Key Account Manager I

About the role

A Key Account Manager owns high-value restaurant partners within an assigned city, typically chains, established multi-outlet restaurants, and growing independents expanding to multiple locations. These accounts are more complex: they involve negotiations with multiple stakeholders, larger deal sizes, custom solutions, and deeper engagement around ROI and strategy. You combine field presence with office-based analysis and executive relationship management. Success requires both relationship skills and the analytical ability to build customized business cases. You mentor the Sales Manager tier and own a portion of the city-wide targets.

Responsibilities

• Own a portfolio of multi-outlet restaurants: Manage 30-40 high-value accounts (60 to 80 in case of Indian next-tier cities), each with 2-10 outlets. These accounts represent 40-60% of city revenue.
• Executive relationship management: Build relationships with franchise owners, regional managers, and operational heads. You are often dealing with decision-makers, not individual restaurant managers.
• Consultative strategy: Move beyond product features. Help restaurants think about their growth strategy across, e.g., optimizing delivery times, increasing order frequency, and cross-location consistency.
• Field presence with data: Conduct monthly visits to key accounts to understand operations, gather feedback, troubleshoot adoption barriers, and surface new opportunities.
• Advanced analytics: Build detailed business reviews (QBR) for accounts. Analyze their performance across cuisine, compare against benchmarks, and present growth strategies.
• Pipeline development: Identify expansion opportunities with existing accounts (new locations, new products/cuisine). Turn your relationship into revenue growth.
• Excel excellence: Build executive presentations, ROI models for pitches, and monthly and quarterly business reviews with charts and trend analysis. Your spreadsheets must be presentation-ready for C-level stakeholders.
• Conduct 60 to 70 in-person restaurant partner meetings in a month.

Requirements

• 2-4 years in account management, B2B sales, or enterprise sales (proven progression from SDR/AE to AE or AM role).
• Track record in managing multi-stakeholder deals.
• Restaurant business is a round-the-clock business; the role holder has to take ownership of the growth of the assigned portfolio of restaurant partners.
• Advanced Excel skills: pivot tables, VLOOKUP, data visualization, forecasting. You should be able to build a dashboard for each restaurant partner to track their business.
• MBAs/PGDMs would be preferred in any discipline.

Qualifications

Strong industry understanding: Since this is a mid-senior account management role, working knowledge of the restaurant ecosystem (unit economics, delivery margins, competitive landscape, aggregator dynamics) should be expected. Industry familiarity will significantly reduce ramp-up time and improve consultative quality.