JOHN KOLKER

Jackson, NJ ***** 267-***-****

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CAREER SUMMARY

Customer Success Manager • Partner Success Manager • Technical CSM

A highly engaged, technical CSM skilled at simplifying the complex into the “story” consumable by technical and non-technical audiences at all levels and sides of the relationship with 8 years of total CSM and Account Management experience. Understands the technology being represented, the customers’ technology, and how the represented product provides the outcomes the customer seeks.

An energetic, consistent, patient, and empathetic customer advocate who is a remarkably strong communicator, and an adaptable relationship manager with a high level of relational intelligence. Possesses the superpower of managing relationships internally, externally, cross-functionally, and up and down the org chart on all sides of the relationship with emotional intelligence and decorum.

A well-organized CSM with an uncanny ability to manage a large book of business with multiple customer accounts with varying ARR and across multiple industries who is accountable for customer retention and expansion and who consistently exceeds expectations.

An avid student and learner with a knack for learning new technologies and new products, with the ability to communicate technical details with clarity.

“By the end of the year, his renewal #'s were well above 90% and his NRR was north of 130% for the year earning him Presidents Club Honors.” – Lee Torno, Sumo Logic

AREAS OF EXPERTISE

CSM - Customer Success Manager

Account Management

Renewals and Retention

Onboarding and Training

Great Demos

SIEM and SOAR

Observability

SaaS

QBR

Totango and Salesforce.com

Adoption and Expansion

DevOps and SecOps

Relationship Management

Business Value

Sales and Engineering Support

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Sumo Logic, Redwood, CA 2021 to 2023

Senior Customer Success Manager, Commercial and MSSP Partners

Hired for relationship skills as well as for deep experience as a former customer of Sumo and engineering practitioner in the areas of SRE, Monitoring, Observability, and SecOps. Joined to help grow a world-class CSM group supporting Sumo Logic’s Analytics, SecOps, SIEM, and SOAR products while quickly bringing value through technical competence and customer empathy.

●Shattered renewal and revenue retention goals, earning President Club honors as a CSM while managing between 50 and 100 customer accounts with a combined ARR of over $14M.

●Earned the “Works with Heart” peer-nominated award for persistence with customer issues and resourcefulness while helping teammates solve and resolve difficult and complex customer-facing problems and situations.

●Pioneered CSM role in the Managed Security Service Provider, MSSP space at Sumo streamlining onboarding, training, expansion, and adoption of our MSSP partners downstream Sumo customers.

●Refactored Health Scoring and Retention Forecasting for Partner accounts where there was none. This effort brought a deeper executive focus on red accounts which increased retention rates by 25 percent.

Bed Bath & Beyond, Union, NJ 2015 to 2020

Senior Manager and Lead Engineer, SRE, SecOps and Observability

Hired to build and lead a global and distributed Site Reliability Engineering, Security Monitoring, and Observability platform using best-in-class SaaS and On-prem software. Primary vendor relationship owner for multiple products like Sumo Logic, New Relic, Broadcom, Tealeaf, and Quantum Metric. Managed the relationships with the CSMs and Account executives as the customer champion.

● Excelled as the relationship manager in several CSM and AE relationships as the primary customer champion of their products which included operating in the role of an influencer over the Economic Buyer of those products at renewal or replacement time.

●Built and led a global and distributed team of SREs, Analysts, and Incident Responders who designed, instrumented, monitored, and responded to the state of multiple complex systems, infrastructures, and toolsets.

●Built a full-stack, microservice architectured, hybrid cloud observability framework with a team of engineers and analysts. Successfully adapted to the complete microservices architecture redesign of the eCommerce platforms.

●Reduced Mean Time to Resolution MTTR from days to hours by integrating and consolidating all tools alerting to a central PagerDuty flow to ServiceNow system for correlation and resolution by incident responder team(s).

Siteworx, Reston, VA 2010 to 2014

Account Manager, CSM, and Digital Analyst

Hired to manage a growing portfolio of customers' post-sales digital analytics needs. Was the primary CSM for all Tealeaf implementations for a large book of business with high-ARR accounts.

●Reduced Time to Value TTV for customers using Tealeaf reducing struggle, errors, and anomalies, saving customers money and time.

●Crushed the navigation of the Startup Culture both at Siteworx and Tealeaf, the platform partner startup from the Bay Area. Adapted to every situation in an agile, fluid, and resourceful way in a fast-paced growing startup.

EDUCATION

Bachelor of Arts, Linguistics, Spanish, Portuguese and Computer Science

University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ

Diplomate, Spanish, and Portuguese Military Cryptologic Linguist

DLIFLC, Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center, Monterey, CA

USARMY Intelligence Center and School, Cryptologic Linguist, Signals Intelligence, and Intelligence Analyst

Fort Devens, MA

RECENT CERTIFICATIONS

Customer Success Management Fundamentals - LinkedIn

DevOps Foundations: Site Reliability Engineering - LinkedIn

DevOps Foundations: Monitoring and Observability - LinkedIn

Sumo Logic Security and Compliance Certified - Sumo Logic

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