Sr. Manager, Critical Situations Team

Smartsheet is a tech company with a human story to tell. We’re here to empower teams to manage projects, automate workflows, and rapidly build new secure solutions, using simple no-code tools. We’re revolutionaries – so for us changing the way the world works is all in a day’s work.

As the Sr. Manager, Critical Situations Team you will lead and manage resolution of our most strategic accounts through challenging periods of their Smartsheet journey. These challenges could be due to user adoption, product issues, solutions scale, professional services, support experience, communication, and/or customer service concerns. This role brings strategy, structure, and executive engagement to marshal company-wide resources to assist customers placed in the Critical Situation (CritSit) process across our global regions. The CritSit process will ensure a high level of customer satisfaction, retention and expansion resulting in both resolution of each customer’s challenges to a healthy state and of continuous improvement and institutional learning from each customer engagement to prevent recurrences across our install base. 

You’ll partner closely with GTM leadership of our Customer Success, Professional Services, Support, as well as Sales and Product leadership to build and define the CritSit process methodology and operating model. This role will regularly report out on the status of CritSit customers to our corporate leadership team. 

Not only will you be on the front line with many of Smartsheet’s largest customer relationships, but also those struggling with ambitious innovative solution plans intended to lead our install base forward.  Your work will be global and highly cross-functional in nature. You will problem-solve alongside leaders in other teams such as Product, Support, Sales, and Finance, to drive resolution and elevate the customer experience. 

You will report to the VP of Customer Experience, Programs and Strategy. This is a remote eligible position and you may work remotely from anywhere in the US where Smartsheet is registered.

You Will:

• Lead executive meetings and strategic content with respect and visibility among executives.
• Leads cross-functional, business-wide efforts through effective thought leadership.
• Analyzes resolution path for high-stakes issues, and develops a strategy and gain alignment across executives for an effective and efficient solution.
• Ensures outcomes that affect the entire product, company, and/or customer base.
• Key point of contact for resolving critical issues.
• Provide quantitative results on the effectiveness and value of the team tied to business impact and strategy.
• Expanded scope of leadership within the broader department, outside of just the CritSit team. 
• Be responsible for defining and executing the global strategy to mitigate situations that lead to customer account escalations, and effectively handling and addressing diverse situations and oversee all programs
• Develop and own our Critical Situation methodology, response playbook and processes, including any regional variants
• Develop nomination, entry and exit criteria for accounts such that Critical SItuation is a time bound need, restoring confidence and success within accounts to be promoted out of the program
• Identify process gaps and themes with product and engineering to drive change and ensure timely customer communication
• Determine the methods to incorporate our technology landscape (Salesforce Sales, Salesforce Service, Smartsheet, Gainsight, Seismic, Chorus, ZoomInfo, Jira, etc.)
• Develop systems and tools for visibility and coordination with internal teams and the customer
• Persuade, influence, and motivate people; build a culture of creating delightful customer experiences and relationships
• Engage with and lead cross-functional communications while accounts are in Critical Situation to ensure internal and external customers are receiving status updates
• Lead Executive communications with customers as necessary during Critical Situation
• Influence roadmap prioritization with Product and Engineering to resolve customer challenges
• Have the flexibility in your working hours to team with global customers, and willingness to be “on call” for your CritSit accounts
• Participate in leadership and customer meetings

You Have:

• 5+ years of experience managing globally diverse, large, and cross-functional initiatives
• 3+ years of experience using the Smartsheet Platform
• Implemented SaaS technology in large enterprise settings as a leader of customer or services teams
• Understanding of SaaS organizational and operational constructs including Product, engineering, support, success, sales, services 
• Ability to quickly establish trust and to influence others, both internally and externally
• Ability to handle conflict and drive agreement on decisions for which conflicting opinions and input exist
• Strong data-driven decision making skills, and process oriented mindset
• Knowledge of Lean, Six Sigma, and continuous improvement approaches
• Ability to identify risks and dependencies and put in place plans to mitigate them
• Adaptability, flexibility and the conviction to “do the right thing” by keeping a customer centric mentality at all times
• Ability to deal with ambiguity, utilize robust problem solving skills, demonstrate situational agility, manage parallel efforts, and communicate effectively through multiple channels 
• Exceptional business acumen and world-class presentation and customer interaction skills that have been acquired through deep technical knowledge and well-developed process management
• Goal orientation to drive progress for each customer through each interaction
• Experience building, leading or teaming with teams similar to HyperCare at a mature technology company, optional but highly desired
• Experience with Smartsheet, Kibana, Snowflake, Tableau, Sparkpost, and Google Suite optional but highly desired
• Knowledge of the Smartsheet platform optional but highly desired