Key Account Director

Established in 2004, BioPhorum is a business-to-business membership organisation that has created an unparalleled environment for life science companies and executives, to collaborate and accelerate progress across the sector. The company uses a subscription model and has created 12 highly targeted “Phorums” (forums) with tailored content across multiple areas including Drug Substance, Drug Development, Fill Finish, Technology Strategy, Supply Chain Resilience, IT, Data and Digital, Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products, Quality, Regulatory, and Sustainability. BioPhorum’s expert
facilitators currently lead more than ninety initiatives involving over 7,000 subject matter experts.

BioPhorum has built a diverse and extensive client base of over 150 organisations, including 18 of the 20 largest global (bio)pharmacos. Beyond pharma, BioPhorum has also built relationships with other types of life science organisations, including those that provide services across the outsourced value chain (e.g., CDMOs), and academia.

Over the last year, BioPhorum has established an exciting growth strategy, launched its first data product and completed an acquisition. Further growth opportunities are being planned in both the core Phorum business as well as adjacent markets. Against this backdrop, BioPhorum is looking to hire a Key Account Director to build strategic sales relationships with BioPhorum’s largest (key) accounts.

The Role

Overview

The Key Account Director drives commercial growth by developing and executing strategic account plans that ensure retention, expand revenue, margin, and product penetration across BioPhorum’s most valuable clients. Acting as the primary point of contact, they build trusted relationships that uncover new business opportunities, secure multi-year agreements, and ensure client satisfaction. By leveraging insights from industry trends, internal data, and cross-functional collaboration, they craft compelling value propositions and account strategies. Their reach into their key accounts ensuring resilient and ongoing engagement across and within client organisations. The role also contributes to the evolution of BioPhorum’s commercial operations, ensuring scalable processes and alignment between Key Accounts and Customer Success teams to deliver sustained commercial outcomes.

Main Responsibilities

• Build and maintain strong, long-lasting relationships with key clients, members and customers, acting as their trusted advisor in order to build account value over a sustained period of time 
• In collaboration with Product and Phorum teams, develop, own and execute the strategic account and growth strategy for your designated key accounts to achieve growth and sales targets — identifying and driving sustained year-on-year product, revenue and margin expansion
• Act as the key point of contact for your key accounts, representing their ‘voice’ internally within BioPhorum to ensure their feedback, concerns and issues are heard and addressed 
• Identify new business opportunities within existing key accounts, leading on negotiation ensuring multi-year agreements that achieve ongoing value 
• Together with Marketing and the Executive Engagement teams, develop strong value stories tailored to your key accounts that provide a compelling reason for partnering / working with BioPhorum 
• Undertake periodic analyses to remain ahead of industry trends and movements, incorporating these insights into opportunities or reasons to engage with your key accounts
• Working with Business Insights, Phorum teams and Finance develop and track the health of your key accounts, identifying early trends that may require your intervention e.g., revenue, satisfaction, churn risks
• In collaboration with Marketing, Product and Phorum teams, curate the contact map within your assigned key accounts, ensuring contact and address book resilience especially when there are changes within member / customer organisations
• Represent BioPhorum as required at events, conferences and symposia — develop impactful and compelling presentations that demonstrate the value of BioPhorum and the benefits of a BioPhorum partnership
• Working with the Chief Commercial Officer, develop the operational processes to support key account management and BioPhorum’s approach to value and relationship selling
• In conjunction with the other Key Account Managers and the Chief Commercial Officer, build-out the operational processes, data requirements and interactions between the Key Accounts and Customer Success teams, ensuring both teams have the information and support required to delivery on their commercial targets
• Support other members of the Commercial and Phorum teams, such as being a mentor to develop future commercial leaders 

Knowledge, Skills & Abilities

• Proven success in a key account management or a relationship-based sales role
• Experience operating within a multi-product / service business
• Confident and competent in identifying, building relationships with, and selling to Executive stakeholders
• A successful track record working across the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and/or life-sciences industries
• Ability to think strategically, while remaining hands-on
• A compelling communicator, can demonstrate credibility quickly; able to articulate business value and ROI to a variety of different levels and audiences
• A strong influencer, can present and communicate with gravitas
• An effective networker with a highly collaborative style who is able to build and sustain strong working relationships
• Enjoys working in collaborative environments — able to encourage and act on suggestions and feedback in a constructive manner
• Highly commercial — with a ‘good nose’ for sales, able to identify sales opportunities and negotiate strong outcomes in a win-win manner
• Highly numerate and data driven, comfortable navigating data and systems, able to draw actionable insights from a variety of data sources. Proficient using CRM and sales operations solutions such as Dynamics, Hubspot, Sales Navigator
• Desirable- A good understanding of biologics manufacturing processes, technologies, and industry challenges.

Location

This is a home-based role, fully remote UK wide, with expected travel in order to participate in customer and organisational events. While BioPhorum is a UK based business, ad hoc international travel may be required.