Manager, Customer Success

POSITION OVERVIEW/OBJECTIVE: 

Manages and develops a team of Customer Success Managers (CSMs), who engage with SolarWinds customers to ensure they are getting full value from their investment in SolarWinds. Impacts product adoption, expansion sales, and retention by delivering a best-in-class customer experience. Manages direct reports through their responses to customer needs and serves as a point of direct customer contact and escalation as required. Works across departments to drive issue resolution and provide feedback on the business process to all functions. Develops staff through regular feedback, coaching, monitoring, and performance reviews.

PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES: 

 Build and lead a team of customer champions who will manage customer relationships and understand the customers’ pain points, technical landscapes, and business goals. Identify how SolarWinds products can best meet customer needs. 

Drive customer success outcomes by influencing customer lifetime value through increased renewal rates, high product adoption, customer satisfaction, and overall net promoter scores, enabling expansion, and new business growth through customer advocacy. 

Analyze user behavior data to detect patterns and define activity scores. Leverage reports to automate customer campaigns geared towards increasing feature adoption and preventing churn. 

Measure the effectiveness of customer success by evaluating operational metrics, actively participating during internal reviews, sharing key performance indicators with senior leaders, and taking defined actions based on observations. 

Lead the team that manages the lifecycle of the customer journey and drive phenomenal customer onboarding and adoption experiences. 

Communicate directly with named customers and conduct data-driven analyses of customer behavior to measure feature adoption and predict at-risk accounts. Manage escalations from team as needed. 

Execute on the customer lifecycle and uphold standards for mapping the customer journey and developing listening points (e.g., usage, satisfaction, etc.), interventions, customer base segmentation, and the identification of opportunities for continuous improvement. 

Enable team through continuous process improvement and support the implementation of tools to drive efficiency and effectiveness. 

Contribute to scaling the business and enhancing technology by monitoring and reporting on the effectiveness of customer-impacting systems. 

Internal customer advocacy – As the internal voice of the customer, drive alignment across SWI marketing, products, and sales. 

Provide 1:1 coaching and growth opportunities for team members through a defined performance management process. Track individual training and professional development plans and carry out other managerial duties. 

Contribute to defining people capabilities, profiles, and skills of high-performing customer success leaders. 

Motivate team to reach its full its capabilities. Recognize and develop employee growth and create opportunities for high performance. Translate company goals into functional department and individual career goals and provide support and guidance to employees. 

Manage the day-to-day operations of a customer success team. Develop team priorities and objectives. 

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS: 

 Experience hiring, developing, and leading a world-class, customer-facing team; demonstrated people management capabilities including coaching, performance management, and succession management to drive high levels of employee engagement 

Previous experience collaborating directly with renewals, sales, customer support, and products/engineering 

Proven ability to execute in a customer-focused environment and advocate for customers across a cross-functional organization 

Deep understanding of value drivers in recurring revenue business models 

Strong empathy for customers and a passion for revenue and growth 

Strong reasoning & analytical skills; able to structure thinking into a logical flow and sequence easy for others to understand; able to create and work with conceptual frameworks 

Demonstrated desire for continuous learning and improvement 

Enthusiastic and creative leader with the ability to inspire others 

Experience with Salesforce, Gainsight, and NetSuite are a plus 

Data driven experience with BI tools such as Tableau is a plus 

Crisp, compelling, and practical style of organizing thoughts into writing and speech; able to communicate with all levels in an organization 

Strong empathy for customers and a passion for revenue and growth; strong understanding of value drivers in recurring revenue business models 

Enthusiastic and creative leader with the ability to inspire others 

Able to prioritize and execute to move projects forward 

Capable of managing own time and team commitments; acts with urgency and integrity 

Able to establish positive relationships and collaborate with key stakeholders around accomplishing goals 

Demonstrated ability to manage changing, multiple priorities 

Accountable for results 

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:

 5+ years’ relevant work experience in customer-facing roles such as renewals, sales, customer success, customer support, sales engineering, or account management 

3+ years managing customer success and/or account management teams