With Kaelie Smith's father working in the plastics industry when she was growing up, she saw how much fulfillment a sales-based role in the manufacturing space could be, "constantly working on new projects, at the development level of some of the most popular products in the market across the wide range of markets."
"Your day always brings something new in plastics," Smith said.
Smith earned her bachelor's degree in marketing and communications, and later an MBA, from Drury University in Missouri. Her first plastics industry job was with the sales training program at Nexeo Plastics.
Smith has been at Des Moines, Iowa-based Channel Prime Alliance for the last four years, starting as an account manager, then polypropylene business development manager, and now market intelligence manager.
Her main goal is to "provide the value of market intelligence, trends and insights across CPA's product lines to help meet supplier-specific growth initiatives." Key responsibilities include market studies and updates, market campaign strategy development, supplier marketing campaign generation, and product and technical guide sales content creation.
Smith determines the best strategies to uncover new business opportunities in line with supplier growth goals, creates targeted messaging for current and prospective customers, tracks analytics of campaigns and data, and collaborates with the product management team and suppliers to create tailored CPA-branded sales tools.
"Since taking on this new role at Channel Prime Alliance, the main challenge is building the role from the ground up to fit what the Channel Prime Alliance management team, suppliers and account managers need from a marketing standpoint," she said. "It has been great getting to dive into a new role and shape it to fit each supplier, their needs and present to our sales team in the most seamless strategies possible to help them grow their business. It's a challenge I have been happy to accept and have really enjoyed the process so far."
In building this position, Smith said, receiving positive feedback on what she has started brings "a great deal of satisfaction" knowing that the role is "heading in the right direction," adding that since starting her career, she has become more proactive vs. reactive.
"While he is in the plastics industry as well and has instilled the hard work ethic side of me into anything I put my mind to, he has helped me grow confidence in my abilities both personally and professionally," Smith said of her father.
"In sales/any role, 'politely persistent' goes a long way," she said. "I've taken this approach into many facets of my roles so far in my career to ensure I am someone that is reliable and will always follow through on any project/topic, big or small."