Vice President of Strategic Accounts

Language I/O is passionate about building engaged teams, with a diverse and inclusive culture. We empower our people to become the best version of themselves, offering coaching and training programs designed to accelerate their career in whatever direction they choose. As a remote-first company, we understand the importance of creating a workplace that is dynamic, connected, and fun. We hold regular company-wide events and local outings when virtual meetings become too much. We are just as passionate about the connections we build with our customers. You’ll not only work with some of the world’s most recognized brands, but build lasting relationships.

The primary responsibility of the VP of Strategic Accounts will be to expand the Language I/O footprint within the enterprise companies who use our technology. This leader provides strategic guidance to their team, using both qualitative and quantitative data to drive expansion strategies and to predict how quickly a customer can be expected to expand usage within our platform based upon their profile and use cases for our technology. The VP of Strategic Accounts will be responsible for maintaining an easy-to-use sales playbook that covers everything from the handoff with sales to creation of an expansion plan to guidelines for quarterly business reviews. It will include useful artifacts such as templates for customer reach-out emails, expectations for meeting frequency, expectations for expansion planning and how to gather and interpret data to detect problems and opportunities within our customer base.

This position will manage a team of Strategic Account Managers (SAMs). The SAM is a sales position and their primary responsibility is to mine enterprise customers for expansion opportunities and to manage expansion deals through to close. Each SAM has a quota and the VP of Strategic Accounts in turn owns the team’s overall quota and will receive a percentage for each expansion deal that closes. The VP of Strategic Accounts will manage this team’s territories and provide this team with sales guidance and mentorship.

Your goal: make the Language I/O platform an indispensable part of global operations within your target organizations.

Core Responsibilities

• Enabling desired expansion outcomes by aiding retention managers (SAMs), helping to expand revenue, and contributing to the efforts to increase product adoption and other relevant CS metrics and health scores.
• Building and maintaining a documented, repeatable expansion process within the sales playbook.
• Mentoring SAs in whitespace analysis within existing customer organizations.
• Mentoring SAs in best practices in engaging higher up in the organization to maintain executive sponsorship and generally maintaining multithreaded relationships within the organization.
• Guiding SAs through the expansion procurement and legal processes
• Working with Sales and Finance Ops to pin down customer lifecycles, correctly set the reach-out process, channels, and touchpoints, and helping the CS team work productively with these processes.
• Cross-functional team management, compensation management, and contributing to decisions regarding team structures.
• Implementing a customer-first approach throughout the organization and demonstrating the value of customer success from a business perspective

Skills and Competencies

Here are the necessary skills to be a good VP of Strategic Accounts :

• Minimum 5 years of experience working directly as a Strategic Account Manager.
• 5+ years of management experience leading an account management or strategic accounts department, with proven performance and revenue goal achievement
• An MBA or related graduate or postgraduate degree is preferred, with a technical undergrad degree being an added advantage. Customer success, account management or sales courses and certifications are nice-to-have, but experience in the field is much more important and often substitutes traditional education.
• Strong persuasion, argumentation, and diplomacy skills to manage and build consensus throughout the customer success department, its activities, and relevant stakeholders
• Expert empathy skills with high emotional intelligence, and experience in applying those skills in a business context.
• Deep understanding of SaaS businesses and metrics such as NRR, GRR, COGs, ARR and deep knowledge of both the subscription and renewal models.
• Expert communication skills and the ability to hold C-level customer conversations that drive business for both parties and move the relationship forward.
• Business development knowledge and, ideally, experience growing a business.
• Strong analytical and goal-oriented mindset backed by expert-level people and project management knowledge and skill set.
• Advanced business experience and ability to create strategies, guidelines, and objectives and implement them while driving business growth and creating data-driven reports. Advanced IT&C knowledge and capabilities and ability to learn new software tools on the job.

Perks and Benefits

This will be the best group that you ever work with! Language I/O invests in total rewards that provide meaningful support for our employees.

• Medical, Dental, Vision Insurance
• 401k and Options / Equity
• Discretionary Time Off
• Sick leave
• Company-sponsored Life & AD&D
• Voluntary short and long-term disability insurance
• Employee Assistance Programs (EAP)
• Headspace App membership for you and up to 5 friends & family
• 10 paid company holidays
• Parental Leave
• Internet & Phone expense reimbursement
• Health & Wellness reimbursement
• Co-working & Team Get-together reimbursement
• Tuition Reimbursement Program
• Employee Referral Program
• Flexible work environments
• MacBook and awesome swag delivered to your door
• Promotional & learning opportunities