Customer Success Manager - Strategic II

Certinia Inc.; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 80,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Certinia Inc. is seeking a Customer Success Manager - Strategic to advise customers on maximizing their investment in Certinia's solutions. The role involves account management, customer retention strategies, and engagement with C-level executives to ensure effective adoption and growth of our services.

Qualifications

• 5+ years relevant experience in High Tech/Enterprise Software.
• Extensive account management experience at enterprise level required.
• Consulting experience with a professional services team.

Responsibilities

• Identify and prioritize strategic accounts to manage and maximize renewals.
• Develop success plans to outline customer critical success factors.
• Monitor adoption rates and improve ROI through education and engagement.

Skills

Account management

Consultative selling

Customer retention

Interpersonal skills

Analytical skills

Presenting

Problem solving

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

Salesforce

Job description

WHO WE ARE

Certinia (formerly FinancialForce) delivers a Services-as-a-Business platform that powers and connects all aspects of services operations, from services estimation and delivery to customer success management and financial planning and accounting. The company's Professional Services Automation (PSA), Customer Success, and ERP solutions delivered on Salesforce's leading cloud platform provide the ability to run a connected services business, deliver with intelligence, and achieve business agility. Headquartered in San Jose, California with offices around the world, Certinia is backed by Haveli Investments, General Atlantic and Salesforce Ventures. For more information, visit www.certinia.com.

THE ROLE

The Customer Success Manager - Strategic (CSM) serves as a trusted advisor to our customers, helping them to achieve success with their Certinia solutions and maximize their return on investment. The CSM works with our strategic customers to strengthen adoption, identify opportunities to expand the footprint and help with customer retention. By leveraging a consultative approach, our CSMs work strategically with their customer base, to understand their business objectives, determine the best approach for leveraging Certinia capabilities, and provide recommendations on how to proceed. CSMs are an integral component of our organization, and we are looking for strong contributors to join this hybrid team of competitive and experienced professionals focused on customer satisfaction, process improvements, and our customer's ROI.

We are searching for an energetic and motivated professional to become a primary part of a rapidly growing team responsible for customer success management for Certinia. You should have the best customer management and business consultancy skills, as well as ensuring that you can manage the required customer retention/renewal management activity, across the US region, in order to meet agreed retention targets. You will be comfortable at both consulting with and negotiating with C level executives, backed up with a strong understanding of their business objectives. Key to this role is being able to articulate value, inspire and sell the future of software as a service. As a trusted advisor and coach, it falls to the customer success manager to identify how our solutions can be effectively applied to support the achievement of a company’s strategic business goals.

The ideal candidate will have relevant knowledge of cloud technologies and processes. This role can offer successful candidates a fulfilling work life in a highly dynamic and industry leading organization. With this role some traveling will be required either to other Certinia offices or to customer sites. The successful candidate must have excellent interpersonal skills, be a strong communicator, organized and analytical with the ability to work well under pressure. They must be a strong team player as well as retaining the ability to work on their own proactively with macro management. You need to be an excellent presenter and creative thinker with the ability to troubleshoot issues quickly and effectively, with good territory management discipline.

WHAT YOU WILL DO IN THIS ROLE

• Proactively identify and prioritize strategic accounts to focus efforts within a defined territory as based on perceived risk, potential growth, strategic value, and renewal timeframe.
• Develop success plans for these customers that outline their critical success factors, metrics for success, potential issues and provide recommendations.
• Ensure that these customers within the US territory derive maximum value from their investment in Certinia.
• Closely monitor adoption rates of assigned accounts; provide keen insight into exactly how customers are using our service, the pros and cons, anything we can do to improve their ROI on the service through education, coaching and strong influencing skills; minimize subscriber churn.
• Responsible for maintaining and growing utilization of Certinia solutions across your territory.
• Develop a network of advocates within each Certinia customer account.
• Educate customers on core key principles for a sustainable configuration.
• Develop and execute a program to keep customers informed of the latest product releases from Certinia relevant to their business.
• Act as liaison between product management, support and the customer for instances where escalation of critical product issues is required.
• Develop a complete understanding of the Certinia products and working knowledge of complementary products and services.
• Work closely with Professional Services to hand over new consulting opportunities and facilitate transitions from professional services following new implementations or re-implementation.
• Work collaboratively with Account Executives (AE’s) who are responsible for driving revenue opportunities across a diverse account base through uncovering new business opportunities within the install base.
• Ensure a seamless experience for the customer during the hand-off between sales through on-boarding into consulting.
• Collaborate with marketing and PR teams on building customer reference-ability.

WHAT YOU NEED TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN THIS ROLE

• Extensive account management experience with High Technology Enterprise level customers required
• Salesforce platform / domain experience strongly desired
• Consulting experience; managing a professional services team and the systems to support that team.
• Ability to multitask and handle complex matters with no supervision and with excellent follow up.
• 5+ years relevant industry experience in High Tech/Enterprise Software.
• Prior hands-on working knowledge and/or implementation of an enterprise class solution.
• Bachelor’s degree preferred.