Strategic Account Manager

Fortified Data; Raleigh, Northern (NC, KY); Hybrid; USD 110,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Health benefits

Retirement plan

Fully remote US-based role

Job summary

Fortified Data, a fully remote database services company, seeks a Strategic Account Manager to own the long-term health and growth of a portfolio within our Client Success team.

You will understand client environments, articulate their priorities, and connect them with Fortified Data experts to renew, expand, and refer services.

Qualifications

• Five or more years in account management or client success at a managed services provider or similar recurring revenue business.
• Proven ability to retain clients through renewal and grow revenue within existing accounts.
• Experience leading business reviews and presenting to IT leaders (directors/CIOs/CTOs).
• Strong written and verbal communication with ability to explain technical topics to non-technical audiences.

Responsibilities

• Own the relationship with a portfolio of Managed Services clients and be the primary contact for overall experience.
• Lead regular business reviews linking service activity to client outcomes (uptime, risk, cost, readiness).
• Identify expansion opportunities and coordinate with services teams to propose solutions.
• Ensure service tier disclosures and route out-of-scope work to appropriate projects or hours.

Skills

Relationship management

Strategic account management

Communication

Cross-functional collaboration

Business acumen

Sales forecasting

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

Zendesk

HubSpot

Job description

Fortified Data is a fast-growing, fully remote database services company helping organizations worldwide optimize their most critical data environments. As trusted advisors in database management, administration, and strategic consulting, we partner with clients to design solutions that do not just solve today’s challenges, they scale for tomorrow’s growth.

Our team members are empowered to take ownership, contribute ideas, and help shape the future of the company. Working at Fortified Data comes with competitive compensation, comprehensive health benefits, a retirement plan, and the flexibility of a fully remote US-based role while maintaining a healthy work life balance.

Fortified Data is an equal opportunity employer. Eligible candidates must provide evidence of legal working status for any employer in the U.S.

Job Summary

The Strategic Account Manager owns the long-term health and growth of a portfolio of Fortified Data’s Managed Services clients. As part of our Client Success team, you will be each client’s primary business relationship: the person who understands their environment, their priorities, and where Fortified Data can help next.

The role pairs relationship management with enough technical fluency to hold credible conversations about database platforms, cloud migration, and data risk. You will recognize opportunities in what clients tell you and connect them to the right Fortified Data experts. Success means clients who renew, expand their services with us, and refer others.

You will work closely with Managed Services POD Leaders, Professional Services, the Project Management Office, sales, and marketing.

Duties and Essential Job Functions

• Own the relationship with a portfolio of Managed Services clients, serving as their primary business point of contact and the person accountable for their overall experience with Fortified Data.
• Build a working understanding of each client’s database environment, including the platforms they run, their service coverage, recent incidents, and planned changes, using Zendesk, HubSpot, and regular conversations with the POD team that supports them.
• Lead regular business reviews that connect service activity and technical findings to the outcomes clients care about, such as uptime, risk reduction, cost, and readiness for upcoming projects.
• Identify and develop expansion opportunities within existing accounts, including upgrades to higher service tiers, additional managed services, Professional Services projects such as migrations, upgrades, and performance work, and Assessments.
• Partner with POD Leaders, Professional Services consultants, and the Principal Solutions Architect to turn technical findings into clear proposals, bringing the right technical expert into client conversations at the right time.
• Ensure clients understand what their service tier includes, and route out-of-scope requests to on-demand hours or scoped projects in partnership with POD Leaders.
• Monitor account health signals such as ticket trends, hours usage, satisfaction feedback, and changes in client leadership, and act early on renewal risk.
• Serve as the escalation point for client concerns about service, working with Managed Services leadership to resolve issues and keeping the client informed with clear, honest updates.
• Coordinate with the Project Management Office on onboarding and project handoffs so new services start smoothly.
• Keep partner contacts informed and aligned on shared accounts sold through our Full Partner and Referral Partner relationships.
• Maintain accurate records of client interactions, opportunities, renewals, and forecasts in HubSpot.
• Stay current on database and cloud platform trends, such as cloud migration, end of support dates, and AI readiness of the data estate, so you can anticipate what clients will need next.
• Use AI tools and automation to improve account research, meeting preparation, and reporting.

Technical Fluency

This is not a hands-on technical role, and you will not administer databases. You do need enough understanding of what our clients run, and what we do for them, to be credible with both IT leaders and engineers. In practice, that means you can:

• Explain in plain language what a database administrator does and why database health, performance, and availability matter to a business.
• Recognize the platforms we support, including Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and cloud database services in Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud, and describe at a general level how they differ.
• Discuss the concepts that drive our client conversations: high availability and disaster recovery, backup and recovery, performance tuning, version upgrades and end of support dates, security and compliance, and the move from on-premises servers to the cloud.
• Read a technical finding or assessment summary and identify both the business risk and the commercial opportunity in it.
• Understand service level agreements, incident priority levels, response and resolution times, root cause analysis, and change control, and explain them clearly to a client after an incident.
• Read monthly metric reports, ticket trends, and hours utilization, and recognize what they indicate about environment health and renewal risk.
• Understand IT service management practice, including incident, problem, change, and request management, as run in a ticketing platform such as Zendesk.
• Distinguish between work included in a client’s service tier, billable on-demand work, and work that should be scoped as a project.
• Recognize when a conversation has moved past your depth and bring in the right technical expert.

If you do not already hold one, we expect you to complete Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) or Azure Data Fundamentals (DP-900) within your first six months. Fortified Data will support that learning.

Measures of Success

• This role will be evaluated against a defined set of annual objectives, established each year in partnership with leadership. Representative measures include the following.
• Client retention and renewal rate across the assigned portfolio.
• Expansion revenue from existing accounts, measured in monthly recurring revenue added.
• Growth in the number of clients upgrading to higher service tiers.
• Professional Services and Assessment revenue sourced from existing accounts.
• Client satisfaction, measured through business review feedback and survey results.
• Forecast accuracy and the quality of account records in HubSpot.

Required Experience

• Five or more years in account management or client success at a managed services provider or comparable recurring service organization, such as managed IT, managed security, managed cloud, or technical support services, owning a portfolio of contracted recurring revenue clients through renewal.
• The technical fluency described above, gained through prior work managing or selling database, cloud, infrastructure, or managed services offerings.
• Demonstrated success retaining clients through renewal and growing revenue within existing accounts.
• Experience leading business reviews and presenting to IT leaders, including IT directors, CIOs, and CTOs.
• Understanding of recurring services economics, including how managed services renewals and expansion differ from one-time project sales.
• Proficiency with a CRM, preferably HubSpot, and the discipline to keep pipeline and forecast data accurate.
• Strong written and verbal communication, with the ability to explain technical topics clearly to non-technical audiences.
• Ability to work independently in a remote environment and manage many client relationships at once.

Preferred Experience

• Experience in database services, data platforms, or the Microsoft partner ecosystem.
• A current Microsoft certification such as Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) or Azure Data Fundamentals (DP-900), or a comparable AWS or Google Cloud fundamentals certification.
• Prior experience in a technical role, such as support engineer, systems administrator, or database administrator, before moving into account management.
• Experience with partner and channel sales models, including systems integrators and technology resellers.
• Familiarity with Zendesk, Microsoft Teams, and Slack.
• Experience using AI tools to improve client success or sales workflows.
• A bachelor’s degree in business, marketing, information technology, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.

Required Attributes

Relationship Building: Earns trust at every level of a client organization, from the engineer who opens support tickets to the executive who signs the renewal.

Business Acumen: Connects technical topics to cost, risk, and growth, and frames recommendations in terms of the client’s business outcomes.

Curiosity: Asks good questions, wants to understand how things work, and keeps learning about the technologies our clients depend on.

Ownership: Takes responsibility for the outcome of every account, follows through on commitments, and raises risk early.

Collaboration: Works well with technical teams, respects their expertise, and brings them in at the right moments.

Integrity: Recommends what the client needs, not what is easiest to sell, and communicates setbacks honestly.

Organization: Manages a full portfolio, keeps records accurate, and plans time well across many clients.

• We are a 100% remote company.
• Occasional travel may be required for client business reviews, partner events, and company events.