Director, Professional Services

Description

Are you looking to combine your passion for technology with your penchant for strategic problem solving? Appian Customer Success is obsessed with great customer outcomes. We deliver mission-critical business impact fast, and are directly responsible for partnering with our customers to bring their best ideas to life. Joining the Customer Success team will provide you with the support and growth you need to strengthen and evolve your skills within the consulting field.

Appian is looking for a Director, Professional Services to join our Customer Success team. As a leader within Appian's Customer Success organisation, you will be responsible for the leadership of a portfolio of Customer Accounts (specifically focused on Public Sector and/or Financial Services), driving growth and delivery success of programmes utilising Appian's cutting-edge software technology. Your focus will be to devise and execute account strategy, identify and solve meaningful business problems for clients using Appian’s software, negotiate contracts, manage regional finance plans across a portfolio of customer accounts, and cultivate new business within existing customers, driving growth within your portfolio. You’ll work directly with key project and executive stakeholders throughout the entire project life-cycle to ensure client satisfaction and adoption and lead and work closely with a team of Appian colleagues including a close partnership with the sales team. 

To be successful in this role, you will:

• Intimately understand your client’s business, identify problems which are key to their growth and/or survival, identify how Appian can solve these problems, and, ultimately, solve the problems with our platform

• Have the ability to make real change to the core of the client’s business

• Be able to recruit, coach, build, and mentor individuals and teams

• Possess strong communication skills, specifically in the verbal and written representation of value propositions and business cases

• Have strong commercial acumen and attention to detail, enabling effective forecasting and financial management of a portfolio of customer accounts

• Possess strong technological understanding and experience of enterprise technology

• Devise and execute account strategy including nurturing projects from inception to launch while collaborating with stakeholders and establishing realistic development guidelines

• Negotiate contracts and oversee financial results for a region

• Cultivate new business with existing customers and play a key role in driving sales success with new customers   

• Be responsible for account success: adoption, services and license growth, marketable stories

• Oversee the delivery of Appian projects at customer accounts within region to ensure deployment matches client executive and business sponsor expectations

• Interface with Appian Sales, Marketing, Engineering, Product Management, and Product Support    

Some of the tools and resources we will equip you with include:

• Training: During your first few weeks of joining Appian, not only will you go through comprehensive onboarding and Appian product training, but you will also complete a Customer Success-specific bootcamp to prepare you for your first client project

• Growth: Continuous learning opportunities are a key focus for our department. Whether it is company-wide weekly knowledge shares, biweekly continuing education sessions led by fellow Customer Success members, or free online trainings, there is always somewhere to turn for technical and professional growth

• Culture: Appian’s customer success group is quickly expanding but the culture continues to make the department feel like a small community. Monthly social events are planned virtually and in person while our First Year Experience (FYE) group concentrates on creating a smooth transition for all new employees entering the working force for the first time

Basic Qualifications:

• You have experience in successfully managing and growing a technology consulting/services practice

• You have experience executing strategy, managing financial plans, shaping strong delivery proposals and commercial propositions and negotiating contracts

• You have experience supporting pre-sales activities with an ability to quickly understand processes and to develop technical solutions to support client business strategy

• You have prior experience with software consulting (ideally in ERP, CRM, BPM/Workflow, Data Integration Architecture or EAI)

• You are well educated, with at least a BS in Computer Science or related field/degree in addition to 10+ years of experience

• You have experience with configuration, deployment, and testing of enterprise software applications

• You have experience with problem identification and Business Value Analysis and leading customers towards measurable ROI

• You have excellent communication skills and keep the lines of communication open by circulating reports that keep stakeholders in the loop on project status and in-sync with the latest development schedule and priorities

• You have experience with Agile project delivery, especially at scale