Strategic Account Manager at Zendesk in San Francisco, CA

This person will define CXO relationship strategy within these key accounts, building a strong working relationship with Zendesk’s Executive Leadership team for sponsorship, business reviews, and GTM strategies. We are looking for someone with consistent history of CX thought leadership, Sales, and Customer Success. This person should have a solid understanding of industry benchmark CX metrics and the challenges and priorities that come with the enterprise customer. They should have established executive relationships within major accounts across multiple B2B and B2C industries. This is a chance to help tailor our “next-state” enterprise customer experience and engagement model with our critical partners necessary for success.

You will team up with our key partners including Zendesk executives, Product and Engineering, Renewals, Advocacy (support), business owners, Legal, and others. You’ll use creative thinking for product/services solutioning, as well as the value prop and all commercials. You will share Zendesk’s platform vision and goals with these accounts, and how we’re tracking against them to foster excitement and impact. You will be responsible for building relationships at the most strategic level within these accounts while forming a broad strategy for crafting compelling customer value and ensuring these customers are retained and achieve their ultimate CX goals.

Responsibilities

• Responsible for the retention and growing TCV for a set of Enterprise accounts
• Collaboratively develop specific GTM strategy and plan with larger Zendesk team
• Develop detailed multi year account strategy and objectives for each account aligned to a quarterly execution plan
• Lead customer, Zendesk, and partner teams to execute on deliverables/milestones
• Develop and nurture CXO relationships at assigned accounts in order to craft new opportunities and expand existing business which will be measured by attrition goals (minimizing C/C) and net revenue rate (account net growth)
• Develop partner relationships and performance measurement working with Zendesk’s Channels and Alliances teams
• Ultimate point of accountability and advocacy for all customer issues and opportunities, communicating and intensifying, when needed, to the Zendesk leadership team
• Follow Zendesk sales process, tracking all critical activities and ensuring a deep understanding of the status of a deal at every stage of the process
• Work with Solution Architecture team to Influence product direction by facilitating structured industry forums for customer feedback to the product management, engineering and ISV teams

Requirements

• Experience in Account Management for VP and C level executives at large Enterprises
• Bachelor's degree and 12+ years of Enterprise software selling and/or customer success experience; SaaS experience strongly preferred and CX SaaS experience a huge plus
• 6+ years experience servicing one or more of the following verticals - Retail, Financial Services, High Tech, Media and Entertainment and Telco
• Proven track record of success with large and complex commercial solutions
• Routinely over-achieving sales quota and/or a renewals number (top 10% in your company)
• Strong interpersonal and presentation skills
• Outstanding verbal and written communication skills
• Experience working in a dynamic, agile company and GTM team
• Relentless and persistent advocate for customers that “gets stuff done” and fast to respond
• Willingness to travel if that opportunity arises in the future.