Customer Sales

IKSHIT PANT

**********@*****.***; 408-***-****; New York, NY

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Customer Success Executive with 25 years of Software Industry experience. Extensive background includes Customer Success P&L responsibility, post sales customer journey management, customer relationship building, Software Engineering and complete Software Development Life Cycle. Focused on delivering value and leveraging customer feedback to ensure long term relationships which drive retention and expansion of recurring revenue. Experience developing global performance driven teams achieving up to 30% utilization improvement through implementation best practices.

SKILLS

• Strategic Leadership • Team Development • Cloud, Containers

• Customer Success • Process Improvement • Automation, Orchestration

• SaaS Account Management • Proposal & SOW • Networking, Security

• DevOps, Agile • NPS (Net Promoter Score) • Databases, Mobility ACCOMPLISHMENTS

• Customer Success: Established Customer Success organization responsible for tracking and management of $200M+ ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue). Improved NPS from +40 to +70 in 1 year

• Methodologies: Developed scaling repeatable methodologies and proven best practices to create consistent and valued customer experience

• Customer Health: Developed and implemented an Early Warning System to proactively track customer health using multiple parameters which improved customer retention from 75% to 90%

• Team Development: Built team of 100+ professionals from scratch including leaders and team members. Put regional management structure in place and expanded global presence across 15 countries

• Process Improvement: Implemented project and resource management processes which led to 30% team utilization improvement

• Collaterals: Created and delivered Reference Architectures, Blueprints and Deployment Guides to customers driving long term success

• Customer Growth: Expanded 5 strategic customers from <$1.5M to $3M+ ARR in 1 year by providing implementation services

• Relationships

o Customer: Built and nurtured C-level relationships across accounts to solidify partnership and commitment to the customer while penetrating the account deeper o Organization: Established relationships with leadership across Sales, Engineering, Product, Services, Finance, Legal, Channel, and Support to ensure cross-functional alignment at scale WORK HISTORY

Head of Customer Success, 05/2018 to Present

HashiCorp Inc – New York, NY

• Driving strategy, alignment and transformational impacts of customer success through adoption of innovative offerings and solutions to accelerate business value for the customers

• Managing team of 100+ globally distributed seasoned customer success professionals responsible for large portfolio of 800+ Enterprise customers driving $200M+ ARR in a hyper growth environment

• Building an experienced and diverse pipeline of dynamic and extraordinarily skilled Customer Success professionals worldwide while partnering with Global Talent Acquisition

• Consistently achieving 90% overall retention and 130% expansion across strategic segment

• Delivery of QBRs (Quarterly Business Reviews) to 100% qualified enterprise customers with continuous improvement

• Created segmentation model based on customer spend, logo and growth to ensure measurable customer success, retention, and expansion

• Implemented worldwide regional management structure leading to efficient team management, better Sales cadence and improved customer satisfaction

• Rolled out triage management process with cadence between Customer Success, Engineering and Product Management to effectively manage long term defects and new feature requests by customers

• Implemented renewal forecasting and tracking methodology, providing insight into customer renewal health, attrition, risk and opportunities

• Created Digital Journey framework as a self-service model for low end customers by using nurture campaigns, Analytics and educational collaterals

• Built and scaled worldwide implementation services to enable customers with expedited onboarding and wide adoption. Resulted in 15% increased retention and >30% Sales Growth

• Collaborated with Legal, Finance and Sales Ops to define SOWs for services and delivery

• Defined, refined and published

o Definitive KPIs to track, monitor and improve customer experience o Customer Health Index (CHI) to determine healthy / at-risk customers proactively and consistently to manage long term success across the organization

o Handoff process between Sales, Sales Engineering, Customer Success and Implementation Services o Metrics and customer churn risk assessment to provide the business with more insight into customer needs to ensure long term retention

Leader Enterprise Support, 09/2016 to 05/2018

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Inc – Palo Alto, CA

• Managed global Technical Account Management team with offices in US, Europe and Asia responsible for rapid adoption of AWS services (including but not limited to EC2 auto scaling, Lambda, IAM, ELB, S3, EBS, RDS, Aurora, Redshift, Kinesis, Cost Explorer, IoT, Machine Learning) by customers

• Spearheaded multiple strategic initiatives related to Customer Success best practices, Support model, security conformance, global operational processes improvement, and architecting tools to invent and simplify the operational needs of customers.

• Built relationships with executives at top accounts to ensure alignment between the customer’s business objectives and AWS solutions

• Developed and executed Business Process Optimization programs and initiatives that improve Total Customer Experience (TCE) and reduce customer churn

• Led KCI (Key Customer Issues) process to escalate issues to the highest level of stakeholders and Cloud Operations Review (COR) driven towards high SLAs

• Initiated checkride process for effective delivery of QBRs and kick off call by Technical Account Managers to customers

• Oversaw service delivery of support operations against defined KPIs in a highly dynamic and fast paced environment across geographically distributed sites and various teams Sr. Manager Customer Success & Engineering, 03/2007 to 09/2016 Cisco Systems Inc - San Jose, CA

• Managed customer-onboarding of 70+ Cisco MiQ SaaS customers and drove rapid adoption

• Oversaw inter-cloud operations, deployment, incident management, scalability, reliability and security

• Built proactive engagement offerings such as architecture, design, and planning workshops to set customers on the appropriate initial course to meet their business requirements

• Managed Pre/Post-Sales support achieving CSAT>95%

• Conducted C-level interfacing, briefings, presentations, regular status updates

• Oversaw escalation management for critical issues, triaging, managing ticket queues for prompt response and quick resolution

• Capacity planning, SLA development, performance management, service availability of >99.9%

• Managed 24x7 NOC (Network Operations Center) for SaaS offering

• Led software development, testing and delivery of several flagship projects related to VoIP, 3G, LTE and Video

• Managed team of 100+ Software Development, Test and DevOps Engineers responsible for Solution Architecture, Orchestration, Automation, Tools Development and Infrastructure. Sr. Manager Engineering & Customer Support, 07/2001 to 03/2007 BayPackets Inc - Fremont, CA

• Managed team of 35+ Managers and Engineers responsible for Software Development, QA and Customer Support for enterprise customers

o Covered wide range of projects including Next Gen SCP, Voice VPN, Toll Free access and enhanced messaging solution using Unified Communication

• Led Development and QA teams through all phases of SDLC and requirements

• Built global customer support organization using follow the sun model Technical Lead, 05/2000 to 05/2001

ipVerse Inc - Sunnyvale, CA

• Worked as Technical Lead on Next Gen SoftSwitch, which provided enhanced services for carrier networks. It provided the intelligence and merging together of complex multi-vendor circuit and packet- based networks, thus enabling the integration of DSL, Wireless, Wireline and IP network technologies. Sr. Engineer, 07/1995 to 05/2000

Koshika Telecom Ltd – New Delhi, India

• Worked as Sr. Engineer on the GSM project, which included Initial Network Design, Software Testing, Network Management and Planning on the GSM wireless communication network. EDUCATION

BACHELORS OF ENGINEERING – ELECTRONICS & COMMUNICATION ENGINEERING, 1995 Kumaon Engineering College, INDIA

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