Customer Success Partner Manager

Your Role and Responsibilities

We are seeking a dynamic and purposeful Partner Success Manager to join our global Customer Success team. In this role, you will be responsible for overseeing and managing the performance and success of partners who implement our software solutions on behalf of the company. This role ensures that partners adhere to our quality standards and deliver exceptional customer experience. The ideal candidate will collaborate closely with internal teams, customers, and external partners to ensure excellent service delivery and successful implementation of our products. We are seeking highly organized individuals with business and technology consulting experience, combined with project management skills. This person must have strong written and verbal communication skills, a strong analytical background, and a passion for fostering strategic partnerships.

We are looking for someone to join a team of people who are bright, initiative-taking, and enthusiastic about making their customers and partners wildly successful. This person loves working with implementation partners, guiding them, answering questions, and building great relationships with rapport and credibility. The Customer Success Partner Manager has a technical aptitude, loves to solve problems, and enjoys challenges, all against a backdrop of an ever-changing product feature landscape. This individual will be a key leader in customer engagement and function as an integrator between business needs and technology solutions. The efforts will directly impact the value realized by the customer and the ultimate success of the relationship. This role will collaborate closely with customers, the IBM Field Delivery team, CSM, and sales to program manage the Apptio product portfolio delivered by partners during the deployment and rollout of customer solutions.

Key Responsibilities:

• Identify partner education gaps to help us design and manage comprehensive partner enablement initiatives.
• Collaborate with internal teams to create and maintain partner resources such as product guides, Community content, and playbooks that partners can leverage to drive success.
• Track and analyze partner performance metrics, using data to refine training, support, and enablement strategies and enhance outcomes.
• Program Development: Create and maintain a structured partner program, including onboarding, certification, and performance monitoring, ensuring partners are equipped to implement our software successfully.
• Build strong relationships and connect regularly with partners as well as internal partner-supporting teams.
• Gather and share feedback from partners with internal teams to drive continuous improvement in the partner experience and enablement strategies.
• Quality Assurance: Implement and oversee a rigorous quality assurance process to ensure partners deliver consistent, high-quality implementations that meet or exceed customer expectations.
• Advocate for partner issues and escalations.
• Track partner proficiency on our products.
• Ensure partner proficiency on key processes.
• Collaboration: Collaborate closely with internal teams such as Product, Sales, and Alliances to ensure partner activities are aligned with customer goals and business objectives.
• Performance Monitoring: Establish KPIs and metrics to track and evaluate the success of partners, providing regular feedback and development plans as necessary.
• Customer Advocacy: Function as an advocate for customers, ensuring their needs and feedback are communicated to partners and internal teams to drive continuous improvement.
• Problem Resolution: Address any challenges or issues with partner performance, ensuring quick and effective solutions to maintain high customer satisfaction.
• Continuous Improvement: Develop initiatives to improve the effectiveness of the partner program, ensuring scalability and efficiency as the company grows.
• Measure the health and success of partners and facilitate retrospective and QBR.

Required Technical and Professional Expertise

Basic Requirements:

• Degree in fields such as Business, Economics, Accounting, Data Analytics, or Computer Science preferred.
• 10+ years of enterprise Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) implementation or consulting experience with at least five years as a senior consultant or project manager.
• Experience leading and developing programs to support Partner success and Customer Success.

Essential Skills:

• Demonstrated client/partner relationship building and people skills.
• Excellent organizational, analytical, and critical thinking skills.
• Client-focused attitude and ability to be a customer advocate.
• Collaborator, with effective and productive communication and presentation skills.
• Demonstrated experience with packaged application software implementation practices.
• Strong analytical and critical thinking skills, and ability to translate complex information into simple solution requirements.
• Experience in project and program management, with the ability to support simultaneous partner engagements implementing the Apptio SaaS solution, following Apptio methodology, and utilizing project management best practices.
• A proven history of meeting with senior management and executives as the subject matter expert.

Technical Skills:

• Understanding of IT infrastructure concepts.
• Ability to break down complex information from customers into business-level requirements.
• Understanding of data analysis/manipulation.
• Certifications from AWS, Azure, GCP, or OCI are a plus.

Required Education

Bachelor's Degree

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.

Country/Region

United Kingdom

State / Province

London, City of

City / Township / Village

London

IBM Business Group

Software

Primary job category

Consultant

Employment Type

Full-Time

Travel Required

Up to 20% or 1 day a week