Australian Graduates
For 2011, we are recruiting roles in:
Sales (based in Victoria, NSW and Queensland)
Where would you work?
When consumers walk into their local supermarket, chances are they’ll come across one of Fonterra’s brands. Among the best known dairy brands in the world, Fonterra’s products are loved by consumers for their balanced nutrition, quality and craftsmanship and sheer indulgence.
With revenues of AUD$3 billion in our Australia and New Zealand business, we are the largest consumer foods business in Australasia.
Fonterra is a major player in the Australian retail channel, supplying great tasting products to Woolworths, Coles and IGA stores, and we are the eleventh largest manufacturer of branded products in supermarkets (AC Nielsen MAT 25/3/07 Top 30 Manufacturers), with sales of around AUD$600 million per year.
We are the market leader in the AUD$1.5 billion cheese category. This position is driven by our Bega and Mainland cheese brands, which are number one and two, and our Perfect Italiano brand also competes strongly in this market. Bega and Mainland are ranked in the Top 10 most popular brands in Australia (ACNielsen 2010)
Our spreads range represents over 20 per cent of the combined butter-margarine market and Western Star is currently ranked number two nationally.
Our national Anlene milk brand leads the market in bone health, and in Western Australia our Brownes range of fresh white and flavoured milk are market leaders. We also have a strong regional presence in New South Wales and Queensland with our Norco and Riverina Fresh brands.
Our commitment to you and your development
All of our territory manager’s begin their careers at Fonterra with a two week induction program led by their state field sales manager. During the program, you will learn office processes and tools, accompany team members on store visits, and familiarise yourself with our Fonterra 7 Steps to the Call framework.
Within your first three to six months, you will attend a two day introductory sales training session usually run at our corporate centre in Melbourne. This session will cover: our Fonterra 7 Steps to the Call framework; questioning and listening skills; selling tips, using product features and benefits; options in closing the sale; and operating standards and behaviours.
Territory managers are also provided with defensive driver training.
To support your skills learnt around our Fonterra 7 Steps to the Call framework, field sales managers will conduct regular in-field days to assess your development. Once a territory manager’s performance meets and begin to exceed expectations, you will attend an intermediate sales training program. This course runs for three days and covers: persuasive selling, features and benefits, and buying signals; minimising the risk of rejection; closing skills; and identifying the best way to respond to different styles of behaviour.
A day in the life of a territory manager
My week begins with a call cycle review, which is in line with objectives established at our regular Friday meeting. I’m tasked with looking after stores in Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula region, and my first stop is Safeway’s Frankston store where I’m aiming to secure a dairy display to support our Perfect Italiano promotion.
I meet with the store manager and apply the skills learnt during my sales training to understand what his key issues are – which are that he is under pressure to increase sales nor is familiar with our range.
I supply specific information about our promotion, and also highlight the media channels and timeframes used to support it – and he agrees the consumer promotion requires the support of a display - which in turn will generate extra sales for his store. I volunteer to set up and maintain the display for the duration of the promotion, and he orders A$3,000 worth of extra stock.
The next stop is Coles Mornington where the ‘items not scanning report’ shows Mainland Colby cheese has not scanned or sold in the past four weeks. Ensuring ‘items not sold’ levels are low is one of my key performance indicators and a contributor to points for Fonterra’s internal ‘State of the Year’ competition between sales staff, where teams in each state are awarded points for the ‘best in store execution’ and at the end of the year, the state awarded the most points wins the prestigious award and are rewarded with an all expense paid weekend away! So I fix this immediately!
Coles has featured a Connoisseur ice cream special in its catalogue, and since it’s the middle of summer, our Connoisseur ice cream is set to perform well. I present the dairy manager with the statistics of previous Connoisseur sales which demonstrate a 200 per cent increase when compared to normal sales, and also demonstrate Connoisseur is the leading “super premium” ice cream brand in Australia and fits well with the store’s customer base. The dairy manager agrees to allocate extra promotion space for Connoisseur and orders 50 cases of stock for the promotion - a great outcome!
My last stop is Mt Eliza’s IGA supermarket. Unlike Safeway and Coles, independent supermarkets stock products that best service their local customer base rather than relying on direction from head office. The key to selling to independently owned supermarkets is the store’s trust and confidence in the territory managers and I’ve established a strong relationship with this store.
The store manager is happy to stock our recently released Western Star butter blend but space in the store is limited. I anticipated this objection and present him with a ‘butter and spreads sales ranking report’ which highlights several slow selling products in the market which the store currently carries, so he agrees to stock ours.
Satisfied with my day’s achievements, I jump back in the car and head home.
Click here to view Past Graduates Stories
Supply and Operations Planning
Fonterra’s 100 tankers collect around 2.1 billion litres of milk from 2,000 Australian dairy farmers each year and we utilise this milk to manufacture over 220,000 tonnes of dairy products and ingredients, including:
* Liquid milk and yoghurt
* Cheese
* Butters and creams
* Skim and whole milk powders
* Whey products
*Nutritional formulas
These products are manufactured in Australia at 11 dairy production sites located in the most fertile dairy regions in Victoria, northern Tasmania, southern New South Wales and Western Australia.
Our operations team are focused on optimising the efficiency of our milk supply, manufacturing and logistics supply chain to ensure we maintain our global competitiveness.
One of our competitive advantages is our fully integrated supply chain, which ensures that everything that we do creates value for our customers.
Our operations team ensure that our consumer and ingredients businesses are successful. They build new plants, make the best use of existing plants, and leverage our expertise and capabilities across our Australasian business.
We continually adopt new technologies to drive efficiency gains and reduce costs, resulting in a better, faster, and smarter focus for our business.
