Head of Relationship Management

Job Title: Head of Relationships (North/South Region) Location: Remote working we are looking for 2 candidates to cover North and South Regions.Reports to: Associate Director of Business DevelopmentContract: Full-time/Remote workingSalary: £60'000-£80'000KJob Purpose:Build and maintain the relationship with target local authorities, making sure we understand what local authorities need and want and grow our income and increase the provision of our services.Key Responsibilities:Contract Management. The role will be the senior account manager for our contracts, ensuring that exceptional business relationships are developed with our commissioners ensuring the long term sustainability of the contracts. The role will be the subject matter expert for their assigned Commissioner and Local Authority Contracts.Negotiate new business outside of frameworks and tenders. Develop strategic relationships with all targeted Local Authorities, ICBs and Education Skills Funding Agency to enable United Response to influence the nature of the contracts and encourage funders to adopt best practices in service delivery and contract design. Assess service delivery against the contract and provide feedback on any gaps in operations ensuring they can manage the service in accordance with the contract. Negotiate any necessary changes with commissioners. Working with the Director of Housing and ESE and Director of Growth and Innovation to ensure that the housing and ESE development plan fully aligns with the overall growth plan.Chair Contract review meetings that cover how we are performing against the contract, areas we need to improve and drive improvement via Operations to ensure that we are delivering against agreed KPIs.External RelationshipUnderstand the structure and job roles within each local authority.Understand who the key influencers are and how the decision-making process works.Understand the political environment and how that affects decision-makingBecome the trusted representative of United ResponseRecord keepingEnsure the information about that commissioner is all saved in a usable way; ultimately, this will be on a customer database.Keep the data up-to-dateEnsure others who are in contact with the commission have access to the information they need.Income growthInfluence commissioners to want the sort of services that are most appropriate for the well-being of the people we support.Generate intelligence on likely tenders and ensure we are prepared to bid if they are in line with our strategy.Work with the bid writers to support them in producing a deliverable service which meets the commissioner's needs and has a high chance of being awarded to United Response.Persuade the commissioner to commission United Response directly.Be effective at negotiating advantageous contract terms and prices.Be the key account manager, ensuring that all internal stakeholders who are in contact are communicating in line with the strategy for that commissioner.Act as the internal representative for the local authority to internal colleagues.Work well with regional managers to grow business vertically in line with the agreed strategy.Act as the conduit to the local authority/commissioner with any message, positive or negative, about the way the local authority is handling the contract.Act as the internal conduit to internal staff with any messages from the local authority about dissatisfaction with our performance or approach.Margin GrowthUnderstand the margin generated by each of our contracts.Identify where we can maximise the margin by generating increased income relative to the cost of service delivery.Essential Criteria:Senior level experience of being the Relationship/Account Manager for Local Authorities, Commissioners or multi-million Corporate clients.Senior level experience of building exceptional working relationships with clients e.g. commissioners.Credibility in building relationships with public sector funders/commissioners.Significant experience of negotiation and able to apply different techniques to varying situations.Leadership experience within a dispersed, national organisation, with a proven track record of engaging with and motivating a multicultural staff team.Creating a ‘high performance’ environment, for all of our contracts and setting and monitoring measures that reflect corporate objectives and customers’ goals.Understanding of how to deliver social purpose in a business-like manner, good business and financial planning skills and proven track record in delivering against financial targets and managing business risk.Experience of dealing with a range of stakeholders including the public sector commissioners. Commitment to co-production with people we support and their families/advocates. Key Competencies:We will be looking for evidence that you:Have a strong & practical understanding of how to deliver and implement growth plans in personalised public services.An understanding of how big organisations have to act and behave in order to successfully enable large numbers of individuals to successfully achieve their own personal outcomes. Know how to drive commercial performance in delivering social outcomes. Exceptional relationship builder and commercial acumen.Can critically appraise ideas, proposals, and business cases.Are comfortable in making decisions at pace and can juggle competing demands, making reasoned decisions about priorities.Can apply project management techniques appropriately to the scale of the task in hand. Can harness creative thinking and innovative approaches both of your own and enable others to apply these to deliver practical outcomes.Can show how you improve existing and develop new services.Can strike a balance between tried & tested approaches while being willing to take calculated risks in developing new ways of doing things.Can show resilience when needed for yourself and assist others to develop this.Recognise that things can & do go wrong and are comfortable in managing the consequences and are open about applying learning.Can hold colleagues to account in an appropriate way and can constructively challenge under-performance, enabling improvements to be made. Able to make sound decisions with incomplete information and to operate in sometimes ambiguous environments.Personal Style and Behaviour:We will be looking for evidence that you:Can describe what your commitment to the aims, values and goals of United Response looks like in practice.Have integrity and display courage in tricky situations.Are a team player, with an ability to collaborate effectively in decision making and implementation, adding value to the wider leadership of the organisation.Are articulate, able to transform complex and often technical subjects into clear messages, and with strongpresentation skills, able to create concise yet robust business cases.Promote collaborative working by building relationships with colleagues If you are interested in having a confidential conversation about this newly established role please contact #####. The closing date for applications will be Thursday, the 25th of July.