Strategic Manufacturing Account Director

Instrumental

Instrumental

Sales & Business Development
Palo Alto, CA, USA
Posted on Feb 6, 2024
Instrumental helps the world’s most admired electronics brands build better hardware. We drive the digital transformation of quality, inspection, and testing with data analysis and AI products. Hardware engineering, operations, and quality teams leverage Instrumental’s manufacturing platform to accelerate development time, improve yields, and reduce field failures.
We’re looking for an experienced manufacturing leader who will own expansion within Instrumental’s largest multinational clients through expertise in this field. We know that you’ve lived through the challenges industry leaders express at companies like SolarEdge, Chargepoint, Lenovo, or Bose.
With that knowledge, you’ll learn and understand their businesses intimately, create and drive the account expansion strategy, coach stakeholders on change management to embed Instrumental in their processes, build relationships with new and existing executive stakeholders, and drive six- and seven-figure expansions.
We’re looking for someone with a real, insider understanding of our customers – which are C-Suite and VPs of Engineering, Operations, and Manufacturing within the world’s admired electronics companies. While every company is slightly different, you come with real-world experience of the organizational politics across these different stakeholders, what motivates them, and how to expand when there may be competing needs and objectives.
We’d particularly like to chat with Directors & VPs who have “sold internally” as a product design, quality, operations, or manufacturing leader. If you’ve particularly guided extensive change management within organizations, we’d love to talk. We’re also open to experienced Account Managers who have a solid understanding of engineering concepts and have “sold externally” within the industry.

Key Responsibilities:

  • Develop and drive account strategy for expansion through relationship-building, including leading value engineering, change management, customer engagement, enterprise navigation, and the expansion sales motion.
  • Drive expansion opportunities by working closely with our strategic value customers to determine how our technology must embed in their processes in order to derive maximum value.
  • Cultivate strategic relationships with cross-functional executive stakeholders in our customers’ organizations, gaining insights into their goals and challenges to position our products and services as strategic assets for their manufacturing operations.
  • Deliver Instrumental’s compelling value narrative by partnering with customers to calculate the realized value we deliver. You provide expert guidance on how to uplevel their processes to maximize efficiency gains and other improvements.
  • Prepare and perform executive business reviews with customers to showcase the results and business impact from Instrumental’s products. This person will leverage these reviews to spotlight opportunities to increase value and ROI, as well as drive for expansions.
  • Leverage data and analytics to track usage, engagement, and satisfaction levels to proactively resolve issues and pinpoint growth opportunities.

Qualifications:

  • Extensive industry domain experience (minimum 8 years) - mechanical engineering, manufacturing operations, quality, and procurement – in consumer electronics or industrial/enterprise hardware.
  • An engineering degree with direct experience working in a technical role, designing or shipping products. You have a deep understanding of how manufacturing KPIs (such as yield, throughput, engineering efficiency, etc.) map to an organization's P&L.
  • You understand how large enterprises operate from the inside.
  • You have experience successfully managing large, cross-functional initiatives where you had to coordinate across multiple functional executive leaders and align organizational politics.
  • Strong interpersonal skills – you are a natural team player who leads from the front and by example; you enjoy engaging and building relationships with new people.
  • Exemplary written and verbal communication skills; extensive executive presentation experience.
  • A demonstrated ability to set the right goal, build an operational plan, and deliver.
  • You either have experience at a startup or equivalent intrapreneurial experience where you had to build something from scratch.
This role requires authorization to access information that is subject to U.S. export control restrictions.
We’re a growing team that works collaboratively, supports each other, and is energized by having impact. We value passion and the ability to learn – you’re encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn’t match the job description precisely!
The following is a representative annual base salary range for this position within the Bay Area: $148,000 - $164,000 with the opportunity for significant variable incentives ($245-$273k on-target earning). Job level and salary opportunities are evaluated through our interview process. Instrumental offers a highly-rated variety of benefits, including health, vision, dental, commuter plans, and parental leave.