Customer Success Manager
Cisco
You will work closely with a diverse range of Customer Experience (CX) resources, including Customer Success Specialists (CSS), Renewals teams, and Partners. Your role involves partnering with Sales and Renewals teams to drive Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) growth. This collaborative environment will enable you to leverage the expertise and support of various team members to achieve shared goals and deliver exceptional value to our customers.
Your Impact
As a Customer Success Manager, you play a crucial role in helping our customers successfully adopt and use Cisco technologies, driving value realization and growth. You will be the primary point of contact for customers, guiding them through software adoption and enabling them to accomplish their business and technical goals.
You are a technical professional whose sweet spot is in customer relationships and success. You are proactive and strategic, with a passion for driving software utilization to accelerate business outcomes. You excel at creating and implementing Technical Adoption Plans that lead software outcomes and optimize Return on Investment. Your ability to connect Cisco's offerings to success measures and remove adoption barriers is unmatched. You focus on driving ARR growth and work collaboratively with Renewals and Sales teams. You have a keen eye for identifying new opportunities and are dedicated to ensuring customer success and satisfaction.
• Acting as a technology advocate, providing feedback to Cisco’s product teams for development and enhancements, and staying current with the latest Cisco technologies, competitive landscape, and industry trends.
• Offering expert guidance to customers, ensuring they achieve their business and technical goals with Cisco technologies.
• Driving software utilization and value realization, leading to customer renewals and business growth.
• Proactively handling renewal risks, demonstrating insights to increase customer retention, and facilitating workshops to review adoption progress and ensure successful onboarding.
• Building strong relationships with customer partners to understand their challenges and objectives, and collaborating with Sales, Customer Success, Renewals, and Business Entities to identify use cases that drive value and business outcomes.
• Advocating for the customer within Cisco, ensuring their needs are met and that they receive a high-quality customer experience.
• Build and implement Technical Adoption Plans in partnership with Customer Success Specialists (CSS) that align with customer goals to maximize their technology investments and promote the full use of our technologies.
• Staying up-to-date with the latest Cisco technologies, competitive landscape, and industry trends to provide expert mentorship to customers
Minimum Qualifications
- 8 + years working in a customer facing role in an IT company or in an Enterprise IT organization
- Understanding of fundamental networking concepts - skills and knowledge to set up, manage, fix, and troubleshoot small to medium-level networks.
- Experience developing software adoption plans across technology portfolio
- Experience driving software adoption with customer executives and technical leaders
- Experience leading cross-functional teams in a matrix organization
- Knowledge of Route/Switch/Wireless and/or Security technologies
- Prior or current experience working within the financial services industry
- CCNA or or CompTIA Network+ certification (or equivalent work experience)
- Financial, Renewal, and/or adoption forecasting experience
- Experience as a technology advocate
- Proven ability to offer expert guidance to customers, helping them achieve business and technical goals
- Experience driving software utilization and value realization (Customer renewals)
- Proficiency in proactively managing renewal risks, demonstrating insights to increase customer retention
- Strong relationship-building skills
- Experience collaborating with teams to drive value and business outcomes.
- Advocacy skills
- Experience building and implementing Technical Adoption Plans
Our passion is connection—we celebrate our employees’ diverse set of backgrounds and focus on unlocking potential. Cisconians often experience one company, many careers where learning and development are encouraged and supported at every stage. Our technology, tools, and culture pioneered hybrid work trends, allowing all to not only give their best, but be their best.
We understand our outstanding opportunity to bring communities together and at the heart of that is our people. One-third of Cisconians collaborate in our 30 employee resource organizations, called Inclusive Communities, to connect, foster belonging, learn to be informed allies, and make a difference. Dedicated paid time off to volunteer—80 hours each year—allows us to give back to causes we are passionate about, and nearly 86% do!
Our purpose, driven by our people, is what makes us the worldwide leader in technology that powers the internet. Helping our customers reimagine their applications, secure their enterprise, transform their infrastructure, and meet their sustainability goals is what we do best. We ensure that every step we take is a step towards a more inclusive future for all. Take your next step and be you, with us!
When available, the salary range posted for this position reflects the projected hiring range for new hire, full-time salaries in U.S. and/or Canada locations, not including equity or benefits. For non-sales roles the hiring ranges reflect base salary only; employees are also eligible to receive annual bonuses. Hiring ranges for sales positions include base and incentive compensation target. Individual pay is determined by the candidate's hiring location and additional factors, including but not limited to skillset, experience, and relevant education, certifications, or training. Applicants may not be eligible for the full salary range based on their U.S. or Canada hiring location. The recruiter can share more details about compensation for the role in your location during the hiring process.
U.S. employees have access to quality medical, dental and vision insurance, a 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution, short and long-term disability coverage, basic life insurance and numerous wellbeing offerings.
Employees receive up to twelve paid holidays per calendar year, which includes one floating holiday (for non-exempt employees), plus a day off for their birthday. Non-Exempt new hires accrue up to 16 days of vacation time off each year, at a rate of 4.92 hours per pay period. Exempt new hires participate in Cisco’s flexible Vacation Time Off policy, which does not place a defined limit on how much vacation time eligible employees may use, but is subject to availability and some business limitations. All new hires are eligible for Sick Time Off subject to Cisco’s Sick Time Off Policy and will have eighty (80) hours of sick time off provided on their hire date and on January 1st of each year thereafter. Up to 80 hours of unused sick time will be carried forward from one calendar year to the next such that the maximum number of sick time hours an employee may have available is 160 hours. Employees in Illinois have a unique time off program designed specifically with local requirements in mind. All employees also have access to paid time away to deal with critical or emergency issues. We offer additional paid time to volunteer and give back to the community.
Employees on sales plans earn performance-based incentive pay on top of their base salary, which is split between quota and non-quota components. For quota-based incentive pay, Cisco typically pays as follows:
.75% of incentive target for each 1% of revenue attainment up to 50% of quota;
1.5% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 50% and 75%;
1% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 75% and 100%; and once performance exceeds 100% attainment, incentive rates are at or above 1% for each 1% of attainment with no cap on incentive compensation.
For non-quota-based sales performance elements such as strategic sales objectives, Cisco may pay up to 125% of target. Cisco sales plans do not have a minimum threshold of performance for sales incentive compensation to be paid.