The Company

Our mission is to make education affordable by helping institutions increase alumni giving. The idea started from our founders’ own struggle with lack of scholarships when they were students. Watch this TEDx talk from Kalyan to learn more.

We are a bootstrapped company that has grown to be a leader in the alumni software space in the US. We’re slated for even faster growth on the path to become market leaders through a unique strategic partnership with Blackbaud (read more here & here)

Our customers are universities and high schools and in most cases we’re working with staff in the alumni relations and fundraising office at these institutions. The value prop for them at a high level is simple - “Engage more alumni and raise more money from them”. 90%+ of our customers are from the US currently but we’re starting sales in UK and Canada this year so we’ll start to see some more customer regions this year. Our team is based in India and USA. The India team is based in Bangalore and the US team is fully remote.

The Role

Work Timing

All of our customers are US universities and high schools. So you are expected to work during US hours 9 am - 5 pm EST (which is 6:30 pm to 2:30 am IST or 7:30 to 3:30 am IST).

Work Location

We expect all team members to work from the Bangalore office. We follow a hybrid work policy, requiring you to work from the office at least 2 to 3 days per week. You have the flexibility to leave early from office and resume work at home on days you are working from office.

Responsibilities

• KPIs: onboarding (CSAT and time to first value), account retention, $ expansion, product adoption, and building advocates.

• Accountable for the complete post-sales customer journey. (Onboarding → Adoption → Retention → Advocacy)

• Become the trusted advisor for each of your customers and help them achieve their alumni engagement and fundraising goals. Build and maintain strong relationships with the champion and other key stakeholders.

• Train customers on the product and leverage product workshops to ensure that they are equipped with knowledge about using Almabase.

• Collaborate with customers to solve various use cases using the Almabase product.

• Conduct regular check-ins & business reviews with your customers to ensure consistent engagement.

• Own the churn prevention and expansion process for all your accounts. Monitor at-risk customer behavior and carry out activities to retain them.

• Proactively identify opportunities for expansion and contact customers for up-sell/cross-sell.

• Identify customer insights and pain points and contribute to the product roadmap by providing active feedback to the product team.

• Collaborate with the Marketing team to build customer case studies, testimonials, and referrals.

• Accountable for training customers on using the product.

• Documenting all customer conversations and information on our CRM.

An independent Customer Support team is responsible for responding to customers' questions while using the product. As a CSM, you are expected to be proactive in helping customers succeed, which is how the role differs from Customer Support.

What your 3, 6, 12 months will look like

First 3 Months:

• Onboarding:

  • Complete training on Almabase's product, market landscape, and competitors.

  • Shadow CSMs on customer calls to learn best practices in customer interactions and management.

  • Familiarize yourself with Almabase's existing customer success playbooks, processes, and CRM tools (HubSpot).

• Hands-on Customer Interaction:

  • Begin managing your own portfolio of customers and having the first conversations.

  • Conduct proactive customer check-ins and start identifying opportunities to build meaningful customer relationships.
    

First 6 Months:

• Ownership and Accountability:

  • Fully own the onboarding, adoption, and initial advocacy stages for your assigned customers.

  • Begin independently conducting Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) to align product usage with customers' strategic goals.

• Customer Advocacy and Expansion:

  • Identify opportunities for customer advocacy (e.g., G2 reviews, case studies, testimonials).

  • Start proactively recognizing opportunities for upselling or cross-selling additional Almabase products.

• Churn Prevention:

  • Begin proactively identifying and managing potential churn risks and work closely with internal teams to retain customers.

First 12 Months:

• Strategic Customer Advisor:

  • Fully established as a trusted advisor to your portfolio of enterprise customers, demonstrating deep knowledge of their goals and use cases.

  • Effectively drive product adoption and continuous customer engagement through personalized strategies and customer success playbooks.

• Revenue Growth and Customer Retention:

  • Actively drive revenue growth through strategic renewals, upsells, and expansions within your accounts.

  • Consistently achieve key performance indicators around onboarding success, retention, expansion revenue, and customer advocacy.

• Process Enhancement:

  • Contribute to improving Almabase’s customer success playbooks and processes based on firsthand experiences and insights.

  • Actively participate in cross-functional projects aimed at enhancing overall customer experience and internal efficiency.

Throughout your journey, you will receive consistent mentoring, regular performance check-ins, and career development support to set you up for long-term success.

Requirements

• At least 1 year of SaaS B2B work experience as a Customer Success Manager.

• Excellent written and verbal business communication skills.

• Ability to communicate and foster positive business relationships.

• Strong problem-solving skills, a technical and analytical aptitude, with the ability to quickly learn and adopt technical products.

• An ability to understand a software product and its nuances very well.

• Experience with customer success software or CRM (like Hubspot) would be helpful. We use Hubspot.

What will a typical quarter look like?

At the beginning of each quarter, we will work with you to come up with a set of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to work towards. This will help you focus.

• Onboarding: You will have customers who just signed up with Almabase, and you’ll be accountable for their onboarding. A separate implementation team will ensure the customer’s implementation is completed before handing it to you (CSM). You will ensure the customer is trained and that the program they intended to launch on Almabase is launched.

• Renewals: You will have customers whose renewal is due in the quarter. You will identify opportunities to upsell and get them to sign a new contract. If the customer is at risk of churn, you will work towards eliminating that risk. Most of our contracts are multi-year contracts, so a customer comes up for renewal only once in 2 - 3 years on average.

• Engagement: For the rest of the customers, you will plan to engage them in different ways based on their goals and current product adoption. You will be identifying opportunities to cross-sell additional products that will be beneficial for them. You will conduct business reviews to help them both tactically and strategically.

• Building Advocates: Actively review your portfolio to identify opportunities for customers to give us a G2 review, Capterra review, or video testimonial. Also, to nudge customers to give us referrals, be references for prospects, help us build case studies, or advocate for Almabase at a conference.

• Apart from all of the above account management work, you will also be involved with folks in the team or cross-functionally to improve our internal processes and help us do our day-to-day job better. For example, develop a playbook to drive more product adoption for a certain type of customer. These objectives help the entire function progress forward, not just your own portfolio of customers.
  

What will make you successful in this role?

• You need to understand the customer pain points and the market really deeply to be successful in this role.

• Being curious. Doing deep discovery to understand customer workflows and what they have hired Almabase for.

• You need to have a deep understanding of our product to match the customer’s needs to specific parts of it. You will often have to screen share with the customer and help them set up something specific within the product.

• You need to be disciplined and good at multitasking. Since you’ll have multiple customers in your portfolio, it’s very easy to get overwhelmed.

You need to care about the customers’ problems genuinely. That authenticity will help you form better relationships with the customers, which is critical to succeeding in this role.

How will we set you up for success in this role?

• We will provide you with detailed training to give you a headstart in the world of alumni relations and educational fundraising. We’ll also talk about the competitive landscape and provide you access to hundreds of recorded conversations with existing customers and existing collateral. You can also dive into our CRM to see all prior customer conversations.

• We will provide you with in-depth training on our product and sandbox access to let you play around. The goal is for you to figure out how each piece helps solve a piece of the puzzle for customers.

• We will provide you with a playbook for how we currently manage customers. You are welcome to suggest improvements, but this will certainly give you a headstart rather than starting from scratch.

• You will have plenty of opportunities to shadow calls where other CSMs are talking to their customers before taking your first call with a customer. We will shadow you on the first few calls to provide feedback.

• You will participate in a weekly standup with the entire customer success, onboarding, support & customer experience team to learn from each other and eliminate bottlenecks quickly. Apart from regular mentoring, you will also have a quarterly 1:1 review with your manager to discuss your career goals and overall success.

• We will provide you with access to the best customer success resources and add you to a few customer success communities so you can discuss with other people in similar roles—learn and teach at the same time. We’ve found that this is the fastest way to improve your skills.

• Most importantly, we will help you set up a one-on-one casual chat with every member of the Almabase team so you get to know everyone well.
  
  

Why should you join Almabase?

Customer Success is set to explode as a function in India. Over the years we have developed some of the best practices in SaaS customer success. By joining this well-oiled team you will get to learn a lot and become a highly valuable customer success professional. At the same time, the team is small enough for you to change how things are done and have an outsized impact. Knowing that the work you do every day improves accessibility to education for millions of students is highly motivating - it’s what keeps us going too.

Benefits

This is what our team members enjoy the most at Almabase:

• Strong Culture: We have a culture that we’re proud of. Read more on how our team feels about the company on Glassdoor (here). When you work at Almabase you get to work with amazing people that will help you grow to become the best version of yourself.

• Transparency & Trust: An environment that trusts each individuals’ ability and creativity to achieve the best outcome for the team. High levels of transparency to help you get exposure to what’s happening across the business.

• Great Salary & Equity: Along with competitive salaries, our top performers and leaders get stock options. As Almabase continues to grow, you’ll have a real opportunity to create wealth for yourself and your family.

• More than just work: One big secret to our success (shhh… this is just between us) is finding the balance between work and play. We have plenty of activities throughout the year that help build esprit de corps – whether they are intense cricket/football/basketball matches, or fun-filled music/dance/trivia/game nights.

• Food & Snacks: You’ll never have to worry about your hunger pangs. We provide tasty home cooked food & snacks at all times of the day.

• Health insurance: We offer health insurance for you and your dependents.

• Unlimited leaves & flexible work hours: There is no ceiling to the leaves or restraint to your working hours. Our only policy is that you use your good judgment.

• The comfort of home: On a tiring day, if you want to take a break on a bed or if you want to jog & take a shower at work or play your hearts our on PS5, you can do it all at Almabase.