Our client is seeking a Vice President, Strategic OEM Accounts to serve as the executive owner of key automotive OEM customer relationships. This role is responsible for protecting and expanding strategic partnerships, driving long-term revenue growth, converting awarded business into realized revenue, and ensuring alignment between customer commitments and organizational execution.
The Vice President will act as the primary executive liaison between the company and assigned OEM customers, leading account strategy, executive engagement, commercial negotiations, program oversight, and cross-functional coordination. This position is ideal for an experienced automotive commercial leader who has successfully managed global OEM relationships from sourcing and product development through launch and production.
What You’ll Do
Strategic Account Leadership
- Serve as the executive owner for assigned automotive OEM accounts.
- Develop and execute global account strategies across multiple regions, vehicle platforms, and business units.
- Build multi-year growth plans focused on revenue expansion, customer retention, profitability, and risk mitigation.
- Maintain deep knowledge of customer product roadmaps, sourcing strategies, manufacturing footprints, and competitive positioning.
- Ensure consistent account management practices and customer communications across the organization.
Executive Relationship Management
- Establish and maintain senior-level relationships across purchasing, engineering, quality, manufacturing, finance, and program management organizations.
- Lead executive engagement initiatives and customer governance programs.
- Represent the organization during executive reviews, negotiations, strategic planning sessions, launches, and escalations.
- Drive long-term customer trust through transparent communication and operational excellence.
- Identify opportunities for expansion across vehicle programs, products, technologies, and geographic regions.
- Partner with Business Development, Product Management, Engineering, and Marketing teams to shape opportunities prior to sourcing events.
- Develop and maintain a strong pipeline beyond existing awarded business.
- Drive account growth strategies that balance current execution with future business development opportunities.
RFQ, Award & Program Oversight
- Lead coordination of RFIs, RFQs, prototype programs, pilot projects, and sourcing initiatives.
- Support pricing strategy, profitability analysis, capacity planning, commercial approvals, and negotiations.
- Provide executive oversight from award through launch, production ramp-up, and full-scale production.
- Partner with Operations, Supply Chain, Quality, Engineering, Program Management, and Finance teams to address customer commitments and execution risks.
Financial Performance Management
- Own customer revenue, bookings, profitability, and backlog performance.
- Drive pricing realization, commercial recovery efforts, and account profitability improvements.
- Monitor backlog conversion into revenue and proactively address risks impacting performance.
- Support forecasting accuracy, collections efforts, dispute resolution, and financial reporting activities.
Cross-Functional Leadership
- Lead integrated account teams consisting of Sales, Program Management, Engineering, Quality, Operations, Supply Chain, Customer Service, Finance, and Legal stakeholders.
- Establish accountability across customer-facing functions.
- Mentor account management professionals and promote commercial excellence throughout the organization.
- Drive continuous improvement initiatives related to forecasting, customer engagement and account management processes.
Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Business, Supply Chain, Program Management or a related field.
- 12+ years progressive experience in automotive OEM account management, strategic sales, commercial leadership, program management, or customer facing leadership roles.
- 5+ years of leadership experience managing global or multi-region accounts with significant revenue and profitability responsibility.
- Proven success managing complex automotive customer relationships from sourcing and product development through launch and production.
- Experience supporting automotive, commercial vehicle, electrification, advanced manufacturing, transportation, and engineered product industries.
- Strong understanding of automotive OEM sourcing processes, RFQs, nominations, product development cycles, APQP, PPAP, launch, and production operations.
- Experience leading commercial negotiations, pricing discussions, contract management activities.
- Strong knowledge of forecasting, backlog management, margin performance, backlog, retention of performance
The Ideal Candidate
- Has extensive experience managing critical automotive OEM accounts.
- Understands the full lifecycle from RFQ through launch, production, and revenue realization.
- Builds lasting executive-level customer relationships and trusted partnerships.
- Effectively balances customer advocacy with operational and financial objectives.
- Thrives in complex, cross-functional environments and can influence without direct authority.
- Demonstrates a strong commercial mindset with a track record of driving sustainable revenue growth.