Regional Account Manager, Independent Bookshops - Central England North

Are you great at building relationships? Are you pro-active and curious with a passion for books?   

The Opportunity 

As Regional Manager, you’ll work closely with booksellers across North of Central England including Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Greater Manchester and Merseyside.  You’ll use your communication and negotiation skills to build relationships and influence decisions, to see our books merchandised with impact across the region you manage.  

You’ll use a variety of tools to manage your accounts with agility – these will include in person customer visits, virtual meetings and sharing information by mediums such as email or WhatsApp.  You’ll flex as appropriate to ensure you’re engaging with as many shops as possible to drive revenue to the highest level.  A full clean driving licence is essential. 

Internally, you’ll be a part of a team of 12 and you’ll confidently build relationships with colleagues across our Editorial, Marketing, Publicity and Sales teams in our publishing houses. You’ll regularly share market insights and use social media as a tool to connect with new and established bookshops and booksellers.  

Candidate Profile 

To succeed in this role, it’s crucial that you’re comfortable in brokering relationships with booksellers and with colleagues across a diverse business, flexing your style as appropriate. You’ll often work autonomously, so being a self-starter and able to use your own initiative are key to your success within this role.  

You might have already worked as a bookseller or in a similar sales or business development role, but you won’t need prior publishing experience. We’ll teach you everything you need to know to be successful, all we ask is that you bring your curiosity, tenacity, and interest in how to market our books to a wide and engaged audience.   You’ll be selling across Fiction, Non-Fiction and Children’s and we’re particularly keen to hear from you if you have a passion for Children’s books. 

Please apply with your CV and cover letter by midnight on Tuesday 23rd August. 

What you can expect from us:

Salary: circa  £30,000 dependent on how your skills and experience align to the role, plus benefits.  

This role will be based between our Vauxhall Bridge Road and Embassy Gardens offices. We’re currently experimenting with hybrid working and involving colleagues across the business to shape our future ways of working. The needs of our teams and individuals are different, so we’re not taking a one-size-fits-all approach. While our offices are places to connect, collaborate and celebrate with colleagues, we recognise that flexibility about where you work is just as important for doing your best work and for your wellbeing.  

The exact balance of office to remote working will depend on the nature of your role and team needs, and we are open to discussing this through the recruitment process. 

Our employees are the heart of our business. We have a range of benefits to reflect our commitment to our employees, some of which are:

 •   27 days paid holiday entitlement in year one (plus bank holidays), increasing a day each year up to 30 days  
•    Medical cover  
•    Life assurance  

•    Company Car for eligible roles
•    Cycle to Work scheme  
•    Discounted gym membership  
•    Generous pension scheme  
•    Summer working hours (role dependent)   
•    Volunteering policy and charity matching  
•    Employee Assistance programme  
•    Mentoring programme  
•    Extended gender neutral parental leave  
•    Access to books and eBooks across Penguin Random House UK  
•    Each site has trained mental health first aiders   
•    We plant a tree for every new employee to our business  

Our creativity is inspired by different perspectives, so we want our culture to be one of belonging, where everyone feels welcome and where differences are celebrated.

As a Disability Confident Committed organisation, we’re part of the offer an interview scheme. This is where disabled applicants who meet the essential criteria for the role can opt in to get to the next recruitment stage. There may be some situations where volume of applicants means we can’t take all eligible candidates to interview.

We want to make sure disabled applicants can be their best at each step of the recruitment journey. If you need adjustments during the application process, we encourage you to get in touch with us at http://PRHCareersUK@penguinrandomhouse.co.uk. 

Remember, you only need to share what you are comfortable to for us to support your adjustment request. Find out more about our approach here: www.penguinrandomhousecareers.co.uk/applying-for-roles-with-a-disability

We partner with The Book Trade Charity, who provide financial assistance for people looking to get into the publishing industry; you can find more information and talk directly here: http://booktradeentrysupport.org/

Please note, we are not able to accept agency CVs for this role. Any CVs sent speculatively will not be eligible for a fee.