Wholesale Account Opener & Negotiator (Home Furnishings) - Long Term

Wholesale Account Opener & Negotiator - Home Furnishings We are a California-based online home-furnishings retailer, operating in the Pacific time zone. We sell furniture in a natural-materials, organic-modern style. We are building out our supplier base and we need someone to own that from first contact to signed terms. This is a long-term role, not a project. We expect the right person to still be doing this in two years. WHAT THE ROLE IS We have a list of furniture manufacturers and importers we want wholesale accounts with. Most of them are not easy to reach. Some publish an application form and nothing else. Some route everything through a portal. Some take months to answer. A few will not show you a price until you are an approved dealer, so until the account exists we cannot even see what we would be buying at. Your job is to get those accounts open, and then to negotiate the terms on them. WHAT YOU WILL ACTUALLY DO - Research each supplier properly before making contact: find their real trade application route, find the right department, and where possible find the name of the specific person who handles new wholesale accounts for online retailers. - Complete their application accurately and completely. This sounds administrative. It is not. Applications get declined for small inconsistencies, and a decline is very hard to reverse. - Follow up persistently across several channels over several weeks, on a schedule, without ever becoming pushy or rude. - Ask a structured set of questions on every account: pricing tiers, minimum orders, freight terms, dropship options, return policy, exclusivity, and how they can deliver product data to us. - Negotiate the discount and the terms, then get to a written agreement. - Hand the finished account over cleanly to our technical team with everything they need. WHAT THIS ROLE IS NOT It is not lead generation. It is not bulk emailing. We are not looking for someone with a list-scraping tool or an outreach automation. Our suppliers receive automated approaches every day and ignore all of them, and being mistaken for one of those is the single worst outcome here. Every message you send will be written by you, for one company, referencing something real about that company. WHO THIS SUITS Someone who has opened B2B supplier or distributor accounts before and can talk in detail about how they did it. You are comfortable on the telephone with people who did not ask you to call. You are organised enough to run thirty relationships at different stages without losing track of any of them. Your written English is clean and your spoken English is confident, because a good part of this job happens live on a call. HOURS AND OVERLAP 30 hours per week. You must be able to work during US Pacific business hours, because these suppliers answer their phones between 8am and 5pm Pacific and much of this role happens on the telephone. We are giving preference to candidates in Colombia, Mexico and Argentina for that reason. HOW WE WILL HIRE We will read your answers to the questions below before anything else, so please answer them specifically. Shortlisted candidates get a short written task, then a 30-minute voice interview, then a paid three-hour trial on real work. We pay for the trial. NON-NEGOTIABLE - You never misrepresent who we are or what we do in order to get an account opened. - No automated or bulk sending, ever. - If a supplier asks not to be contacted again, that is permanent and absolute.