Interim Team Lead Enterprise Account Management (DACH)

Job description

About Us Perk (formerly TravelPerk) is the intelligent platform for travel and spend management. Built to tackle the time-consuming, manual work that gets in the way of real work, our tools automate everything from travel bookings to expenses, invoice processing, and more. By eliminating this shadow work that wastes hours, erodes morale, and saps innovation, we're on a mission to power real work, with real impact. We're trusted by more than 12,000 companies worldwide, including On Running, Breitling, and Fabletics, and we're tackling the 7 hours of lost productivity per employee each week, a $1.7 trillion problem https://www.perk.com/shadow-work-report. Founded in 2015, Perk has grown into a global company of more than 1,800 people across 12 offices globally, with headquarters in London and Boston. We combine innovation, control, and simplicity to transform how businesses work and how people feel at work. At Perk, we're driven by our values, like being an owner, delivering a 7-star experience, and working as one team. We value curiosity, purpose, and mindset, not just knowledge, to unlock the power in your potential. Our talent team brings together leading minds from the travel, fintech, and SaaS industries, representing over 70 countries. If you're excited about having a real impact and shaping how millions of people experience work, we'd love you on the team. Visit www.perk.com http://www.perk.com to learn more. ABOUT THE ROLE We are looking for an Interim Team Leader for our Senior & Enterprise Account Management team in DACH. You cover a parental leave and lead the team that manages our largest and most complex customers in the German speaking market. The mandate is real, not administrative. You own the commercial results of the segment, you represent Account Management in the DACH leadership team, and you drive customer facing programmes that are currently high on our agenda: platform migrations for spend management customers, cross-sell between our Travel and Spend products, and a structured retention initiatives for our most strategic accounts. Because the assignment is time limited, we are looking for a leader who is effective within weeks, not months. Seniority in leading experienced account managers and confidence with large enterprise customers matter more here than a long ramp up into our systems. WHAT YOU’LL DO - People leadership and performance - Lead, coach and develop a team of Senior and Enterprise Account Managers, potentially including one Player Coach who has own direct reports. - Run a clear leadership rhythm: regular team meetings, structured 1:1s, documented feedback loops, development plans per quarter. - Own the team's KPIs and targets (retention, revenue growth, cross-sell, take rate) and manage performance transparently, including the difficult conversations. - Enable your team to handle complex commercial situations (price negotiations, churn cases, escalations) independently. - Keep the team stable, focused and supported during a period of change. - Commercial ownership - Be accountable for retention, upsell and cross-sell across the Senior and Enterprise portfolio (Travel, Spend, Cards, Events). - Steer the risk agenda: regular risk reviews, action plans per account, stakeholder maps and multi-threading standards for accounts at risk. - Support your team in strategic negotiations, renewals and business reviews with C level stakeholders. - Drive the platform motion: bring Spend to Travel customers and Travel to Spend customers, together with sales and technical account management teams. - Programme and stakeholder work - Co-own the DACH execution of our spend platform migration programme for Senior and Enterprise customers, together with Technical Account Management, the Spend organisation and Implementation. The objective is to protect customer satisfaction and revenue throughout the migration. - Act as the escalation level for your team and manage cross-functional escalations into Product, Support, Implementation and Finance. - Represent the voice of Enterprise customers towards Product and translate customer pain into concrete roadmap input. - Contribute to planning, strategy and daily operations of the DACH Account Management leadership team: capacity planning, portfolio distribution, hiring and onboarding. - Operational excellence - Keep data quality high in Salesforce, Looker and Notion, and use it for forecasting and prioritisation. - Improve and automate recurring tasks, playbooks and customer facing materials, including the use of AI tooling. - Coordinate onboarding of new Enterprise clients with Sales, Implementation and Technical Account Managements WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR - Must have - Proven experience of people management experience in Account Management, Customer Success or Sales, including responsibility for experienced or senior individual contributors. - Own background as a Senior or Enterprise Account Manager, with a track record of meeting and exceeding retention and growth targets. - Confidence with C level stakeholders in large German speaking organisations, including escalation and recovery situations. - Strong commercial judgement: negotiation, pricing logic, business case thinking. - Analytical strength: Salesforce, Looker or comparable BI tools, forecasting, Excel or Sheets, today’s AI tools. - German at native or near native level and fluent English. - Based in Barcelona, or able to be based in Barcelona from the start date. - Strong plus - Experience with spend management, expense management or fintech products, or a proven ability to get deep into a technical product very quickly. - Experience in travel tech, SaaS or B2B platform businesses. - Experience with product migrations, platform upgrades or post-merger customer integration. - Experience leading a team through a transition, restructuring or leave cover. - Who you are - Effective early: you build trust fast and do not need six months to add value. - Calm under pressure: you keep the team steady when several escalations run in parallel. - Direct and fair: you give clear feedback, also when it is uncomfortable. - Enabler, not bottleneck: you measure success by what your team delivers without you. - Owner mindset: you do not wait for permission to fix what is broken. WHAT WE OFFER - Receive competitive compensation and equity ownership in Perk. - Rest and recharge with our generous allocation of vacation days plus public holidays. - Take control of your physical health with your choice of private healthcare or a gym allowance. - Know that your loved ones are protected financially through your Life Insurance if the worst were to happen. - Join our unforgettable Perk events, including our spectacular annual summer party. - Always feel supported with Spring Health, our market-leading wellbeing partner, providing fast, comprehensive access to 12x therapy and 12x coaching sessions for you and your loved ones. - Make your money go further with our flexible compensation plan. - Focus on your family with 17 weeks’ paid parental leave during your child’s first year. - Contribute to your community with 16 paid hours per year to spend volunteering for your dearest charitable causes. - Broaden your horizons with up to 20 "Work from Anywhere" days per year. - Nurture your language skills with in real-life English, Spanish and Catalan lessons. - Follow your passions and take a four-week, fully paid sabbatical once you reach 5 years - Let us help you move to one of our hubs with relocation support. THE PROCESS - Talent Acquisition Interview - 30mins Virtual - Hiring Manager Interview - 30mins Virtual - Assessment Interview - 60mins - In-person Interview - Values interview - 30mins Virtual AI at Perk AI is embedded in how we work across every function. The tools you'll use day-to-day are AI-enabled so you can move faster and spend more time on the work that matters. In practice, that means using AI to research and prioritise accounts, draft and refine outreach, handle customer interactions more effectively, synthesise information, and cut through shadow work - the invisible tasks that pull people away from the work only they can do - so you can focus on relationships and outcomes. We don't expect you to be an AI expert, but we do expect you to be curious and intentional about it. The bar is judgment: knowing when AI makes your work better, when to verify what it produces, and when to rely on your own expertise instead. We'll ask about how you use AI in your interviews, not to test tool knowledge, but to understand how you think about it. That reflects how we work every day. How We Work At Perk, we take an IRL-first approach to work, where our team works together in-person 3 days a week. As such, this role requires you to be based within commuting distance of our hubs. We fundamentally believe in the value of meeting in real life to improve connectivity, productivity, creativity and ultimately making us a great place to work. For certain roles, we can help with relocation from anywhere in the world, English is the official language at the office. Please submit your resume in English if you choose to apply. Do not forget to submit an updated portfolio and/or resume. Perk is a global company with a diverse customer base, and we want to make sure the people behind our product reflect that. We’re an equal opportunity employer, which means you’re welcome at Perk regardless of how you look, where you’re from, or anything else that makes you, well, you. Protect Yourself from Recruitment Scams All official communication from Perk will always come from email addresses ending in @perk.com http://perk.com or @externalperk.com http://externalperk.com, our verified social media channels, or recruiters listed on our official LinkedIn page. We will never ask you to pay for equipment, training, or fees, request sensitive personal information such as bank details early in the process, or communicate through unofficial apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, or Signal. If you receive a message claiming to be from Perk that seems suspicious, please do not respond. Forward it to security [at] perk .com, and we will confirm whether it is legitimate. #LI-Hybrid