Account Director Bristol

We’re an internationally renowned experience design consultancy working with some of the biggest names on the Internet, making a difference to millions of people around the world.

Our Bristol office needs an Account Director who can help us to deepen our understanding of our clients’ needs, and work with the consultancy team to develop programmes of work that transform our clients’ organisations. It’s a chance to join a growing team and play a key role in taking it to the next level.

You’ll work alongside one of our Bristol Experience Strategy Directors (ESDs), sharing your understanding of our clients’ needs with their knowledge about our skills and services. You’ll map out our clients’ organisations and help us to understand what makes them tick. You’ll report directly to our CEO, Giles Colborne, and share best practice and professional growth with our other account management staff in Bristol and London.

You’ll also work collaboratively with our project managers, UX consultants, designers and front-end developers to shape projects, and to make sure that the skills and time allocated to your projects are sufficient to meet your clients’ needs and expectations.

• Work with your ESD to develop a pod vision, growth plan, and quarterly business plan. To do this you’ll need to maintain a deep understanding of the issues facing our clients’ sectors.
• Work with the ESD, consultant team, and the client to create Client Development Plans (CDPs) and client roadmaps. To do this you’ll need to develop a deep understanding of our clients’ businesses.
• Work with the new biz team to create marketing plans, lists of target clients, and to triage leads.
• Manage the pipeline of work, ensuing we have a good understanding of each client's sign off process and what is required to get work started. To do this, you’ll need to build strong, open, and mutually beneficial relationships with a number of our existing clients.
• Negotiate commercial and contractual arrangements with our clients.
• Work with the lead consultants to make sure we understand our client's business and have good relationships with the right contacts to advance the CDP.
• Define a client contact strategy and identify a lead contact from cxpartners for each client.
• Manage the pitch / RFP process to ensure that the pitch team has a strategy for winning and that documents and presentations meet our standards and fit our vision and values.

Our clients are based in the UK, Europe, and beyond, so you’ll need to be able to travel to them and spend time working at their offices.

• You’ll care as much as we do about the need to involve users in the design process - for us this is essential and not a ‘luxury’ that can be cut when budgets are tight.
• You’ll be an evangelist for user centred design.
• You’ll understand that great relationships are about building a sense of trust and honesty - so you won’t be afraid to have the difficult conversations that bring about long-term success. And you’ll have the emotional intelligence to understand how to have those conversations sensitively and how to develop solutions in collaboration with diverse teams.
• You’ll have great communication skills - the ability to listen, and to articulate complex ideas clearly, vividly, and concisely.
• You’ll have gravitas - outstanding presentation, written, verbal and persuasion skills with the ability to ‘hold the room’ and tell a compelling story.
• You’ll have strong leadership and management skills, and great commercial awareness.
• You’ll be fantastic at consultative selling and influencing and will have strong negotiation skills.

• A minimum of 1 year’s experience in a similar role, with evidence of your success.
• Experience managing a portfolio of clients with a diverse range of client sizes/types/relationships.
• Experience of working with senior level clients to identify opportunities, set a vision for change, shape projects and set a shared vision for those projects. This should include leading pitch teams, proposal writing and articulating a detailed understanding of client needs.
• In particular, experience developing client relationships ‘up the chain’ within a client organisation.
• Experience of managing and meeting financial targets, including sales and project profitability, and providing updates on progress back to the Board or senior stakeholders.
• Degree level education.
• The right to live and work in UK

We’re a great place to work – you’ll love the environment, the people and the way the company looks after its staff. You’ll also get a great package with 25 days holiday, benefits including a smartphone, a cash-back healthcare scheme, a pension plan to which we’ll contribute, a MacBook and other kit as needed.

cxpartners are committed to training and run an extensive training programme which will support both your individual needs and our business ambitions.

If you’d like to apply, please email matt.ferguson@cxpartners.co.uk with a brief CV.