Customer Success Manager

Introduction
IBM’s Industry Consultants are essential to our clients as they work to reinvent themselves for the future. Join our highly visible and highly skilled team of global consultants as we strive to accelerate sales deliver client engagements and build IBM’s market eminence. If you are a forward-thinker and a curious intellectual we welcome you to apply for your next exciting career challenge!

Your Role and Responsibilities
You:
We are looking for an organized passionate individual with extensive customer-facing experience. As an experienced professional in the SaaS industry as a Customer Success Manager (CSM) you will bring your experience leading our largest most complex customers from deployment to broad scale usage managing the risks associated with successful adoption. You will be comfortable working independently across all levels within an organization and have experience working with Partners and System Integrators along with an appreciation of the demands of working within IT tech operations or finance disciplines.
The successful candidate will be able to adapt to a fast-moving organization and collaborate with technical and non-technical stakeholders. The successful candidate should be outcome-focused and demonstrate excellent interpersonal and soft skills.
Us:
The team plays a wide variety of roles engaging various internal organizations to provide an outstanding customer experience. Our strength lies in our ability to collaborate; we challenge and encourage each other to think outside the box and come up with new ideas to improve the overall customer experience.
As a growing and evolving organization Apptio is looking for someone who is able to bring experience grit and creativity in equal measure to drive success in the region.
What we want you to do:

• Maintain a portfolio of large complex customers as a CSM: create an engagement strategy with a sense of urgency by working closely with customers to understand and drive use cases; monitor and track usage of Apptio applications; identify and react to adoption risk both in terms of threats and opportunities; build agree then coach customers to deliver against their success plans to ensure achievement of roadmap targets and defined success metrics.
• Develop strong customer relationships: proactively engage with customers across both operational and management positions to promote their Apptio solution and showcase value back to them; understand the customer business and empathize with their circumstances in order to build a relationship as a trusted advisor and foster deep trust.
• Serve as Apptio coach and expert: provide product knowledge and expertise as it relates to customer needs; coach customer TBM team on best practices reference examples across your portfolio and leverage your Apptio internal network to guide and mentor customer to achieve their goals.
• Collaborate and partner with Customer Success teams: Lead solution architecture new capabilities patches and upgrades etc. discussions in partnership with Customer Success Advisors Engineering technical experts etc. Ensure that the right solutions get implemented upgrades and patches are timely following Apptio best practices.
• Coordinate with the Account Management Function: working alongside Account Managers to ensure alignment with the efforts of the Account Management team to maximize retention adoption and customer satisfaction; periodically engage directly in the sales process specifically within existing accounts.
• Maintain Product Knowledge: Understand the business and technical problems the Apptio solution addresses; stay current on product roadmap as well as understanding the scenarios features and functions within each of the products and how these are applied to address business and technical problems; collaborate with product management and development functions to channel client feedback and enhancements as appropriate.
• Program Management: Provide overall program oversight working in partnership with Apptio Product and Engineering teams Apptio University Global Deployment Customer Success Advisors and Delivery Services to execute high-quality projects and initiatives aligned to agreed outcomes . Provide mentorship to Apptio customers which includes product and operational best practices rollout Month End Close Practice as well as other client processes best supported with the Apptio solution. Act as the escalation point for the team working to communicate and resolve issues related to value realization . Support the completion of project deliverables by assisting with sponsor / executive coordination within the customer process invocation / alignment and value conversations

Required Technical and Professional Expertise

• Candidates must have a B.A. or B.S. ideally in finance technology engineering or a business-related discipline with most successful candidates having 2-4 years as a CSM or Technical Account Manager role in a SaaS organization
• Proven experience in B2B SaaS environment delivering against operational metrics focused on adoption and renewal upsell and expansion subscription services and margins
• Proven experience managing a demanding portfolio of customers driving customer value and adoption through use case elicitation and roadmap execution
• Candidates must be fluent in German and English

Preferred Technical and Professional Expertise

• Experience within IT Finance and/or Technology departments
• Technical / hands-on implementation experience
• Experience positioning or selling software and/or services within software industry
• Capable influencer with proven ability to build and maintain strong customer relationships at all levels
• Team player who will innovate to continue improving the way Apptio serves its customers
• Excellent organization program/project/time management and communication skills
• One or more of the following knowledge areas is a plus:
  • PMP and/or Agile Methodology certification or relevant experience
  • Apptio product knowledge
  • TBMA certification
  • FinOps certification
  • AWS/Azure/ GCP practitioner certification