Project Sales Account Key Accounts Manager - Solar Engineering

Experience: minimum of 5 years’ sales and engineering work experience in a technical environment, in the solar industry or renewable energy industry.

Qualifications: Engineering Degree or similar educational training in an electro-technical field with an additional degree in business or a similar business course.

The Account Manager Project Sales role will entail business development and sales components paired with technical know-how of string inverters, central inverters, medium voltage and battery storage applications. Hence sales skills as well as an affinity to technology are essential to market the  product portfolio and be responsible for all sales leads and business activities in an emerging market region.

Provide monthly forecasts and account activity analysis using Salesforce as a CRM tool, be a technical product expert towards our customers and assist in developing and executing trainings and workshops for defined target groups on products and system solution.

 The Account Manager Project Sales Southern & East African with profound technical know-how is managing the relationships with all national South African as well as Southern and Eastern African clients. Regarding the latter it is understood that building up the markets and respective clients forms an integral part of the role and typical customers or points of contact are IPP’s, EPC’s, project developers, fund managers, and other stakeholders such as engineering consultants, utilities, government agencies and lenders. Business relationships shall be developed and nurtured while

providing stakeholders with technical and commercial solutions based on a high value proposition.

• Possess excellent market knowledge and account management skills necessary for dealing with specific, high-level target audiences to push direct B2B sales
• Understand market, segment and technical requirements and collaborate
• Ability to deal with short-notice tender bid-submissions for  inverters, medium voltage

components, battery storage solutions and service offerings such as on-site commissioning, warranty extensions etc.

• Knowledge of project development (PPA, licenses, dealing with the lenders and consultants) in a project finance environment
• Continually analyse the market environment for large and medium-sized solar PV projects (nowadays more and more with storage applications as an add-on) in Sub-Saharan and East African countries, assist the Business Unit Large Scale & Projects at headquarter in strategic product and solution offering decisions for Africa by evaluating competitive advantages, performance gaps and gauging emerging requirements
• Achieve annual budgeted project sales targets
  • Continuously track business, create sales opportunities and quotations in Salesforce CRM tool on a frequent basis as well as forecast revenue to steer supply chain
  • Conduct frequent customer meetings, both on-site/in-country and virtually, with engineers, project managers, procurement staff and other decision makers to promote solutions for PV and Battery Storage projects
  • Assist customers by analysing system specifications and requirements, reviewing and/or

proposing system designs as well as utility interconnection requirements to help select the right products and services, answering technical questions etc. – all with the assistance of in- house application engineers and with the drive to win the project

• Be the interface between customers and SMA’s German based Customer Project Management (CPjM) and legal department to negotiate project specific supply agreements
• Follow up on purchase orders, payments, deliveries timelines, logistics coordination etc.
• Attend industry conferences, trade shows and regularly conduct technical trainings or webinars on  solutions
• Contribute to the creation of sales materials and to the development of marketing material by creating value propositions to be used during meetings with existing and new potential clients