OverviewThe Principal Customer Success Manager oversees the success of strategic customer relationships at the enterprise level. This role focuses on driving organizational-level customer success initiatives and ensuring alignment between customer goals and company objectives.
Account Ownership & Lifecycle Management:
- Own relationships with enterprise-level customers, overseeing multi-stakeholder engagements and organizational success planning.
- Align customer and company objectives through success frameworks and executive touchpoints.
Customer Advocacy & Retention:
- Anticipate customer challenges and proactively mitigate risks to long-term retention.
- Serve as a strategic advisor, helping customers maximize ROI and align with industry best practices.
Cross-Functional Collaboration:
- Collaborate with senior leaders in Product, Sales, and Marketing to drive enterprise account initiatives.
- Align internal roadmaps with customer priorities and feedback.
Process Improvement & Data Use:
- Use data to identify at-risk customers and develop targeted engagement plans.
- Propose enhancements to tools, playbooks, and lifecycle strategies based on analysis and feedback.
Strategic Customer Engagement:
- Leads Strategic Executive Briefings for complex or highvalue customer accounts. Owns and optimizes the executive engagement rhythm, tailoring cadence to customer priorities and lifecycle stage.
- Proactively drives strategic outreach to executive and senior stakeholders to strengthen alignment and surface emerging needs.
Stakeholder Alignment:
- Orchestrates highstakes, multistakeholder engagements across senior customer leadership and internal executives.
- Anticipates systemic crossorganizational friction points, designs coordination structures (e.g., joint steering committees, escalation paths), and drives resolution of complex interdependencies that span multiple accounts or business units.
Industry Acumen & Product Expertise:
- Maintains a deep knowledge of client industry, product, and role in the market.
- Applies industry and product expertise to guide customer conversations, anticipate needs, and provide contextual recommendations.
- Understands how customers create value in their market and tailors guidance to their business model and competitive environment.
All other duties as assigned
- Typically requires 10+ years of experience in customer success or account management OR 10+ years of experience in management consulting, technical account management, or enterprise software sales. Demonstrated track record of managing strategic, highcomplexity accounts or portfolios.
- Experience in the software or financial services industries highly preferred.
- Microsoft 365: Advancedlevel command of Microsoft 365; proven ability to design scalable accountmanagement frameworks, reporting templates, and collaboration structures in SharePoint/Teams that areadopted across the Customer Success organization.
- Salesforce: Advancedlevel Salesforce skills; demonstrated experience designing account health scoringmodels, defining CRM data standards and workflows, and building portfoliolevel views that drive strategicdecisionmaking across the Customer Success function.
- Power BI: Expert-level Power BI skills; demonstrated ability to build and customize dashboards thatvisualize customer health, adoption trends, churn risk, and engagement metrics to drive datainformedaccount strategies.
- Clari: Advancedlevel Clari skills; proven experience designing forecast models, defining account scoringand signal configurations, establishing inspection cadences, and building portfoliowide pipeline viewsthat drive strategic decisionmaking and forecast accuracy across the Customer Success organization.
- AI Tools (e.g., CoPilot): Advanced use of AI tools to accelerate complex workflows; including generatingexecutive business review content, synthesizing multisource customer data into actionable insights,building prompt templates for repeatable account analysis, and coaching peers on effective AI usagewithin established governance guardrails.
- Escalation Management: Proven technical acumen to recognize when an emerging issue is escalating tothe point of requiring emergency intervention, including the judgment to raise a production outage incidentat the appropriate threshold. Track record of engaging senior customer success and support leadershipwith authority during highseverity incidents, and driving systemic rootcause analysis that translates intoprocess and product improvements reducing future escalation frequency and impact.
- Data-Driven Decision Making: Advanced proficiency in customer data analysis spanning multiplesystems, segments, and portfoliolevel views. Experience synthesizing complex and sometimesconflicting data sets to identify systemic patterns, forecast customer outcomes, and drive strategicdecisions that impact the broader Customer Success function.
- Communication: Expertlevel communication skills with a track record of managing highstakesexpectationsetting across senior customer stakeholders and complex account structures. Skilled atreframing difficult conversations, navigating competing priorities between the customer and theorganization, and brokering outcomes that protect both the relationship and business interests. Coachesand mentors others on managing challenging customer dynamics.
- Ability to manage complex customer programs with exceptional organization, setting the standard forplanning and prioritization across a strategic book of business.
- Demonstrates exceptional ownership of customer and business outcomes, leading others through criticalcustomer moments while modeling healthy, highperformance work habits.
- Delivers compelling, strategic presentations to senior leaders and coaches others in storytelling, ROIframing, and business outcome alignment.
- Exceeds retention, expansion, and adoption goals across complex, highvalue accounts and influencesinternal teams to resolve systemic customer issues.
- Change Management: Ability to manage changes in customer needs and align internal resourcesaccordingly.
- Leadership: Strong leadership skills with the ability to mentor and develop less experienced teammembers.
- Demonstrated track record of managing strategic, highcomplexity accounts or portfolios.
Solution Expertise: This is either/or. Deep expertise in enterprise software platforms and/or extensive experience with software developmentor delivery processes, including architectural considerations, integration patterns, and complex deployment scenarios. -OR-
Demonstrates authoritative understanding of the life insurance, annuity, or financial services industry, including regulatory dynamics, competitive landscape, and how customers' business models drive technology requirements. Leverages this technical and industry mastery to shape strategic customer engagements, anticipate downstream implementation risks across complex environments, and define best practices for ensuring product alignment with evolving customer needs across a portfolio of accounts.
Benefits
We offer a competitive compensation and benefits package, opportunities for career growth, an employee stock purchase plan, 401(k), generous time off and flexible work/life balance, company-matched retirement packages, an employee wellness program, and an awards and recognition program – all in a creative, fast-growing, and innovative company.