Senior Customer Success Manager - Apptio

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 experienced, passionate individual with extensive customer-facing experience in the SaaS industry. As a Senior (Sr) Customer Success Manager (CSM), you will apply your experience to lead our largest, most complex customers from deployment to broad scale usage, managing the risks associated with successful adoption and full renewals. You will highlight your excellent leadership skills to ensure our customers are finding value to not only renew, but to expand across the entire Apptio suite of products and solutions. You will be comfortable working independently across all levels of an organization and have experience collaborating with Partners and System Integrators. You will have an appreciation of the demands of working within IT, tech/cloud operations and finance disciplines, following either traditional waterfall or scaled agile methodologies. The successful candidate will be able to adapt to a fast-moving SaaS organization and collaborate with both 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 and full renewal of our products. 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. You will be evaluated on your ability to ensure your client portfolio achieves optimal health metrics, their value outcomes are maximized, as well as your ability to reduce churn for not only a full renewal in your client base, but also how you drive and support expansion opportunities. • Develop strong customer relationships: proactively engage with customers across both operational and executive management positions to promote the client’s Apptio solution, increasing usage and adoption and highlighting the current and future value they have or will realize: 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 team(s) on best practices, reference examples across your portfolio, and leverage your Apptio internal network to guide and mentor customer, including executives, to achieve their goals. • Collaborate and partner with Customer Success teams: Lead solution architecture, new capabilities, patches, upgrades, etc., discussions in partnership with Customer Success Advisors, Engineering, Technical Experts, Support, etc. Ensure that the right solutions are implemented to achieve the client’s agreed upon use case value outcomes, upgrades and patches align to SLA’s, risk and issues are mitigated, communications and interactions are timely, and you are following Apptio best practices. • Coordinate with the Account Management Function: working alongside Account Managers (sales) 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 for the client; 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 • Education, ideally in finance, technology, engineering, or a business-related discipline, with most successful candidates having 5+ years as a CSM or Technical Account Manager role that is executive facing in a SaaS organization. • Proven experience in B2B SaaS environment delivering against operational metrics focused on adoption and renewal, risk mitigation, 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. Preferred Technical And Professional Expertise • Experience within IT Finance and/or Technology departments • Experience in Public Cloud • Experience in Agile Methodologies • 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 • 3+ years in a management role or leading cross-functional teams • 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 About Business Unit IBM Software infuses core business operations with intelligence—from machine learning to generative AI—to help make organizations more responsive, productive, and resilient. IBM Software helps clients put AI into action now to create real value with trust, speed, and confidence across digital labor, IT automation, application modernization, security, and sustainability. Critical to this is the ability to make use of all data, because AI is only as good as the data that fuels it. In most organizations data is spread across multiple clouds, on premises, in private datacenters, and at the edge. IBM’s AI and data platform scales and accelerates the impact of AI with trusted data, and provides leading capabilities to train, tune and deploy AI across business. IBM’s hybrid cloud platform is one of the most comprehensive and consistent approach to development, security, and operations across hybrid environments—a flexible foundation for leveraging data, wherever it resides, to extend AI deep into a business. Your Life @ IBM In a world where technology never stands still, we understand that, dedication to our clients success, innovation that matters, and trust and personal responsibility in all our relationships, lives in what we do as IBMers as we strive to be the catalyst that makes the world work better. Being an IBMer means you’ll be able to learn and develop yourself and your career, you’ll be encouraged to be courageous and experiment everyday, all whilst having continuous trust and support in an environment where everyone can thrive whatever their personal or professional background. Our IBMers are growth minded, always staying curious, open to feedback and learning new information and skills to constantly transform themselves and our company. They are trusted to provide on-going feedback to help other IBMers grow, as well as collaborate with colleagues keeping in mind a team focused approach to include different perspectives to drive exceptional outcomes for our customers. The courage our IBMers have to make critical decisions everyday is essential to IBM becoming the catalyst for progress, always embracing challenges with resources they have to hand, a can-do attitude and always striving for an outcome focused approach within everything that they do. Are you ready to be an IBMer? About IBM IBM’s greatest invention is the IBMer. We believe that through the application of intelligence, reason and science, we can improve business, society and the human condition, bringing the power of an open hybrid cloud and AI strategy to life for our clients and partners around the world. Restlessly reinventing since 1911, we are not only one of the largest corporate organizations in the world, we’re also one of the biggest technology and consulting employers, with many of the Fortune 50 companies relying on the IBM Cloud to run their business. At IBM, we pride ourselves on being an early adopter of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and blockchain. Now it’s time for you to join us on our journey to being a responsible technology innovator and a force for good in the world. Location Statement IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. Being You @ IBM IBM is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, caste, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, veteran status, or other characteristics. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status