video calls.
• Comfortable building long-term business relationships.
• Commercially aware and interested in numbers.
• Naturally proactive rather than waiting for customers to contact us.
• Comfortable discussing customer spend, usage and business performance.
• Able to spot opportunities without using aggressive sales tactics.
• Organised and capable of managing a large customer portfolio.
• Confident using CRM systems and customer data.
• Comfortable working independently while reporting directly to a senior leader.
• Motivated by performance and the opportunity to increase earnings.

Experience within account management, customer success, customer retention, relationship management or business development would be useful, although attitude and commercial awareness are equally important.

What This Role Is Not

This is not a traditional Customer Service position.

You will not spend your day dealing with routine delivery queries, tracking shipments or general customer service requests.

It is also not a traditional new-business sales role. You will not be expected to spend your day cold calling prospects.

Your focus will be entirely on our existing customers:

Retain them. Develop them. Understand them. Protect them. Grow them.

Longer-Term Opportunity

This is a new and important role within the business with significant scope to develop as the customer portfolio grows.

The successful person will have the opportunity to shape how we manage customer retention and growth across the franchise and could ultimately build and lead a wider Customer Growth or Customer Success function.

• For the right person, this is an opportunity to take genuine ownership of a substantial customer portfolio and directly benefit financially from its continued growth.