Wholesale Sales Representative

Title:   Production Associate 

Reports To: General Manager // FLSA Classification: Nonexempt

Interested applicants should email a statement of interest, resume, and professional to jobs@highergroundstrading.com.

Description:

Higher Grounds is seeking a full-time Wholesale Sales Representative with a strong work ethic to retain and grow the wholesale a customer base across northern Michigan while diligently and creatively pursuing new business and new accounts for Higher Grounds. The representative will be expected to work generally Monday through Friday,  40 hours per week, with some weeks requiring less and some weeks requiring more and occasional weekend work.

Duties include:

  • Conduct regular in-person visits across Higher Grounds’ wholesale customer base active accounts, scaled to the assigned territory.

  • Know each account’s order cadence, product mix, equipment needs, key contacts, and growth potential.

  • Identify and pursue healthy expansion opportunities with existing customers.

  • Organize, lead, and execute on coffee brewing and sampling for events and demonstrations.

  • Catch at-risk signals and customer needs early, to ensure customer support and retention.

  • Build and maintain a pipeline of qualified prospects and leads within the territory.

  • Conduct in-person prospecting, cultivate referrals, and follow up promptly with inbound leads.

  • Move prospects through the defined sales stages with discipline and pace.

  • Close new accounts and onboard them fully and smoothly.

  • Provide administrative and follow-up support for growth accounts

  • Work with the owner and General Manager on strategic growth account work.

Competencies:

  • Ability to read a room and build rapport quickly.

  • Pleasant persistence — consistent follow-up without being pushy.

  • Comfortable spending hours in the car and minutes at the counter.

  • Confident asking for the business in a natural, low-pressure way.

  • Organized enough to manage a 60–80 account portfolio without dropping details.

  • Comfortable using modern electronic sales tools such as CRM, Google Suite, pipeline dashboards, and quote builders.

  • Strong verbal and written communication skills.

  • A real interest in coffee, sustainability, small business, or some combination of the three.

Qualifications:

  • Demonstrate, measurable sales growth in a B2B field sales role.

  • Experience in food service, beverage, or related B2B sales; coffee experience is a plus but not required.

  • Valid driver’s license and an acceptable driving record.

  • Use of a personal vehicle for daily field work, reimbursed at the IRS standard mileage rate.

  • Comfortable with extended driving across northern Michigan.

  • Enthusiastic supporter of small business, social justice, and environmental sustainability.

Work Environment:

This role is field-based. Frequent time spent traveling to and visiting customer locations — cafes, restaurants, grocery stores, hotels, and offices — across northern Michigan, using the employee’s own vehicle (reimbursed at the IRS standard mileage rate). The position requires extended periods of driving, early-morning visits, and the ability to transport samples and marketing materials.

Other Duties:

Please note this job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee for this job. Duties, responsibilities and activities may change at any time with or without notice.

Higher Grounds is a mission-based business built around the idea that high quality coffee is sustainable only through a human-centric approach by making coffee production beneficial for farmers, their communities and everyone involved in the supply chain. 

Our circle model: We provide coffee drinkers with the opportunity to engage in a cycle that begins with, and returns to, our partners in coffee-growing regions. We’re fully engaged in that cycle, sourcing coffee directly from farmers through ownership of our importer Cooperative Coffees and circling back to the farmers and their communities via our partner nonprofit, On the Ground.

Learn more about our nonprofit work at: http://onthegroundglobal.org

Learn more about Cooperative Coffees at:  https://coopcoffees.coop/about/mission-vision/