Business Development Manager – Co-op Wholesale 

£60,000 to £70,000 plus great benefits including private healthcare and a company car (Work Level 5) 

A full UK driving licence required

National field-based, in this role you’ll work in a hybrid way splitting your time between home and the office (find out more about our hybrid working policy at colleagues.coop.co.uk/hybrid-working-policy).

We’re looking for Business Development Managers to join us in Co-op Wholesale. This is a brand-new team, and we’ll look to you to help us find opportunities to recruit new and different businesses of scale for our multi-site and wholesale business. 

In this role, you’ll build positive relationships with prospective partners and work closely with internal teams, making sure we are recruiting the type of retailer who will benefit from their relationship with us. You’ll be responsible for generating and developing profitable leads as part of the annual new business targets and will play a key role in ensuring our processes, lead generation and reporting are fit for purpose and support continual improvement. If you’ve got great tenacity, excellent communication skills and the knowledge and experience of new business development, then we can offer you a fantastic opportunity to build your networks and really make an impact across our Co-op.

What you’ll do

• Deliver the annual new business growth target, specifically focussing on large scale recruitment in national accounts and wholesale
• Own the sales process through to success of a number of corporate sales opportunities, with values of up to c£20m annual sales per opportunity 
• Support the creation of recruitment strategies, working with our marketing team to deliver the best return on investment
• Engage and build strong relationships with relevant third-party lead generators
• Own the process to continually review the competitor base and benchmark the group proposition

This role would suit people who have

• Experience in corporate new business development or sales acquisition 
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills with the ability to articulate in a clear and professional way 
• The ability to build positive relationships and collaborate with others to get great results
• Excellent organisation and time management skills, with the ability to manage workload effectively
• Strong IT skills with the ability to use Microsoft PowerPoint and Excel confidently
• The resilience and confidence to manage challenging situations

Why Co-op? 

If you have the skills that we need, we can offer you a competitive salary and great benefits package which includes 30% off Co-op branded products in our food stores (as well as other discounts on Co-op products and services).

• An annual bonus (based on personal and business performance)
• 28 days holiday (rising to 32 with service) plus bank holidays 
• A pension with up to 10% employer contributions
• Private healthcare 
• Access to a subsidised onsite gym (at our Manchester HQ)
• Coaching and training to support your career development
• Wagestream app – giving you access to a percentage of your pay as you earn

At Co-op, we’re proud to do things a different way. As one of the world’s largest co-operatives, owned by millions of members, community is at the heart of what we do. Since our Co-op was founded in 1844, we’ve had a clear social purpose, and everything we do as a business helps to build a fairer world for our members, customers, colleagues, and communities. 

Building a diverse environment

We’re actively building diverse teams and we welcome applications from everyone. If you have a disability, we can make reasonable adjustments to our recruitment process according to your needs. We're also part of the Disability Confident scheme, meaning we'll always offer an interview to disabled candidates who apply through the scheme if they meet the minimum criteria for a job.

We'll ask whether you’d like to be considered under the Disability Confident scheme when you apply.

If we invite you to take part in the recruitment process for any of our jobs, we’ll ask you if you need any reasonable adjustments to enable you to participate.

You can find out more about our recruitment process at jobs.coop.co.uk/apply-process

You can find out more about the Disability Confident scheme and all our commitments to diversity and inclusion at colleagues.coop.co.uk/diversity-inclusion-and-wellbeing

As part of your application, you'll need to complete an online assessment. This assessment typically takes between 45-60 minutes. If you're a current Co-op colleague, this does not need to be completed.