Customer Success Lead

Job description

We have 11,000 travel advisors on Tern today, we'll have 20,000 by year end, primarily driven by mid-market and enterprise agencies joining Tern with their full multi-hundred or 1000+ advisor member communities. This role's mission is to drive growth across this book of business, not just retention. What that means: maximize the amount of bookable travel volume that advisors at our most important customers are using Tern for. This could be a mix of seat adoption, engagement in key growth features, upsell, or otherwise. You decide what levers to pull and you're responsible for the end-to-end relationship, from day one through their long-term partnership with us. If you want to have impact and ownership across the end-to-end customer journey, this role is for you. We're not looking for a traditional CSM, but a growth-hungry and relationship driven partner to our most important customers. You'll help define what this function looks like to get us from 0-1 and have influence over the processes, tools, and methods we use to get there. ABOUT TERN Tern is a venture-backed software company on a mission to reshape the $127B travel agency industry by giving power back to the entrepreneurs who built it. Nearly 98% of travel agencies are small businesses. These businesses have been chronically underserved by technology. We're here to change that. Our platform helps travel advisors run more efficient, professional, and profitable operations, giving them the modern infrastructure they need to lead the next chapter of travel. But the impact goes beyond business. Travel advisors help clients move more intentionally through the world. When a traveler works with an advisor, they're more likely to avoid overtouristed hotspots and more likely to spend their dollars in places where they can do real good. That's the kind of travel we want more of. At Tern, we believe in small business. We believe in the power of travel. And we're building the future of both. CUSTOMER SUCCESS LEAD Agencies use Tern to run their businesses. They track commissions, manage client profiles, connect to suppliers, and handle the back office work that used to take hours. That's the foundation of their day to day work. But using a platform to manage the status quo is different from using it to grow, taking on more clients, becoming more efficient, building a team that books more travel and runs a stronger business. The goal of this role is to enable and drive that growth across every account, using the tools in our product to do so. That's the opportunity this role exists to unlock. We've built an early foundation with our first enterprise hosts and it's working. Now we want to take what's been learned and apply it across our significantly growing book of business, whether that be new customers or engaging with our highest value partners that we don't spend a ton of time with yet. The Customer Success Lead will define what that looks like and own the end to end process, from setting them up on Tern, activating their launch, and consulting with our most senior stakeholders on growth. Our book of business is likely to grow faster than the team that's in place. Your role is to define what needs the human touch vs. what can be automated and you own the metric to maximize booked travel revenue through Tern for every account. You define the strategy to make that happen and quarterback the execution. This is not a traditional CSM role. You're not tracking logins or generic engagement effort like feature usage. You're a strategic consultant and partner to some of the most influential agencies in the industry, helping them use Tern not just to operate, but to grow. You'll own the goal of on revenue growth for your accounts, meaning you activate and launch them quickly and get to value creation as fast as possible for each customer. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Define the success motion at Tern from near day 1. Partner with our Head of CX and to define the right customer segments, engagement model, and playbook for how we support agencies at scale without losing relationship quality. - Own post-sale success for large and enterprise agencies. This means partnering with sales in the pre-sale process on the scope of work, executing on that roadmap from day 1, building the activation and enablement plans at go-live, drive integration adoption, and run structured business reviews tied to growth outcomes. - Partner with the R&D to launch each agency on Tern and run onboarding sessions with the customer team to enable them. Go-live or launch dates is not the finish line though, this role is about fostering the agency relationship long-term and monetizing their work on the platform for Tern. - Surface agency friction, workarounds, and feature needs to R&D. You're the voice of the agency in the product cycle and the speed of that feedback loop matters. - Build scalable touch points and systems that work across a range of account sizes and complexity, so spending time with advisors in each of these agencies doesn't require hours and hours of human time. Use AI to run a high touch motion at a volume that wouldn't be possible otherwise, unique and personalized to those accounts. WHAT YOU HAVE - 5+ years in customer success, account management, or a senior sales role within a tech company with direct ownership of adoption and revenue growth metrics in a post-sale capacity - Experience managing a meaningful book of business across account sizes and a track record of driving measurable growth, not just retention - A track record of building things. You've joined teams where the playbook was incomplete and left them with something repeatable. - Comfortable operating across both enterprise complexity, mid-market agencies desiring attention, and individual needs within each of our largest accounts. - Excitement and comfortability owning the end-to-end journey. You can define the roadmap for your customer, lead cross-functional collaboration to execute, and equally deliver yourself. Whether answering a setup question, leveraging data tools, running training, or leading a business review, you're comfortable across those forums. You know when to delegate but are also comfortable in the weeds. - Ability to ramp quickly on travel and our various stakeholders personas (advisors, agency owners, and back office teams). Accounting or back office expertise is a plus, with fluency to enable internal admin and finance teams at our customers to run their business on Tern. You can understand these workflows and translate how it works in Tern seamlessly. - Strong instincts for how to drive growth and adoption at both the agency or team level and also the individual user level within your accounts. BONUS POINTS - Experience in travel, hospitality, or a vertical where your customers sell something and your product helps them sell more of it - Consulting background (strategy, management consulting, or professional services) combined with hands on startup or SaaS experience - Familiarity with AI tooling for success or account management workflows - Experience supporting large scale customer launches: host networks, franchise systems, or multi-location rollouts WHAT WE VALUE @ TERN 🌱 We're always leveling up. Whether you're deepening your craft, learning from a teammate, or embracing a new challenge, growth is core to our identity. 🧭 We act with optimistic agency. We take initiative, seek clarity, and move forward, even when the path isn't obvious. Through every peak and valley, we lead with curiosity, laughter, kindness, and resolve. 💪 We expect operational excellence. We ship value to our users every single week. We believe that compounding habits lead to sustainable productivity, consistency, and mutual trust. Operating Principles: 👂 We deeply understand our users. At every level of the organization, we obsess about understanding those we serve and the industry we operate in. ➕ We embrace the power of and, and not now. We challenge trade-offs by asking better questions. We break hard problems into small pieces and tackle them with intention. We also know to make the hard call to say "not right now". 📣 We speak up and move forward. Everyone at Tern has a voice and a responsibility to use it. We invite healthy tension, share dissenting views early, and challenge each other with curiosity, not ego. 🏃 We move fast and sweat the details. Velocity matters and relentless progress beats perfection every time. But speed isn't chaos: we stay aligned, own our outcomes, and care deeply about quality. 🤣 We take the work seriously, but not ourselves. We hire kind, driven people who elevate the room. If you've got a big ego or take yourself too seriously, you won't last. WHY THIS ROLE IS EXCITING We're just scratching the surface with success. We've built an early foundation with our first enterprise hosts, but this is the opportunity to come in near day 1 and define what the function looks like across the entire agency book. We'll continue to grow and that growth will be driven by the agency and enterprise motion, so this role is critical or activation and growth of every one of those accounts. Here's the reality: we'll likely have more accounts to support than the humans in seat to partner with them in the most traditional sense. This role works directly with our Head of CX to define what the future of success looks like in an AI driven world- both for the processes to support and engage with each account and the deployment of resources, communication, and trust to enable each account to grow on Tern. This is a growth and revenue driving role, not a traditional CSM job tracking engagement data and logins. You'll be a strategic consultant and partner to our most influential agencies, helping them use Tern to grow their own businesses. Your mission will be to maximize the travel revenue booked through Tern and contribute directly to monetizing that revenue for Tern as a business. WHY JOIN TERN? - Be part of a mission-driven team transforming the travel planning space - Work with a supportive, curious, and creative team - Influence and shape our customer success strategy from the ground up - Competitive salary, equity, and benefits package Tern is committed to building a team that represents people from many different backgrounds and life experiences, reflecting our worldview coinciding with the users and customers we serve across the world. We prefer that you apply, so think of our postings as the start of the conversation. Take the chance, you may be a wonderful add to our Tern team, even if you don't fully match every requirement on the job description.