Cisco - Client Director

Client Director

Location: Mumbai & Bangalore

The Client Director is the next generation senior customer leader at Cisco. He or she functions as a general manager for their customer relationship, managing the account holistically from an engagement, financial, personnel, and corporate perspective.

The Client Director role is assigned to a strategic Cisco customer account to grow the relationship into a truly world-class partnership. This requires Cisco to approach the customer differently, with a long-term view, investment mentality, and commitment to assign world class resources from all cross-functional Cisco teams. The return on this investment will be higher business growth, increased profitability, and improved customer satisfaction and intimacy.

Reporting to the ITS Transformation Accounts Leader, the Client Director is the single-point-of-contact for Cisco’s top customers enabling Cisco to conduct business with that customer as a unified, highly coordinated entity. The Client Director is responsible for and measured against the long term strategic value of the client relationship, and manages a cross-functional team of employees to achieve a defined set of short and long term objectives.

Specific Responsibilities:

- Builds and maintains executive level relationships at client and Cisco on a global basis.

- Directs all sales processes and manages short term (annual) and long term (strategic) revenues for infrastructure and services, and channels strategy.

- Leads creation of and executes a coordinated and synergistic strategy to maintain and build wallet share, improve margins, productivity and bookings for the company..

- Determines the global coverage model for the client based on the selling strategy.

- Manages a cross-functional team of employees with diverse skill sets and representing diverse internal requirements to achieve the client strategy.

- Manages all direct and indirect expenses associated with the client to maximize account profitability and margins.

- Sets the pricing strategy for all Cisco products and services for the client account.

- Creates short and long term plans for the client based on research and deep understanding of business and technology trends.

Team work

- Provides professional leadership and coordination of all Cisco client-facing resources.

- Manages sales, sales engineering and business development staff directly; manages channels and services staff indirectly.

Requirements:

- Extensive background and understanding of product, service, and channels sales as well as practice building and service delivery

- Intimate knowledge of the ITS market space and capable of clearly articulating details of Cisco’s & Customer's business environment (i.e. Financial, Competitive & Regulatory).

- Demonstrated ability to build deep relationships with CxO’s in key customers

- Experience building actionable long and short term account plans based on a deep understanding of the impacts of business and technology trends

- Successful leadership of large, complex sales teams at key accounts.

- Demonstrated clear team leadership in collaboration with cross-functional organizations (example: Service delivery, Channels, etc).

- Successful sales and delivery of professional/managed services, Advanced Technologies and/or innovative business models at key customers

- Demonstrated success in long term planning of resources, technology and account structure within the customer base

- Track record of successful performance as a “change agent”

- Proven ability to work closely with engineering development organizations to drive timely delivery of feature and functionality for customer requirements or practice build-outs

Education and General Experience

- Bachelor’s degree in engineering , or MBA

- Minimum 17 years overall work experience, with exposure to sales, business development, channels, P&L & people management