Job Opening - Customer Success Manager

Remote, US-based | $75,000-95,000 p.a.

 

Who we are

Trelica is a tech start-up with team members distributed across the UK, US and Switzerland. We’re operating in the SaaS management space, which is a new and rapidly expanding market focussed on helping businesses get the most from the various SaaS apps they’re using (think Zoom, Salesforce, Slack).

Since launching our product in early 2021, we’ve gained customers across North America, Europe and Asia, and been recognised as a market leader and outperformer by independent analysts. We’re looking for great people to help shape and deliver our continued growth.

 

Why do we need a Customer Success Manager?

We believe in delivering ‘outcomes’ for our customers. This means specific, meaningful things the customer has done / is doing with Trelica and which represents value to them.

There are several potential outcomes e.g. saving money, reducing manual work, improving compliance. Not all outcomes will be relevant or achievable to a given customer. The amount of support the customer needs will vary based on the outcome you’re engaging them on – this can range from pointing something out to a customer so they can take a quick and simple action, through to a more involved process of helping them create and test a Trelica workflow.

The CSM has primary responsibility for ensuring customers are achieving outcomes. This should be tracked in a clear and accessible way – allowing the wider Trelica team to easily understand progress with each customer. This transparency and a systematic approach is what ensures a CSM is working in tandem with the wider Trelica team to deliver customer outcomes.

This objective, and hence the CSM role, is critical to our business because we need to ensure:
a) we’re in the best possible position to achieve each renewal
b) existing customers reference us favourably to their peers, which helps us sign up new customers

 

Key Tasks and Deliverables

Support the Implementation Team to onboard new customers

Whilst the Implementation Team will take primary responsibility for the initial set-up and roll-out of Trelica, the CSM’s engagement with the customer needs to start during these early stages.

In simple terms, this means:

• joining customer calls to start the relationship building process and to understand the customer’s context / needs / technical landscape
• back-up the Implementation Team by identifying potential outcomes that may have been missed from the scope of the initial roll-out
• looking for early signs of poor customer engagement or dissatisfaction which could be addressed before the relationship starts to degrade

Proactively engage with customers on an ongoing basis

The initial implementation is the right time to get foundations in place and get customers using Trelica, but we will never achieve all that’s possible in that first round of work. To avoid slipping into a reactive role where we wait for customers to contact us via the support desk, the CSM should be engaging with customers to identify and plan for the next outcomes.

Dig into customer data to identify problems / opportunities

Regular customer contact is only half of the battle. Customers are busy and are rarely interested in generic ‘checking in’ calls. We expect the CSM to take the time to understand the customer’s set up in Trelica and to be able to look at the data in their account to make informed observations.

This doesn’t require complex analysis and we don’t expect you to be a data scientist! It’s more a question of an inquisitive, thoughtful approach that will become formulaic i.e. once you’ve found something of interest for Customer A you know to check for the same with Customer B.

This kind of meaningful customer engagement creates strong relationships and ultimately delivers outcomes.

Track customer engagement and progress

We use a scorecard to track outcomes for each customer. The CSM ‘owns’ this scorecard and is responsible for keeping it up-to-date so the whole Trelica team has an accurate view of where we are with each customer. The scorecard is backed up with Trello boards, which act as a basic project management tool to evidence the summary presented on the scorecard.

This tooling is far from perfect and we’re very open to making improvements, but more strategic planning / enhancements need to be balanced with the primary, day-to-day focus on sustaining customer engagement and delivering outcomes.

Create scalable resources to help and engage customers

Our customers are typically IT teams. Some would rather help themselves if possible, and this group needs quality resources they can access if they get stuck; others prefer more interaction with us, and this group needs to be serviced personally, but efficiently. 

For example, rather than just recording a video to show a customer how to achieve something, you might discuss with the product team about why the customer couldn’t see how to do what they wanted, create a generic video explainer that can be used more broadly, and add a step to the handover check-list to make sure we touch upon this topic with new customers.

Grow relationships beyond the initial customer

Our product appeals to IT teams managing software spend, but also those managing IT from a more operational perspective. You will need to find ways to broaden our relationship with other people in the organisation to ensure that Trelica is being used as widely as possible.

 

What does progress look like?

Growing and managing the customer success team: currently we have no formal customer success team in place, it’s a responsibility spread across several people and supported by some basic tooling. The right CSM will grasp the opportunity to define the Customer Success function and demonstrate their ability to lead a team of CSMs.

 

Person specification

• 3+ years of experience in a Customer Success role in a b2b SaaS business
• Confidence in communicating technical issues clearly and simply
• Polite but persistent approach to customer engagement. This isn’t a commercial role, but we think a great CSM can be as tenacious as a sales person, after all, you’re often persuading a customer to spend their time with you
• Inquisitive, analytical mindset which will be applied to a) understanding how Trelica works, and b) understanding customer context and their data in Trelica
• Solid judgement. In a situation where several things are possible with a customer, it’s important to judge what to focus on and when
• Excellent organisational skills. It’s rare to see a role that doesn’t ask for this, but it’s very important here: tracking engagement with dozens of customers requires regular context shifting, which is only manageable with effective note-taking and a consistent approach to task management.

 

Location

Remote (US-based). We’re happy to pay for desk space for those that prefer the option.

 

Salary & benefits

• $75,000-95,000 p.a. – the range accounts for different experience and location. We’re also happy to discuss going outside of that range in either direction for candidates with more / less experience and who are a demonstrably good fit
• 25 days annual leave
• Health Benefits and 401k are all open to negotiation. We’re a UK-based company and would use an Employer of Record (EOR)

 

How to apply

Please send over your CV along with a short cover letter to iain.mcghee@trelica.com. The cover letter really can be short, we would just like to know what interests you about our company / the role and why you think you could be a good fit.

Please don’t apply if you’re not based and eligible to work in the US. We’re not currently in a position to support relocations or visa applications.

No agencies for this one, thank you