Customer Success Manager

Company Description

Aurea was founded with the singular vision of helping businesses succeed in today’s complex digital landscape. To achieve that goal, we do things differently. Our Unlimited approach to enterprise software is designed to simplify and accelerate the way our customers use technology, with a Netflix-like model that unlocks each and every Aurea product with a single subscription. With Aurea Unlimited, our customers can innovate and expand with less risk, better performance, and more value for their business.

Job Description

Do you excel at deeply engaging with customers/clients around their technical and user success objectives in order to understand and maximize the stability, maintainability and performance that customers derive from your products and services, leading to world class levels of retention, customer satisfaction and top-line growth? Do you have the clear and direct communications capabilities to truly lead customer discussions at a variety of levels, from junior to more senior, cutting through noise and keeping things centered on the true success priorities.

This proactive approach to focus actions and choices around strategic decisions is the opposite of how customer success is practiced at many firms, where staff scurry around promoting an unfocused diffusion of effort and unproductive set of placating actions that don’t actually move the customer toward success, and often move them farther away. Our CSMs deeply understand the goals most essential for delivering required performance levels for customers and drive the dialogue & action around those true needs, leading to real impact. We are seeking a specific type of individual, with the intelligence to connect customer insights and best practices to yield customer success plans that provide an unambiguous path to maximum performance & benefit of our software applications, as well as a clear and direct personal communication style to lead customers on that path. We call this the “doctor-patient” relationship, where you diagnose issues, assemble a prescriptive plan of action, and - as the success expert - guide the customer through the regimen necessary to achieve health and success.

If you aspire to work across a broad range of industries and software products in a company that aggressively grows through acquisition; if you are someone who craves the adrenaline rush of being squarely “in the arena”, proactively taking on conflict vs. shying (or running) away; if you want to build long-term relationships and guide customers through meter-moving results unlike the traditional consulting "on to the next one" project turnover, then this role may be the one for you.

Your role is to:

Build relationships at various levels and conduct frequent discussions around technical and user success objectives vs. current state performance. Use playbook and analytical package-driven insights to present the logic for prioritized recommendations and to quantify success proof
Leveraging these technical success and use case/user success insights, create and execute Customer Success Plans for your customers that unambiguously define the success goals and the actions required to achieve those goals. Drive against those plans to deliver to those objectives
Navigate and lead the customer along the success journey, keeping them centered on the “north star” and proactively managing divergence/distraction . While our emphasis on being able to lead conversations is clear, we are seeking an empathetic active listener, not a tone-deaf bulldozer, with a superior ability to rapidly process information and (re)center conversations and actions to their essential core. You are a catalyst for focus.

Specific Accountabilities:

Conduct routine check-ins with customer contacts at a variety of levels to generate insight, guide actions and solicit feedback
Leveraging your customer insights and Aurea’s best practice playbooks, create success plans for each of your accounts. For each success plan, our objective is to ensure that customers understand the plan, are aligned to the recommended actions and commit to that path
Provide consistency as a valued partner in driving focused discussions, compelling decisions and explicit choices, challenging to yield prioritization, and (re)centering ongoing discussions & actions on those choices and resulting plan
Work with Engineering, Technical Support, Professional Services and other internal organizations to deliver to success plan action items on behalf of the customer.

Key outputs:

Deep customer Insight Summaries around technical and user success
Customer Success Plans
Customer Check-Ins and summaries to drive understanding, alignment and commitment to success plans
Exceptional customer retention and customer satisfaction Performance

Qualifications - Education and Experience

An undergraduate university major or minor in a technical discipline (Engineering, Computer Science, Physical Sciences, Math, Applied Economics)
4+ years in the delivery of high-value services to senior-level customers/clients, which include or are augmented by the following required experiences:
At least 2 years of experience working within a leading management consulting or systems consulting firm
At least 1 year of leading relationships with senior-level business buyers of software-enabled products, services and/or projects
At least 2 years of experience in a technical capacity working directly with software (Product Management, Engineering, Technical Support, Product and/or Solution Marketing, Pre-Sales, Solution Delivery)
Post-merger integration and PE-backed experience is desirable, but not essential

Qualifications - Required Skills

A clear, direct, and simple communication style in both verbal and written form that eliminates the potential for ambiguity. You have a superior ability to break things down to their essence and instill that focus into your customer engagement
A relentless curiosity, where you probe for true customer motivations and rationale - not only on issues but also on key players and their hot buttons
Able to have difficult conversations as part of junior, mid- and (up to) senior-level engagement and escalations with customers, pushing them to make decisions and take actions that they may prefer to avoid
A strong ability to use “productized” analytical insights, in concert with agreed success plans, to to break through the noise, clarify what really matters and re-center conversations
Tenacity in achieving success goals. Holding your team, yourself and other stakeholders to account in delivery to commitments