Head of Customer Success

Key Responsibilities:

Team Leadership & People Management

·      Directly manage five Customer Success Managers and two Senior CSMs. The Senior CSMs hold additional responsibility for covering you when you are unavailable, onboarding new starters, and mentoring junior team members.

·      Hold line management responsibility for the Enablement POD (POD Lead and two Trainers), deploying their services on behalf of customers and directing their work in line with CS priorities.

·      Lead, coach, and develop the team to deliver consistent, proactive customer success across their portfolios, holding them to the same performance standards you hold yourself to.

·      Recruit, onboard, and where necessary performance manage and exit team members, working with HR and leadership support throughout.

·      Conduct regular one-to-ones, team meetings, and formal performance reviews to ensure every CSM is developing, accountable, and set up to succeed.

·      Foster a team culture that reflects iplicit's values: proactive, commercially minded, customer-obsessed, and focused on creating Raving Fans rather than managing relationships.

Lead the Enablement POD

The Enablement POD is a free-of-charge service deployed to ensure customers are not left unsupported through critical early-life events. It is not a replacement for Professional Services where a customer requires paid delivery work. The Head of CS directs the POD's deployment in line with customer need and CS priorities.

·      Deploy the POD to support customers through high-risk early-life events: first month-end, year-end, first VAT return, first HESA return, and first budget cycle. The moments where customers are most likely to struggle and most likely to lose confidence in iplicit.

·      Use the POD for Executive Onboarding when a new CFO or Finance Director joins a customer organisation, ensuring leadership transitions do not become churn risks by getting new finance leaders up to speed on iplicit quickly and effectively.

·      Make active, prioritised decisions about where POD resource is deployed. Not every customer needs the POD at the same time, and not all requests are equal. You are accountable for those deployment decisions.

·      Line manage the POD Lead, set clear expectations for the team's performance, and ensure the POD operates to the same standards of quality and customer experience as the broader CS function.

·      Maintain a clear boundary: the Enablement POD supports customers in using what they have already implemented. Where a customer needs configuration changes, additional modules, or paid delivery work, that conversation routes to Professional Services, not the POD.

Own a Strategic Portfolio

·      Hold a personal portfolio of 10to 15 strategic accounts where Head-of-CS-level engagement materially changes the outcome: highest ARR, most complex deployments, executive-to-executive relationships, marquee referenceable customers, or accounts central to the wider Raving Fans agenda.

·      Demonstrate the behaviours and outcomes you are asking of the team. Your portfolio is your proof of concept.

·      Build relationships that generate referrals, advocacy, testimonials, and referenceable customers from within your own accounts.

·      Identify and manage at-risk accounts within your portfolio, developing and executing recovery plans, escalating to the Chief Customer Officer where authority or resource beyond your remit is required.

Performance Management and Reporting

·      Hold each CSM accountable to their individual portfolio targets across churn, NRR contribution, NPS, adoption, referrals, and proactive coverage. The same metrics you are accountable to on your own portfolio.

·      Report regularly to the Chief Customer Officer on team-wide performance across the full customer base: aggregate health, churn risk, NRR trajectory, NPS, advocacy pipeline, and at-risk accounts.

·      Analyse data to identify patterns across the customer base: common churn signals, adoption barriers, friction points. Translate insight into action for the team and for leadership.

·      Own the at-risk escalation process for the team: when a CSM identifies a customer at risk, the recovery plan sits with you. You diagnose, decide, and execute, escalating to the Chief Customer Officer only when resolution requires authority or resource beyond your remit.

·      Maintain full visibility of commercial data across the team's portfolio: renewal pipeline, ARR by account, expansion signals. Use it to inform both team direction and leadership reporting.

Customer Advocacy and Raving Fans

·      Drive the Raving Fans agenda across the team: ensure every CSM has an active advocacy pipeline within their portfolio and is converting satisfied customers into active promoters.

·      Oversee the team's delivery of testimonials, case studies, referrals, and referenceable accounts for Sales and Marketing, tracking output and holding the team to defined targets.

·      Contribute your own advocacy pipeline from your personal portfolio. The same referral and NPS targets apply to your accounts.

·      Collaborate with Marketing on community initiatives, customer events, webinars, and panels, ensuring the team actively nominates and supports customer participation.

Revenue Protection and Growth

·      While NRR is owned at executive level, you are responsible for creating the conditions that make NRR growth achievable: adoption, retention, satisfaction, and expansion signal identification across the full customer base.

·      Ensure CSMs are identifying and qualifying expansion opportunities, handing them to PMO with appropriate context on customer goals and commercial readiness ready for them to process.

·      Support the team in conducting licence true-up conversations commercially and appropriately and assist with renewals where executive presence adds value.

·      Keep the Chief Customer Officer informed of commercial trends, renewal risks, and expansion opportunities across the customer base, providing commercial data to support decision-making at leadership level.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

·      Work closely with Professional Services and Partners to ensure structured, context-rich handovers at go-live. The quality of the Implementation-to-CS transition directly affects your team's starting position with every new customer.

·      Collaborate with Support to maintain awareness of trends, ticket patterns, and systemic issues affecting your customer base, without owning ticket resolution.

·      Partner with Sales on expansion opportunities, providing the customer context that makes commercial conversations more likely to succeed.

·      Consolidate and channel customer feedback to Product, Support, and leadership: synthesising what the team hears across accounts into structured, actionable insight rather than anecdote.

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Core Competencies:

Essential

·      Proven experience in a customer success, account management, or customer-facing role within a SaaS or software business.

·      Previous line management or team leadership experience: you have managed people, not just influenced them.

·      Confidence holding commercial conversations with finance professionals (CFOs, Financial Controllers, Finance Managers) without being salesy.

·      Data-literate: comfortable using commercial and usage data to make decisions, manage performance, and inform leadership.

·      Genuine belief that customer experience is a commercial lever, not a support function.

·      Proactive and structured: able to manage your own accounts, lead a team, and report upwards simultaneously without any of the three suffering.

·      Strong written, verbal, and presentation skills: you communicate clearly with customers, your team, and exec leadership.

·      Resilient and calm under pressure: at-risk accounts and underperforming team members require clear thinking, not reactive management.

Desirable

·      Experience with accounting, ERP, or finance software.

·      Track record of generating customer advocacy, referrals, or references at scale.

·      Familiarity with CRM and customer success tooling (HubSpot, Freshdesk, or similar).

·      Background in professional services, implementation, or customer onboarding.

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