Product Specialist, Manager (Post Sales)

AlphaSense | No comp given

Steph's Notes:

The Careers page is well-developed, informative, and pretty straightforward.

We spend our waking hours obsessing over our customers

Eh, do you though? 'Cause that's not necessarily something I'd brag about.

You demonstrate equanimity in all situations.

This is "stay calm under pressure" in sheep's clothing, in case you were wondering.

You are a warm but demanding manager to your direct reports.

Again, it's not that weird, just a signal of a specific kind of culture, which could be fine! Make sure it's your kind of culture, is all I'm saying.

An intelligent, articulate, consultative and confident client facing professional

No unintelligible, meek boneheads, thank you very much.

Superior ability to develop rapport with people, and to maintain relationships, combined with a positive and proactive personality.

Ah, so we're prescribing personalities now, cool cool cool.

Energetic and creative individual

I'm just a girl, standing in front of a faceless company, asking them to stop saying this ableist bullshit.

Effective attention to detail, time management and task prioritisation, even when under pressure.

I'm not going to copy and paste the typos / errors in this JD (you'll see them below), but there were enough that I thought to myself, "these folks are definitely going to require attention to detail." It's just a constant of the universe now.

I was going to give this an Eh, It's Probably Fine, but the weird culture signals tipped it over into Tread Carefully for me. Oh yeah, and there's no salary transparency (and the application asks for comp range), so that would've done it anyway.

Original Job Description: Product Specialist, Manager (Post Sales)

Location: London, UK
Reports to: Director of Customer Success

About AlphaSense

The world’s most sophisticated companies rely on AlphaSense to remove uncertainty from decision-making. With market intelligence and search built on proven AI, AlphaSense delivers insights that matter from content you can trust. Our universe of public and private content includes equity research, company filings, event transcripts, expert calls, news, trade journals, and clients’ own research content. Our platform is trusted by over 4,000 enterprise customers, including a majority of the S&P 500. Founded in 2011, AlphaSense is headquartered in New York City with over 1,500 people across the globe and offices in the U.S., U.K., Finland, India, and Singapore. Come Join Us!

About The Team

The Customer Success team is composed of our Product Specialist group, a team of highly trained product experts as well as our Account Managers, who provide strategic guidance to our robust book of business, spanning from Fortune 1000 businesses to some of the largest financial institutions in the world.
First and foremost, the Product Specialist team are value-added partners to our clients. We are extremely consultative in our approach and will do everything we can to solve client challenges through our product. We spend our waking hours obsessing over our customers and making sure they have the right data at their fingertips to make the best decisions possible. We are responsible for retaining our customers, maximising usage of the product and partnering with the sales team to uncover opportunities to grow our business.

The Product Specialist role marries the technical knowledge of our solution with a deep understanding of either the Corporate or Financial Services verticals to ensure that users, across all of the segments and business units that we work with, are realising maximum value from the platform. The team is heavily relied upon to contribute to both growth and retention initiatives by helping maximise prospect and customer health. The team is segmented into two - pre and post sales. Our pre-sales team partners with Account Executives to help wins user trials and bring in new revenue, while our post-sales team partners with Account Managers to retain existing clients and ensure they are effectively engaging with the platform and realising value. Additionally, because of the extensive exposure that Product Specialists have with clients, they are also in a prime position to partner with our Product Management and Content teams to help determine future product developments that will resonate with the market, as well as owning the customer feedback loop. The Product Specialist role can be both an excellent launching point and destination due to the several career opportunities it offers.

About The Role & What You’ll Do:
The Product Specialist Manager focused on Post-sales will be responsible for managing a team of Product Specialists who are responsible for:

• Being experts in the product as well as our persona-specific use cases.
• Building custom searches and completing specific customizations to users’ accounts.
• Demoing live on calls of all types with the aim of increasing user engagement, adoption and retention.
• Building effective relationships with cross-functional Account Manager (AM) partners, as well as the Product and Content teams.

We are looking for a team oriented, data-driven leader who can have an impact on the continued growth of this team. As the Product Specialist team continues to grow and morph, we are adding additional roles and responsibilities.

The duties of the Product Specialist Manager include:

• Directly leading a team of Post-sales Product Specialists who are responsible for supporting AMs in retaining and growing existing accounts through white glove and value-add client service.
• Driving Successful Customer Outcomes by increasing renewal rates and reducing churn, expanding revenue by building deeper relationships with our accounts, and influencing future lifetime value through higher product adoption.
• Aggregating feedback and pivoting pilot programs to allow for optimal renewal rates, revenue growth, and uncovering the key support PS can offer to our revenue organisation. As part of this, taking initiatives is key to continuously improving our organisation & updating internal processes.
• Coaching and mentoring members of your team on development, call coaching, implementing best practices, and establishing accountability across the team. This includes adapting your managerial style to each direct report to effectively support and challenge them.
• Providing transparency and insight of your team’s performance to the leadership team, which includes tracking and reporting day-to-day metrics.
• Recruiting top talent for your growing team while maintaining a high bar of excellence.
• Building impactful relationships with cross-functional leaders (Sales, Account Management, Sales Enablement, Product, Marketing, etc.) to ensure alignment and drive successful growth outcomes.
• Diligently learn about our product and feed additional ideas to bridge the gap between feature roll-outs, the future roadmap, and user requests for platform updates.

Who You Are:

• You have a proven track record of successfully managing a team of at least 5 client-facing people (and being directly responsible for those individuals).
• Passionate about learning and always seeking the next challenge.
• A systems thinker—you have a proven track record of turning processes that lack structure into effective, scalable systems.
• You measure our success by the success of our customers. As an effective leader, you will instil these values in your team to ensure our customers are receiving an excellent customer experience & white glove service.
• You are obsessed with adding value to your team through coaching and feedback.
• You demonstrate equanimity in all situations.
• You are a warm but demanding manager to your direct reports.
• You are ambitious, with impeccable integrity and curiosity.
• You have significant experience working directly with users and clients to solve complex problems.
• Servant leadership is innate - you see leading people as a privilege and are committed to others’ success. You lead by example everyday.
• Strong 360 communicator; able to parse nuanced data and draw actionable conclusions.
• You appreciate that feedback is a gift and you feel comfortable giving and receiving 360 feedback.

Candidate Requirements:

• 5+ years of work experience in consulting, sales, account management, or client success with a minimum of 2 years direct people management experience
  (where you managed a team of at least 5 client-facing people).
• High aptitude and willingness to learn. Because of our diverse client base, most of the technical knowledge required to succeed will be learned on the job
• Ability to distil and explain complex issues in simple terms.
• Experience operationalising the customer journey and creating effective and scalable processes.● An intelligent, articulate, consultative and confident client facing professional
• Must have the personal motivation and ability to contribute to a dynamic and entrepreneurial team culture.
• Superior ability to develop rapport with people, and to maintain relationships, combined with a positive and proactive personality.
• Energetic and creative individual, possessing natural curiosity with the ability to learn quickly and adapt.
• Outstanding oral, written and presentation skills.
• Effective attention to detail, time management and task prioritisation, even when under pressure.
• Ability and interest to work autonomously, and for a small fast-growing company. Someone can genuinely "make the role their own", so looking for highly motivated proactive individuals who make things happen, and want to play a large role in the company’s success.

AlphaSense is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to a work environment that supports, inspires, and respects all individuals. All employees share in the responsibility for fulfilling AlphaSense’s commitment to equal employment opportunity. AlphaSense does not discriminate against any employee or applicant on the basis of race, color, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, age, religion, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, military or veteran status, disability, or any other non-merit factor. This policy applies to every aspect of employment at AlphaSense, including recruitment, hiring, training, advancement, and termination.

In addition, it is the policy of AlphaSense to provide reasonable accommodation to qualified employees who have protected disabilities to the extent required by applicable laws, regulations, and ordinances where a particular employee works.