Where AI Meets ROI: Building Strategic Customer Relationships in Enterprise SaaS

The Client

Our client is a fast-growing technology company delivering AI-powered solutions that transform how marketing and sales teams engage their customers. Their SaaS platform enables enterprise clients to personalize the buyer journey at scale—boosting engagement, expanding pipeline, and increasing deal size through intelligent account-based marketing (ABM).

With clients like Adobe, Dell, PayPal, and SunTrust Bank, the company is recognized as a leader in AI-enabled ABM. Backed by a prominent private equity sponsor and led by former Bain, McKinsey, and BCG consultants, the business is rapidly scaling—and needed strong talent to grow alongside it.

The Challenge

To support their growing customer base and ensure sustained revenue expansion, our client needed to build a world-class customer success team.

The mandate: recruit Customer Success Directors who could be both relationship managers and strategic advisors. These leaders would work closely with enterprise customers across verticals—driving adoption, securing renewals, and identifying opportunities for upsell and deeper value creation.

Key qualifications included:

• Top-tier consulting experience (MBB or similar)
• Strong executive presence and communication skills
• Comfort navigating IT, marketing, and executive stakeholders
• Strategic thinking and analytical rigor
• A collaborative, client-first mindset
• Willingness to be based in San Mateo or Austin

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This was not a technical support role—it was about guiding clients through the strategic use of a complex platform, grounded in business outcomes and ROI.

Our Approach

We conducted a targeted search for management consultants with 2–3 years of experience, strong client management skills, and a track record of strategic problem-solving.

Our outreach focused on those who could:

• Translate analytics into business narratives
• Build executive trust quickly and authentically
• Understand client priorities and tailor the platform’s features accordingly
• Represent the voice of the customer internally to product and engineering

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We prioritized candidates from MBB and top-tier strategy firms while avoiding tech-heavy profiles from implementation-heavy environments.

The Placements

We successfully placed two standout Customer Success Directors:

Candidate 1: A predictive analytics expert with experience in Revenue Intelligence at Google. He brought deep analytical skill and comfort with cross-functional teams—making him ideally suited for high-growth, data-driven enterprise environments.

Candidate 2: A seasoned consumer and e-commerce executive with over a decade of experience in strategy, operations, and leadership. A Bain alum, she spent five years as an executive at a PE-backed ecommerce brand and seven years advising Fortune 500 and private equity clients. Her commercial mindset, strategic orientation, and client empathy made her a natural fit for driving renewals and long-term value.

The Outcome

Both hires quickly became strategic extensions of the client team—owning post-sale relationships, helping enterprise customers unlock the platform’s full potential, and influencing product development through real-world feedback.

Their presence elevated customer success from support to strategic partnership—strengthening retention, expanding account value, and reinforcing the company’s reputation as a high-impact SaaS partner.

By embedding consulting-caliber talent into customer-facing roles, the client turned renewals into growth—and customer relationships into a competitive edge.