About Kudos
An exciting opportunity to join a small but rapidly expanding team focused on providing an innovative online service for academic authors, institutions, publishers, societies and funders.
Kudos helps broaden the reach and impact of published works. This multi-award-winning service has a global client base, including major publishers such as Taylor & Francis, Wiley and SAGE, and over 160,000 users in the research community.
About this role
Kudos has over 100 clients including publishers, institutions, societies and corporates. You will be responsible for client servicing and satisfaction, and for a sizeable renewals budget. You will be a people person, and a self-starting problem solver, comfortable with both defining overall client strategy, and with supporting clients’ every day needs. You will be passionate and productive, experienced at juggling priorities, and creative in your approach to ensuring that clients derive value from our data and services.
Job Purpose
You will ensure that we provide the highest levels of client servicing, by:
- Developing strong customer relationships with clients
- Identifying and ensuring conversion of upsell opportunities across the full client base
- Liaising with internal colleagues to report, explore and resolve client issues and propose / scope enhancements
- Supporting and contributing to the development of sales, product and marketing strategy
- Creating / collating regular reports and analysis
- Advising the Kudos leadership team on the health of our client base, and ensuring that clients’ needs are recognized and addressed at leadership level.
Reports to
Sales & Marketing Director
Key duties and responsibilities
Plan and execute strategy to ensure maximum client retention (in line with annually agreed revenue targets)
- Provide strategic oversight for all clients including commercial decisions, problem solving, maximizing value derived by customers, seeking and developing client development opportunities
- Develop best practice in client servicing (communications, reporting / analysis, troubleshooting, renewal, etc) and ensure buy-in and application of this by colleagues both within and beyond the team
- Forecast, track, analyse and report on key account metrics (internally and to clients)
- Devise and implement processes for measuring, tracking, reporting on and risk-managing (qualitative) client satisfaction
- Proactively assess, clarify and validate customer needs on an ongoing basis, and ensure these are recognized and addressed by the wider Kudos team
- Support clients during pilots to develop new products / partnerships
- Ensure relevant documentation is kept up-to-date and stored centrally
- Keep up to date with market trends and competitor activities.
Establish productive, professional relationships with key personnel in assigned customer accounts
- Write and execute client development plans for key client relationships
- Manage configuration and ongoing support for clients’ implementation of Kudos, including training for clients and their users
- Respond in a timely and professional manner to client communications or queries, and own the troubleshooting and resolution of any client issues, with support as required from colleagues
- Regularly organise and take part in phone or in-person meetings, including workshops, webinars and similar
- Communicate clearly the progress of company initiatives to assigned customer accounts
- Use the Kudos system, SalesForce, Google Analytics and other data sources to store all relevant data and to provide reports
Dimensions/Territory/Scope/Scale
Global for all client groups including publisher, institutional, funder, industry and others across all Kudos products. The role is based in the main Kudos offices in Wheatley, Oxford. Evening / weekend work and travel may be required on occasion.
Qualifications
Essential
- Experience in delivering client-focused solutions based on customer needs and commercial objectives
- Demonstrated ability to communicate, present and influence credibly and effectively at all levels of the organization
- Well organized, meticulous and result driven
- Proven ability to work independently, prioritise effectively and meet deadlines
- Excellent verbal and written communications skills
- Confidence, ambition and self-motivation
- Computer and web literacy including Word, PowerPoint and Excel
- Ability to travel
Desirable
- Account management experience
- Scholarly publishing experience
- BA/BS degree or equivalent
- Familiarity with Salesforce or similar systems
Application
To apply, please send your CV together with a covering letter outlining why you’re right for this role, to: Charlie Rapple, Sales & Marketing Director, charlie.a.rapple@growkudos.com.
Closing date for applications is 28th July 2017.