Job Overview
The Senior Sales Manager, Retail is a senior commercial leader responsible for profitable growth, customer development, and sales execution across multiple geographies, key accounts, regional and independent retailers. Reporting to the Director of Retail & Wholesale Sales & Business Development, this role leads inside and outside sales team members while maintaining direct ownership of strategic customers, market development, pricing, merchandising, and new business opportunities.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead, coach, develop, and hold accountable inside and outside sales professionals across multiple markets and territories.
- Own performance against revenue, gross margin, case growth, retention, new business, and account penetration targets.
- Develop market and territory strategies, identify white-space opportunities, and recommend sales coverage and resource priorities.
- Maintain direct involvement with strategic retail accounts, building relationships with owners, buyers, category managers, store leadership, and senior executives.
- Create customer growth plans focused on additional locations, categories, SKUs, promotional activity, and share of wallet.
- Drive growth across independent retailers, regional chains, specialty markets, and other priority retail channels.
- Lead pricing and margin execution, identifying margin leakage, excessive credits, unfavorable terms, and cost-to-serve opportunities.
- Partner with merchandising, procurement, and marketing to translate Baldor's assortment into customer-specific seasonal, promotional, and category-growth programs.
- Maintain a disciplined new-business pipeline and personally participate in high-value prospecting, presentations, RFPs, and strategic opportunities.
- Establish a consistent operating cadence including sales reviews, pipeline reviews, account planning, field coaching, and performance management.
- Partner cross-functionally with Operations, Procurement, Merchandising, Finance, Marketing, and Sales Operations to improve customer execution and profitability.
- Serve as a senior escalation point for customer and team issues, driving timely resolution and clear accountability.
Leadership Expectations
- Operate as a business owner with accountability for both growth and profitability.
- Balance strategic thinking with hands-on field and customer execution.
- Use data and commercial judgment to make timely decisions and identify opportunities.
- Build a high-performance culture through clear expectations, coaching, communication, and accountability.
- Develop future sales leaders and strengthen bench depth across the Retail organization.
- Act as a trusted extension of the Director, independently leading day-to-day sales execution while escalating appropriately.
Key Performance Indicators
- Revenue and year-over-year growth • Gross margin • Case growth • Same-customer growth
- New-business revenue and pipeline conversion • Customer retention • Key-account expansion
- Category and SKU penetration • Pricing discipline • Credits and account profitability
- Territory performance • Sales-team productivity • Talent development and retention
Job Requirements
- 8+ years of progressive sales, business development, account management, or commercial leadership experience; food distribution, produce, grocery, retail, CPG, or perishable categories preferred.
- 3+ years of direct people-management experience with demonstrated success leading inside and/or outside sales teams.
- Experience managing multiple territories, geographies, and complex key accounts.
Proven ability to deliver revenue, margin, customer-retention, and new-business objectives. - Strong understanding of pricing, profitability, customer economics, negotiation, and account planning.
- Strong executive communication, presentation, coaching, and cross-functional leadership skills.
What Success Looks Like
The Senior Sales Manager, Retail creates clear ownership and accountability across assigned markets, strengthens inside and outside sales performance, accelerates key-account and independent-channel growth, and improves consistency across pricing, margin, merchandising, prospecting, and customer development. The role provides strong day-to-day commercial leadership while enabling the Director to focus on broader strategy, major customer development, new channels, organizational development, and long-term growth.
