Customer Success Manager

Certara accelerates the potential of bringing medicines to market and to patients using biosimulation software, technology, and services to transform traditional drug discovery and development. Our clients include more than 2,400 biopharmaceutical companies, academic institutions, and regulatory agencies across 70 countries.

Our goal is to enable the life sciences industry’s use of data, modeling, and analytics to make better decisions across the various phases of discovery and drug development. Our software and scientists incorporate modern advances in scientific understanding, drug development experience, data analysis, and AI resulting in significant opportunities to decrease the cost and increase the probability of success for new drug approval and commercialization.

As our Customer Success Manager, you will align our goals with those of our clients, maximizing the value we transfer to each other. You will ensure that we understand our clients’ problems and needs, and that they understand and benefit from our software solutions. You will be in the center of a hexagon, moving information among internal and external expert stakeholders: P21 Business Leaders, Product Managers, and Clinical Data Consultants; and also client-side department heads, IT administrators, and end users.

Your challenge is to optimize the tradeoffs between each stakeholder’s respective goals: help P21 renew and expand contracts, communicate product features and user feedback, and meter out limited consulting resources; and also help clients get their preferred fixes and features on our roadmap, navigate the bureaucracy of version upgrades, and train many thousands of people to use our software well.

As the hub of vendor-client intelligence, you will be relied on to guarantee feature adoption and client business success—which should result in customer satisfaction, retention, and revenue growth, as well as direction for our product development efforts. Note: As the market leader, we have almost all the major clients that exist, and the pressure is real. You’ll be doing about four different jobs.

Account Manager: Escort clients along their journey with us.

• Serve as point of contact starting after initial sale and onboarding clients from their first install (implementation) to expanded use and later version upgrades (adoption).
• Build professional client relationships, facilitating online meetings and offline emails and tickets; follow or create scripts for standard steps in the client journey.
• Move clients through the admin steps surrounding installs and upgrades in tandem with our Implementation Managers and Technical Operations Teams; provide ongoing support for all clients, and extra care for those who are new and/or at-risk. Note: Some of this extra care involves working beyond or outside of normal hours for clients who have emergencies, operate overseas, or require off-hours system maintenance.

Product Evangelist: Educate clients on our features and their intended use.

• Study our documentation and experiment in our testing environments to learn our selling points, the differences between versions, and the steps for using each feature.
• Route clients through our knowledge libraries to circulate our marketing, training, and informational content, generating excitement and preempting FAQs.
• Represent our Product Managers and Clinical Data Consultants in training users in our intended use cases and supporting their adoption of our advanced features.
• Lure clients onto the latest version of our software by negotiating for their IT resources and articulating our value propositions. Note: One challenge of your role will be to help clients time their upgrades amidst uncertain or delayed release schedules.

Customer Advocate & Communicator: Move key info between clients and our teams.

• Research each client extensively, writing your findings in our CRM system and triaging which questions we should ask next; facilitate interviews with existing clients biweekly for premium accounts and annually for small pilot accounts.
• Document all discussions with pre-call agenda, post-call notes/minutes, and service desk tickets to track bug reports, feature ideas, or information requests; triage the resulting action steps based on client account size, urgency, and scalability of the solution.
• Escalate or deescalate issues wisely to direct the right staff to the right problem; kindly “remind” your peers to follow through with responses, either in the form of future code changes, temporary workarounds, or the production of more informational content. Note: Another challenge of your role will be to hear clients’ problems and be able to communicate effectively with other P21 teams who are non-client facing to resolve client needs within timelines specified.
• Find answers independently by troubleshooting bugs, shadowing our experts, and teaching yourself about our products; remain humble and know when to defer to an expert—which will be most of the time at first.

Business Analyst: Ask good questions and listen to clients’ pain points.

• Drive client satisfaction by tracking both stories and stats that show account health.
• Gather qualitative intel from direct observation of client environments and anecdotal evidence from routine interviews, e.g., pain points, nuances in their use cases, feedback on features, and opportunities for more training. Note: We often go off script for our largest clients in helping them resolve emergencies, so it will be a challenge to promote long-term health while dealing with the short-term “crisis of the week.”
• Gather quantitative intel from analysis of client click paths and usage metrics to identify patterns of (mis)use, interpreting these insights in light of their stories.
• Identify gaps and overlaps between clients’ existing processes and our intended use cases to advise their scope and sequence in adopting our solutions.

• Our key value proposition is that we offer the same software to every client and regulatory authority to standardize data handling across industry and government. Note: Unlike some software boutiques, we do not create custom apps or novel interfaces client-by-client. Instead, we focus on educating and informing clients to better use the features they all already share, and we reject the majority of one-off change requests.
• Because our sales and product lifecycles are constrained upstream of you, and because you will be busy with your core duties, expect to not be tasked with dealing with leads, preparing pricing tables and statements of work, handling contract renewals, gathering product requirements, making design mockups, coordinating engineering R&D, running usability focus groups, determining “best practices” for use of our software, authoring guides and documentation, and producing marketing content. Of course, if you master your duties and want to surprise us with more, be our guest!
• Some of our clients are national regulatory agencies (FDA in the USA, PMDA in Japan, etc.), and we also offer an opensource product, but you will not interact with these teams. You will work with our commercial P21 Enterprise clients, predominantly Top Pharma, Biotechs, and CROs.

• Must
o Speak fluent Portuguese & have related industry experience

o Curious about our clients and products, cautious with our brand and industry goodwill, conscientious in follow-through
o Willing to learn and serve, flexible in adapting to rapid organizational change, receptive of constructive criticism
o Thick skin in being able to take heat from big clients when things go wrong outside of your control, unafraid to ask (and re-ask) team members to deliver on their promises
o High tolerance for ambiguity, low tolerance for mess; able to create order out of chaos, attend to details, and push quality higher
o Service-obsessed, motivated to go above and beyond to assist clients, able to gain client trust as an advisor while also furthering our company goals
o Smooth and exact in communicating, writing, presenting, and facilitating; able to shift from calming “bedside manner” to exuberant sales-mode to calculating negotiator
o Relentlessly resourceful and discerning in solving problems independently vs. seeking help from others; brave yet humble in working across multi-disciplinary teams where each person is more of an expert than you in their

o Candidates who live on the East Coast of the United States

• Plus
o Ability to work in a remote position requiring constant spoken and written communication; skill in exerting influence (even on company founders, owners, and partners) without leverage or managerial authority
o Education or qualifications relating to business, programming, data science, health sciences, medical writing, customer support, project management, or corporate communications
o Experience working for a software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor, clinical laboratory, pharmaceutical company, or Contract Research Organization (CRO), specifically in functions supporting Clinical Data Management, Biostatistics, or CDISC data submissions

Certara bases all employment-related decision on merit, taking into consideration qualifications, skills, achievement, and performance. We treat all applicants and employees without regard to personal characteristics such as race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age, nationality, marital status, pregnancy, physical or mental condition, genetic information, military service, or other characteristic protected by law.

Originally posted on Himalayas