Introduction
Our Customer Success Partner Manager will play a key leadership role to help our partners transform their IT organizations by helping them understand how to design and deploy an effective Cost Management strategy leveraging IBMs suite of Apptio Products and services and ensure that customers are able to maximize their investment.

This role will function as trusted advisors to partners by enabling them to implement the Apptio products to achieve their business objectives. We have a diverse team with varied backgrounds, but some common attributes that lead to success are a fearless disposition towards adopting and learning new technologies and tools, an easy facility with navigating and troubleshooting large multi-dimensional data, paired with the interpersonal skills and business acumen to help uncover and understand business goals and technical requirements. These goals and requirements are then turned into actionable plans to drive quick value for our customers. Good project management and stakeholder management skills help members of our team thrive and succeed in this fast-paced environment. We partner with customers to develop and execute success plans: organizational, programmatic, and technical strategies to meet their business objectives and stakeholder goals.

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 ensure the 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 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 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
• Tracks the partner proficiency on our products
• Ensure partner proficiency on key processes
• Collaboration: Collaborate closely with internal teams such as Product, Sales, and Alliances 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 facilitates retrospective and QBR

Required Technical and Professional Expertise

• 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

Preferred Technical and Professional Expertise

• N/A