Customer Success Manager - IBM Apptio

Introduction

As a Customer Success Manager, you will serve as the primary customer success technical advisor and trusted advocate for customers using IBM Apptio. You will be responsible for ensuring customers realize measurable value from their investment by driving product adoption, optimizing use cases, and delivering business outcomes aligned to their strategic goals.

This role combines deep product expertise, technical problem-solving, and customer engagement to build and nurture long-term partnerships that lead to successful renewals and expansion.

Your Role And Responsibilities

Customer Success Ownership

• Manage a full portfolio of customers leveraging IBM Apptio.
• Own customer health and adoption outcomes by serving as the primary advocate for assigned accounts.
• Act as the bridge between customer leadership and Apptio internal teams, ensuring alignment on goals, usage, and business value.

Success Planning & Value Realization

• Develop and maintain a Customer Success Plan for each account that outlines objectives, success criteria, adoption milestones, and measurable value targets.
• Coach customers through their journey, from first point of value to advanced use cases, ensuring adoption is embedded within the customer’s processes.
• Partner with the account team to regularly present progress and outcomes to client executives, highlighting realized value and aligning on next-phase opportunities.

Technical Expertise

• Serve as customer main Point of Contact for the solution set by ensuring readiness across key capabilities, use cases, and technical integrations for IBM Apptio.
• Provide best practice guidance, solution design input, and hands-on support for operationalizing customer use cases.
• Partner with Customer Success Architects, Technical Account Managers, Product Management and Support/Engineering to address technical blockers and optimize the customer experience.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with Account Managers, Engagement Managers, and Strategy Advisors to ensure unified execution of the Customer Success Plan.
• Provide insights into customer usage, adoption patterns, and technical challenges back to internal teams to influence roadmap and strategy.

Customer Advocacy

• Develop strong relationships with customer stakeholders and the TBM Office to ensure adoption is championed internally.
• Represent the voice of the customer to Apptio leadership and product teams.
• Identify and nurture referenceable customers through successful use case adoption and measurable business outcomes.

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

Experience: Hands-on experience as technical customer success, solutions engineering, consulting, or technical account management role within SaaS or enterprise software.

Domain Knowledge: Familiarity with IT Financial Management (ITFM) and/or Technology Business Management (TBM) Frameworks (including budgeting, forecasting, cost transparency, chargeback/showback models) highly preferred.

Skills

• Strong technical acumen with the ability to translate complex product capabilities into customer outcomes.
• Proven ability to manage customer relationships, including executive-level communication.
• Strong problem-solving, facilitation, and presentation skills.
• Ability to understand and propose solutions based on complex data
• Comfortable driving structured success plans and aligning with cross-functional teams.
• Hands-on experience with financial planning and analysis (FP&A) or IT Finance processes (e.g. CapEx/OpEx Management, Cost Allocations, Unit Costing, Total Cost of Ownership).
• Solid understanding of IT infrastructure components (cloud services, data centers, networks, storage, compute, SaaS, on-prem) and how they drive cost structures.
• Familiarity with Apptio Costing & Planning or similar ITFM/TBM Platforms.
• Comfortable leading workshops, training sessions, and executive reviews focused on IT cost management, planning and value realization.

Tools: Experience with Gainsight, Salesforce, or similar Customer Success platforms a plus. Experience with data analytics tools such as Excel, Tableau, and Power BI.

Mindset: Outcome-driven, collaborative, and passionate about enabling customers to succeed.