Your impact

As a Senior Customer Success Manager at Handshake, you are responsible for ensuring our education partners are healthy, happy, successful, and retained. You will create repeatable and reusable tactics for driving engagement across our university partners' teams.

In this critical role, we are seeking an individual with a wealth of experience as a customer success manager to manage our most strategic partnerships. Given the rapid pace of our expansion, we require someone who not only possesses a deep understanding of how to create and maintain strong partnerships but has a proven track record of successful market growth in tech.

To succeed in this role, you must be prepared to set a high bar for yourself and those around you. There is always a way to contribute: Acting with autonomy on the opportunities you come across, having accountability and being open to new challenges are essential to our continued success. There is an opportunity to make a real impact here! If you are driven and hungry for a challenge to help us on our mission to help students fulfil their career dreams, then we can’t wait to meet you!

Your role

• Relationship Management - Owning the core and executive relationships for our key strategic partners. Having a proactive approach with partners and regularly meeting them to understand their current state and how to help them achieve their goals through Handshake - you are willing to try new and innovative ways in order to achieve this
• Renewals and expansions - Building trust and advocacy with partners which ultimately leads to driving retention. Driving the plan of action internally and externally for key partners
• Owning Customer Journey - act as the main point of contact for your partners, which means you will be accountable for the entire partner lifecycle, from onboarding and implementation to adoption and optimization - knowing when to bring other team members in and working with the support team on improving processes for the day to day questions
• Internal Collaboration - Communicate key updates to the wider team, secure opportunities for success stories, and collaborate with sales and product teams for effective partnership differentiation and enhancement. As you can see this role will involve wearing multiple hats but also will give you exposure to grow in multiple areas!
• Product Knowledge - Demonstrate a deep understanding of the Handshake product and the ability to consult using best practices and learnings from managing university partners. Expand product adoption, and drive value for university partners. Staying on top of the roadmap and identifying opportunities to excite partners about our vision
• Product Adoption and Best Practices - Expand and deepen product adoption, creating strong action plans with university partners on leveraging our platform to drive student and employer engagement. Actively learn and understand the career services space as well as awareness of student and employer priorities, consulting with partners on adapting workflows to achieve success with the Handshake product.
• Partner Success, Health, and Retention - Track subjective health assessments and collaborate with Handshake’s Product Teams to address partner needs promptly and to escalate key product developments. Utilising data reporting and dashboards to understand trends and take appropriate actions for maintaining account health Ownership of a Region - Acting as the primary liaison between the company and partners in that region by providing crucial insights to internal teams. As we are scaling and we are learning as we are growing in these regions and in this role, you will be responsible for sharing insights through managing your partners to ensure the success of the region
• Mentorship - provide coaching and guidance to junior colleagues and to act as a role model to the team - you will be the one Senior CSM in the team and so it is key that the team can see what “exceptional” looks like and to act as the go to person when support is needed on escalations and pushing internal initiatives
• Customer On-sites - you will be traveling to Universities and so it is key that you will be comfortable with running partner on-sites to hold key milestone meetings and to build relationships with the wider team. This is also a good opportunity to engage with students to see the impact Handshake is having.

Your experience

• An established Customer Success professional (5+ years of experience) who finds satisfaction in helping your partners achieve their goals and helping your team grow.
• Proven experience with SaaS - It’s a bonus if you know the startup space, and can pre-empt the bumps in the road ahead as we scale
• Excellent communicator - written and verbal and also experience with running presentations to key decision makers
• You get energy from being in high pressure situations and fast growth, with the ability to build repeatable, scalable processes
• Ability to prioritise workload while maintaining high attention to detail
• Confident with data reporting and analysing to tell stories and to spot trends
• Highly curious with high level of intellectual curiosity - you see an opportunity and you act on this!
• Ability to think critically and empathetically about the customer’s needs
• Add value to a team environment by demonstrating enthusiasm and a collaborative spirit
• Adaptable to evolving business needs and willingness to contribute to process improvement
• Fluent in written and spoken German and English