Associate Director - Client Delivery

Location: Bangalore, India

Function: Client Delivery / Operations

Level: Associate Director Sales

Team Scope: 400+ employees

Industry: B2B Technology | Digital Advertising | Sales & Marketing Services

Role Overview:

We are seeking an accomplished, commercially astute, and highly execution-oriented Associate Director - Client Delivery to lead a large, complex portfolio supporting a strategic client that is a global leader in B2B professional networking and digital marketing solutions.

The Associate Director will have end-to-end accountability for a 400+ member organization delivering services across the customer and advertiser lifecycle, including Acquisition, Onboarding, Account Management, Renewals/Retention, and Advertising Operations.

This is a senior leadership role that goes significantly beyond managing day-to-day operations. The Associate Director will be expected to own the business and client outcomes - translating client priorities into executable strategies, delivering predictable performance, anticipating risks before they become escalations, developing a strong leadership organization, improving the commercial health of the engagement, and continuously increasing the value delivered to the client.

The successful candidate will combine the operational rigor of a scaled delivery leader, the commercial mindset of an account leader, the customer and revenue orientation of a sales organization, and the strategic perspective required to build a long-term client partnership.

Key Accountabilities:

Client Delivery & Operational Excellence:

- Own end-to-end delivery across the portfolio, ensuring consistent achievement of SLAs, KPIs, revenue/business outcomes, quality, productivity, and customer/advertiser experience goals.

- Establish strong operating rhythms, forecasting, performance management, and accountability mechanisms across programs and leadership layers.

- Anticipate performance risks and ensure teams move quickly from identifying gaps to diagnosing root causes, developing recovery strategies, and delivering measurable improvements.

- Drive standardization, continuous improvement, and replication of proven practices across programs and geographies.

Strategic Client Leadership:

- Serve as a senior delivery leader and trusted advisor to client stakeholders, building strong relationships across operational and executive levels.

- Develop a deep understanding of the client's business, products, customers, advertiser ecosystem, and evolving GTM priorities, translating them into clear operational strategies.

- Lead executive governance, including business reviews, strategic planning, performance discussions, and critical escalations, bringing forward insights, recommendations, risks, and opportunities - not simply reporting performance.

- Build client confidence through proactive communication, predictability of execution, sound judgment, and ownership of outcomes.

Commercial & Account Growth:

- Understand and actively manage the commercial health of the engagement, balancing client outcomes, revenue, cost, productivity, workforce economics, and profitability.

- Identify and address potential revenue or margin leakage arising from performance, staffing, utilization, productivity, or operational gaps.

- Partner with account and commercial leadership on strategic planning, renewals, and opportunities to expand the partnership through new capabilities, programs, solutions, or geographies.

- Build compelling business cases for investments and transformation initiatives that demonstrate measurable client and business value.

Sales, Customer Lifecycle & Advertising Operations:

- Provide leadership across revenue-generating and customer-facing programs spanning Acquisition, Onboarding, Account Management, Renewals/Retention, and Ad Operations.

- Drive strong performance management across relevant metrics such as customer/advertiser engagement, conversion, revenue attainment, retention, product adoption, quality, productivity, and customer experience.

- Ensure successful sales, account-management, and operational practices are identified, standardized, and scaled across the portfolio.

People & Workforce Leadership:

- Lead and develop a strong multi-layered leadership organization, creating clear accountability, succession depth, and independent business ownership across leadership levels.

- Build a high-performance culture centered on ownership, client focus, collaboration, execution excellence, transparency, and continuous improvement.

- Partner with HR, Talent Acquisition, L&D, and Workforce Management to proactively manage capacity, hiring, skill requirements, attrition, engagement, succession, and operational resilience.

- Ensure workforce decisions appropriately balance client requirements, growth readiness, employee experience, productivity, and commercial considerations.

Transformation, Technology & AI:

- Champion the use of AI, automation, analytics, and digital tools to improve sales effectiveness, productivity, quality, customer experience, and scalability.

- Challenge traditional ways of working and identify opportunities to simplify, automate, augment, or redesign processes rather than relying solely on incremental headcount.

- Partner with Technology, Analytics, and Transformation teams to build and implement solutions with clear business cases and measurable impact.

Risk, Governance & Compliance:

- Ensure adherence to contractual commitments, client policies, information security, data privacy, compliance requirements, and internal controls.

- Proactively identify and mitigate operational, talent, commercial, compliance, and business-continuity risks, ensuring material risks have clear ownership and mitigation plans.

Critical Leadership Competencies:

- Business Ownership: Operates with an owner's mindset and takes end-to-end accountability for the health, performance, and future of the engagement.

- Strategic & Commercial Acumen: Connects operational decisions to client strategy, revenue, profitability, customer outcomes, and long-term account growth.

- Execution Excellence: Converts strategy into clear plans, operating mechanisms, ownership, timelines, and measurable results.

- Executive Client Presence: Builds credibility with senior executives, communicates confidently, constructively challenges when appropriate, and operates as a trusted advisor.

- Proactive Leadership: Anticipates risks and opportunities and acts before circumstances require client or senior-leadership intervention.

- Analytical Problem Solving: Moves rapidly from symptoms to root causes and uses data, structured thinking, and sound judgment to determine interventions.

- Performance Orientation: Establishes high standards and creates a culture where commitments, timelines, and business outcomes matter.

- People Leadership: Builds strong leaders beneath them, develops talent, addresses performance issues decisively, and creates organizational depth.

- Influence & Collaboration: Mobilizes cross-functional and geographically distributed stakeholders regardless of formal reporting relationships.

- Change Leadership: Successfully leads organizations through changing client priorities, commercial models, operating structures, technologies, and market conditions.

- Innovation & Digital Mindset: Challenges conventional ways of working and actively identifies opportunities to leverage AI, automation, analytics, and process redesign.

- Executive Communication: Simplifies complex information into clear, concise, decision-oriented narratives appropriate for senior client and internal stakeholders.

Candidate Profile:

Required Experience:

- 15+ years of overall professional experience, preferably within outsourced sales, managed services, digital operations, technology-enabled services, SaaS, customer lifecycle management, or related industries.

- Ideally 5+ years in senior Client Delivery / Operations leadership roles, with significant accountability for large and complex client engagements.

- Demonstrated experience managing scaled organizations of 400 - 500+ employees, preferably across multiple programs, service lines, or locations.

- Proven ownership of SLA/KPI performance, revenue/business outcomes, client governance, workforce planning, operational excellence, talent management, and financial performance.

- Strong track record of working directly with Director, VP, and executive-level client stakeholders and successfully managing complex client relationships.

- Demonstrated success in turning around underperforming operations and building predictable, sustainable performance.

- Experience leading large-scale transformation, continuous improvement, organizational change, or technology adoption initiatives.

- Experience operating within global and matrixed organizations and influencing stakeholders who may not directly report to the role.

Strongly Preferred Domain Experience:

Candidates with experience across one or more of the following will be strongly preferred:

- B2B SaaS / Technology Platforms

- Advertising Sales / Inside Sales / Digital Sales

- Revenue Operations

- Customer or Advertiser Lifecycle Management

- Large-scale revenue-generating operations

- Experience supporting platforms with advertiser-facing products, digital marketing solutions, performance advertising, or marketing technology ecosystems will be considered a significant advantage.

Education & Qualifications:

- Bachelor's degree in Business, Management, Engineering, Technology, Commerce, Marketing, or a related discipline.

- MBA or equivalent postgraduate management qualification is preferred but not mandatory.

- Certifications in Lean/Six Sigma, Program Management, Digital Advertising, Analytics, Agile, or Operational Excellence would be advantageous.

What Success Looks Like:

Within the first 6 - 12 months, the successful Associate Director should demonstrate:

- Consistent and predictable achievement of critical SLAs, KPIs, revenue, quality, productivity, and customer/advertiser outcomes.

- Stronger forecasting and significantly fewer performance surprises, reactive escalations, and last-minute recovery efforts.

- Clearly established operating rigor and accountability across programs and leadership layers.

- Strong credibility and trusted-advisor relationships with senior client stakeholders.

- Improved performance across relevant revenue, customer, productivity, quality, and commercial measures.

- Faster identification and resolution of performance gaps through strong leading indicators and root-cause mechanisms.

- A stronger, more independent leadership organization with clearly identified successors for critical roles.

- Improved employee engagement, retention, and leadership effectiveness.

- Demonstrable replication of best practices across programs, teams, and geographies.

- A measurable pipeline of AI, automation, analytics, and operational-transformation initiatives, with demonstrated business impact.

- Reduced operational, talent, compliance, and commercial risks.

- Identification and conversion of opportunities that expand the strategic and commercial value of the client partnership.

The Leader We Are Looking For:

We are not looking for someone who simply manages a large operation. We are looking for someone who owns the business.

The right leader must be capable of operating effectively at three levels simultaneously: engaging senior client executives on strategy and business outcomes; leading managers and functional leaders through complex operational challenges; and remaining sufficiently connected to frontline execution to recognize when performance, processes, or the operating model are not working.

They should be equally comfortable discussing client strategy and commercial performance in an executive meeting, diagnosing a performance problem with an operations leader, reviewing workforce and financial assumptions, and challenging teams to find a better technology-enabled way of delivering an outcome.

Above all, this individual will bring a client-first, data-driven, commercially aware, technology-forward, and growth-oriented mindset. They will protect today's business while continuously making the partnership stronger, smarter, more scalable, more predictable, and more valuable for the future.

Scale: 400+ FTEs | Multi-Program Operations | Global Client Stakeholders | Executive Client Engagement | Revenue & Commercial Accountability | Digital Advertising | Transformation & AI | Strategic Account Growth