Senior Manager, Customer Success

Job description

ABOUT PLEO Messy spend management is tricky business. And tedious processes are a lose-lose situation for all involved, not just finance. At Pleo, we're changing that. We build spend solutions that make managing money seamless, empowering, and surprisingly effective for finance teams and employees alike - with a vision to help all businesses ‘go beyond’. The word ‘Pleo’ actually means ‘more than you’d expect’, and living by that mantra has been the secret to our success over the last 10 years. Now, we’re at a pivotal moment in our journey; every move we make has a direct impact on our 40,000+ customers, our business, and our collective success. We need people who take pride in uncovering customer needs, who turn complex problems into simple solutions, challenge the way things are done (respectfully), and always aim high. With great ambitions driving us forward, we can’t say we’ve got this whole thing figured out. And frankly, that’s half the fun! What we can say is that we’re a driven, progressive, and, importantly, a kind bunch of 850+ people from over 100 nationalities, all committed to delivering the future of business spending, together. About the Role We're looking for a Senior Manager of Customer Success to lead our UKI team within the Large and High Growth segment. Joining our Customer Experience department, you will be responsible for executing our regional CS strategy, driving team performance, and ensuring an exceptional experience for our most strategic UKI customers. In this role, you will directly manage, coach, and scale a high-performing team of Customer Success Managers (CSMs). Your mission is to operationalise our customer success motions, ensuring your team successfully drives product adoption, value realisation, retention, and expansion across their portfolios. This role is ideal for an experienced B2B SaaS or Fintech people leader who thrives in fast-paced environments. You should bring a strong execution discipline, a commercial mindset, and a passion for frontline coaching to help your team turn complex customer challenges into simple, impactful solutions. Who you’ll be working with and reporting to You’ll report to our Director, Customer Success (large and high growth) and leading a dedicated regional team of CSMs. The team is highly collaborative and dedicated to retain the largest customers of Pleo. You’ll also have the chance to work closely with UKI commercial team, account managers, customer support, onboarding, product and RevOps to ensure customer risk is addressed early and growth opportunities are maximised What You’ll Be Doing As a Senior Manager of Customer Success, you will: - Lead and coach a team of 10 CSMs, providing active coaching, career development, and daily operational guidance to ensure consistent, high-quality performance. - Own your team’s core metrics. - Implement and iterate on segment-specific success plans, engagement motions, renewal readiness playbooks, and risk-mitigation strategies. - Partner with Sales and Account Management to ensure seamless customer transitions, aligned account strategies, and coordinated execution during renewals and expansion plays. - Act as the senior escalation point for UKI strategic accounts, working cross-functionally with Product, Support, and Operations to eliminate friction points. - Use operational insights, data dashboards, and forecasting metrics to track team productivity, evaluate portfolio health, and proactively address churn risks. Immediate priorities you can expect to tackle: - Strengthening localised account health visibility and proactive risk intervention. - Building high-impact execution habits across your team of 10 CSMs. - Improving renewal readiness and commercial handoffs with the UKI Sales teams. - Fostering a culture of accountability, continuous feedback, and performance excellence. What You Bring You’ll thrive in this role if you have: - 5+ years of experience in Customer Success, with a proven track record of 2+ years directly managing high-performing teams in B2B SaaS, fintech, or fast-paced technology environments. - Strong experience supporting large, mid-market, or enterprise-level accounts with complex stakeholders and sophisticated commercial needs. - A strong commercial acumen - you seamlessly connect day-to-day customer health to retention, expansion, and long-term business value. - Deep familiarity with Customer Success methodologies, customer lifecycles, health scoring, and risk mitigation tools. - Excellent people leadership skills with a proven ability to hire, inspire, hold accountable, and develop talent. - A data-driven approach, comfortable utilising CRM and CS tooling (e.g.Hubspot, Vitally) to drive team performance and forecasting. - Fluency in English with exceptional communication and stakeholder management skills. Other languages are a plus Nice to have: - Direct experience in fintech, spend management, payments, or financial operations verticals. - Experience scaling team structures from smaller cohorts to larger regional pods. Why is this role a good fit for you This role is a good fit for you if: - You love combining frontline coaching with commercial strategy - You thrive in high-velocity, evolving environment - You want to make a highly visible, regional impact This role is not a good fit for you if: - You prefer a steady, predictable corporate routine - You want to step away from the frontline - You view Customer Success as purely “customer happiness" How You’ll Develop in this Role In your first 6 months at Pleo, you’ll: - Establish a highly cohesive, high-performing UKI CS team structure for our CSMs. - Deliver measurable improvements in UKI customer retention, renewal execution, and expansion pipelines. - Build a deep understanding of our product ecosystem to successfully advocate for the needs of our UKI market. - Be recognized as a vital execution partner to our Director of CS and a champion for our large and high-growth customer base. LOCATION Please note: We can hire on a hybrid set-up in any of the locations listed on the advert but you will need to be physically based in the country of your choice with a valid right to work. We are unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role in any of the listed locations. The interview process We want to ensure you are set-up for success and understand what will be expected of you. If your application is successful, our interview process is as follows: 1. Intro call: A 30-minute chat with our Talent Acquisition Partner to discuss the role and your background. 2. Hiring Manager Interview: A 45 mins interview with the hiring manager to deep dive into your experience and what you can bring to the team 3. Challenge and Team Interview: We will send you a take-home test to showcase your onboarding strategy and data driven approach and invite you to a 60 mins team interview to present your challenge and to know part of the team 4. Final Interview: Final conversation with a senior leader Transparency is important to us so we also wanted to share some insights about what we’re looking for in applications to ensure you can set yourself up for success! Last time we hired a Manager, Customer Success, we received a vast number of applications but only a few were selected for an intro call. With this in mind, we want to help you understand what we really care about when reviewing your application: - We receive a lot of CVs, and many of them are AI-generated. We love seeing people leverage AI—it’s a big focus for us internally too—but without human intervention, these CVs can sometimes become generic and fail to show a candidate in the best light. What we're really looking for is the specific details of real impact that only you—not AI—know from your previous experience. A top tip from us is to use the “Achieved X, as measured by Y, by doing Z” formula (credit: Laszlo Bock, ~2014) to give a really clear picture of what you’ve worked on. A final note: including links to your previous companies' websites is a huge help and allows us to truly understand your background. - Every single application we receive is reviewed by a human (yes, hundreds of them) because we believe that candidates' efforts should be matched by an equal level of human care. This means that we expect a similar level of attention put into your application. Read and answer the application questions carefully, they make a huge difference in our decision-making process. - Highlight the most important aspects of the role, points that might get misunderstood, any specific industry requirements etc. ABOUT YOUR APPLICATION - English first. Since it's our company language, please submit your application in English. You’ll be using it a lot if you join us. - A fair look for everyone. Our talent team reads every single application to ensure the process is fair. To keep things running smoothly, we only accept applications through our system—our support team can’t pass on calls or emails. - Diversity drives us. We can only reach our goals if our team reflects the world around us. That starts with you hitting apply, even if you don't tick every single box. We encourage people from all backgrounds and experiences to join us. - Interview at your best. We want you to feel comfortable throughout the process. If you have any accessibility requirements or need a specific format, email belonging@pleo.io. We’ll design a process that works for you. - Your data is safe. When you apply, we process your personal data as a data processor. For more information on how Pleo processes personal data, read our Privacy Policy here https://www.pleo.io/en/legal. - Applying for multiple roles? Nothing is stopping you, and we assess every role independently. However, we do look for alignment, so make sure you can explain why your interest and experience are right for each specific role. - Reapplying. If you’re applying for the same role again, please wait six months from your last decision before hitting submit.