Mark Cage

In January 2025 I was promoted to look after some of our national accounts at Broadland Drinks. Mostly within the Bargain Store channel, which included Home Bargains and B&M amongst others. More recently I have also taken on responsibility of our largest customer, Aldi UK and Ireland.

Key duties in this role include face to face customer meetings (always preferred), day to day management of orders, stock and forecasting, working with customers on promotional plans to help drive sales, helping my customers to solve problems and hit their targets, liaising with internal teams to ensure efficiencies within the business relating to my customers, working with internal teams on customer spec systems and artwork requirements and developing own label NPD with my customers.

In this role I am responsible for 29% of the business contribution margin.

This was my first full time Account Manager role at Broadland Drinks. I had a portfolio of approx. 80 accounts varying in size and these customers were mostly located in East Anglia. I had taken on 4 large customers from my previous role. These customers spanned over many different channels, including On and Off Trade, wholesale, food service, independents, bargain stores, online, church supplies, farm shops, bingo halls, football stadiums. A real range which was great to build so many relationships.

Key duties included customer meetings, forecasting, proposing NPD, working with customers on their needs.

Due to the size of my customer base in this role, most of my work was proposing/maintaining current Broadland product listings rather than developing new skus with my customers.

This was very much a hybrid role, where I managed a team of 2 in our support function of the business helping with the admin and support needs across the business. And part of my time was managing our smaller, local account base with their needs.

Within the support function of the business I would assist and lead a team responsible for the following; customer new lines forms, manage our pricing system, maintain customer spec systems, maintain Brandbank, new account setup, bespoke reporting for customers or colleagues, arrange and sending of samples to customers. A lot of these requests were excel based.

During this time I also researched and implemented a new CRM system for the business which included providing training to the team and creating customised reports on the Microsoft Power Bi platform. This is something I'm extremely proud of.

This was my first role at Broadland Drinks and gave me the platform to learn so much about the business and understand the processes fully which has helped me through my various roles with the company.

On top of the day to day tasks referred to in the above role, I also used to manage and prepare our trade shows, including ProWein and London Wine Fair. this involved stand design, sample stock management, logistics and organisation of the team day by day.

After 2 years I promoted to Senior Sales Support Officer when I took on more responsibility in reporting and product management.

Leading a team of 4 to help deliver titles to the education sector.

Key duties included day to day management of a team, liaising with customers on their orders and queries, reporting on performance, communicating across other departments in the business to ensure great customer service to our customers.