Bluespark, a world-class creative technology company headquartered in Research Triangle Park, NC and Paris, France is looking to fill a key customer-facing position on the team. As an account manager with us, you will engage in a variety of tasks including relationship management, project logistics management, negotiation, and the development of opportunities including both expanding business within our portfolio and finding new business. You must be a first class communicator in every respect. You must also be the consummate professional as you'll be working from your home office; this is a position on our distributed team. Here’s a summary of what we need you to do:
• Nurture the Client Relationship
You'll be acting as a regular daily interface between the client and our kick-ass team. This doesn't mean you're the only one responsible for talking to the client— all of our team leaders will talk to the client on a regular basis. Your role here is to make sure the team and the client stakeholders are working well together. You'll be the point person if they have a problem or a praise. They should naturally think of coming to you first. Make sure that the client relationship is healthy as we move forward together.
• Manage Project Logistics
The Bluespark XLeads (UX Lead, Creative Lead, Technical Lead) will develop a project plan which defines scope, allocates budget, resources, and sets a schedule. They'll put this plan in your hands and you'll have to track and manage the logistics of the project according to that plan. This means you get the awesome job of gathering and analyzing time and budget data on a weekly basis. You'll make sure individual staff time is logged and reported to you. You'll aggregate the time across the project team and prepare a comprehensive status report to show to the XLeads and the client on a regular basis. Your time reports will also be submitted back to accounting for billing. You'll also watch the calendar and make sure the XLeads confirm they are on pace with the project schedule. You'll schedule meetings. You'll sit in on those meetings, take notes, and catch action items allowing the XLeads to focus on the discussion. You'll summarize meeting notes and post them, and then follow up on action items to make sure the appropriate XLead or client stakeholder has it underway or completed. You'll be the facilitator of forward movement and the collector of project logistics data.
• Negotiate and Communicate
We work on big projects. Large projects are a dance of give and take and involve compromise— sometimes accompanied by hard decisions that won’t make everyone happy. You're going to have to work through this with the client. Accept it as inevitable. You must use your negotiation powers for good and be the one to get in there and smooth it out. In general, you need to be a kick-butt proactive problem solver. You should be able to see potential problems before they become issues. If something does become an issue, you automatically become someone that can solve that problem with your ability to connect the people that have the required professional expertise with the right resources. With your negotiation and communication skills, you make sure people have what they need to do great work and you keep things moving forward.
• Expand Existing Relationships
Working closely with our portfolio, you'll be listening when clients get excited about how clever we are and want to expand our team’s ideas into features they hadn't previously considered. Conversely, during scope discussions, the development of a known feature might be deferred until later because priorities change. You'll naturally use new feature ideas and deferred features as opportunities to later increase the volume of our business with the client. You and the XLeads should be able to sense when to pitch and and how best to pitch. With your finger on the pulse of the relationship, and armed with solid justification and details from your XLeads, you’ll go in and win the business. You'll need sharp negotiation skills to land this additional work for us.
• Develop New Relationships
Given your incredible people skills and organization skills you should be able to recognize a great prospect when you see one. Part of your job will be actively seeking out and networking with likely prospects, developing a relationship with them, and converting that relationship naturally into new business for Bluespark. Our portfolio should have your name all over it.
Responsibilities:
- Responsible for client communications, conflict resolution, and compliance on client deliverables and revenue.
- Ensures that client issues are dealt with in an efficient manner, informing the management of any problems that may arise.
- Owns the contract and contract renewals for new work for an existing client.
- Seeks approval for change orders and invoices, and is responsible for payment collections.
- Works closely with the project team in order to maintain a continuous knowledge of project status in order to identify potential issues and/or opportunities within or related to the project.
- Ensures that all quality standards are met, and that projects are profitable.
- Aware and in pursuit of opportunities for account growth and new business.
- Communicates the client's goals and represent the client's interests to the team.
- Provides regular two-way communication between the client and team, to provide strong team representation and set proper client expectations.
- Understanding Bluespark’s capabilities and service, and effectively communicates all offerings to the client.
- Reports to management, providing regular input on all account activity, including status and call reports on a weekly basis.
Requirements:
- Proven people skills required in order to create, maintain and enhance customer relationships
- Minimum 3 years of Account/project management experience
- Extremely detail oriented
- Motivated, goal oriented, persistent and a skilled negotiator
- High level of initiative and the ability to work well in a distributed team environment
- Excellent written and oral communication skills
- Handles stressful situations and deadline pressures well
- Plans and carries out responsibilities with minimal direction
- Solid, reliable high speed internet connectivity in a personal working environment
- Ability and willingness to travel internationally
No calls and no recruiters, please. Interested parties should contact us and we'll get back to you.