Influitive – Vice President, Customer Success

Influitive is a rapidly growing innovator in the marketing software space. With over $40M raised from top-tier venture capitalists including Georgian Partners, Hummer Winblad, Relay Ventures, First Round Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Lightspeed Ventures and others, Influitive helps B2B marketers mobilize their customers to become advocates for the business, influencing buyers and driving revenue growth.

The AdvocateHub SaaS platform and Maven mobile app make it fun and exciting for advocates to participate in more customer referrals, reference calls, success stories & testimonials, online product reviews, survey responses and other social sharing. This approach, called ‘advocate marketing’, is proven to generate higher-quality sales leads, accelerate sales opportunities and improve brand recognition.

The founding team has previously built Eloqua, a marketing automation software firm that went public and was bought by Oracle for $871M in 2012. The team is now bolstered by leaders with one or more exits under their belts.

Scope of Position

Customer success is a critical function for any growing SaaS company and similar to other fast growing technology companies, Influitive considers customer success to be mission critical to achieving its revenue and overall strategic growth. Accordingly, Influitive is now looking to bring on board a proven, customer focused software executive to assume the challenging and rewarding role of Vice President, Customer Success.

Reporting to the CEO, the VP, Customer Success is responsible for ensuring that every Influitive customer is successful at generating value from Influitive’s suite of products and services and remains a loyal and happy customer.

Functional Tasks

Grouped in the 5 teams listed below, the Vice President, Customer Success will be tasked with leading a highly dynamic and engaged team of 25+ professionals:

• Onboarding: Ensure every new customer is quickly and efficiently educated and launched with the company’s offering to ensure long term success;
• Advocacy Coaching: Manage each customer to share best practices, ensure they stay focused and on track, and help set the strategic direction of each customer’s advocate marketing program;
• Support: Resolve all customer problems quickly and efficiently before such problems escalate so that clients can focus on their advocate marketing programs;
• Services: Where clients lack the appropriate talent or resources, launch and manage advocate marketing programs for the client on a fee-for-service basis; this is a key strategic focus as services can eliminate a common sales objection (i.e. lack of suitable program administrator);
• Education: Train and develop advocate marketers so that customers and prospects gain access to talented and capable set of professionals to lead and operate highly effective, value-add advocate marketing programs.

Additionally, as a member of the senior management team, the Vice President of Customer Service shall be tasked with:

• Inspire and lead a talented group of customer-facing employees, helping them manage their careers and grow as professionals
• Contribute to the strategic direction & leadership of the company as a key member of the core leadership team
• Instill a culture of innovation within the customer success team to ensure the team is effective at managing the existing customer base for maximum value
• Represent the perspective of current customers and the customer success team at all executive and leadership team meetings
• Serve as a partner to the sales team to ensure new accounts are handed off smoothly, and to ensure accounts nearing end of term can be renewed with additional up-sell and cross-sell revenue (i.e. grow the accounts)
• Serve as a partner to the product team to ensure that the right product feedback from customers is provided and is incorporated into the company’s product roadmap; this means advocating hard for customers when it makes sense, but not overwhelming or distracting the product team with every customer ‘ask’
• Recruit highly engaged, high achieving individuals to join the customer success team as Influitive continues to expand its customer base rapidly
• Continue to build and deepen the intensely customer-centric and innovative culture of the customer success team
• Devise ways to scale customer service operations as the company grows, so that when the company has 10x the number of customers it does not require 10x the spending and human capital resources in Customer Success.
• Manage customer retention, churn and other key SaaS metrics to top industry standards and ensure that Customer Success objectives align and meet those of the organization.
• Provide feedback to software development/product marketing on product issues that impact the customer experience and ensure that continuous improvement and best practices are in place.
• Identify opportunities for revenue expansion within the Influitive network
• Work closely with the Influitive implementation team to ensure consistent quality and smooth transition to the Customer Success team.

Competency Profile

The following competencies listed below define the role of VP, Customer Success at Influitive:

Customer/Client Orientation
Strives to provide customers/clients with personalized and efficient service. Anticipates customers’/clients’ needs. Quickly follows up on customer/client contacts and complaints. Monitors and acts on measures of customer/client satisfaction.

Results Orientation
Focuses strongly on achieving agreed upon outcomes and ensures that key objectives are met. Conveys a sense of urgency and drives issues to closure. Aims to improve upon past performance. Establishes aggressive personal targets and strives to achieve them.

Quality Orientation
Strives for excellence in products, processes and/or services through continued evaluation, enhancement and redefinition of quality standards.

Developing & Coaching Others
Accurately assesses strengths and development needs of employees. Challenges others to improve their abilities and actively supports their development. Continually provides timely and constructive feedback, coaching and challenging learning opportunities. Adjusts coaching style based on each employee’s ability and motivation level.

Role Expertise
Demonstrates critical technical or professional knowledge/skills related to the role. Has thorough knowledge of relevant products, services and methods. Expands technical knowledge/skills and keeps up-to-date in own area of expertise.

Team Skills
Helps to create a sense of team spirit and harmonious relations through cooperation and support. Balances personal goals with those of the team. Fosters collaboration among team members.

Preferred Experience

• 10+ years’ experience in customer success in the software industry
• Some experience in a SaaS company is preferred
• 5+ years’ experience in Customer Success leadership, ideally running this function
• Proven ability to coach and mentor teams in a software company
• Demonstrated ability to deal with ambiguity and uncertainty, preferably in a start-up company environment
• Post-secondary degree is required

Working at Influitive

At Influitive, you’ll find an empowering environment where people are inspired to do great work, learning and developing quickly as professionals as they fundamentally change the way modern marketing works. In addition, you’ll get some awesome perks, such as a MacBook Air, catered lunches 3X/wk, free house cleaning 2X/mo, and a comfy Influitive hoodie. We offer every full-time employee competitive compensation including performance bonuses, generous benefits from day one, and stock options in the company.