Customer Consultant Academia & Governments at Elsevier

Job description

The Customer Consultant is responsible for ensuring value and use of solutions/products and for renewal revenue growth, maximizing customer retention (number of customers) at account base and understanding of researcher needs as they use our or our competitor’s solutions.

Working together!

In order to be successful, the Customer Consultant will know everything about the researcher workflow in their portfolio. You will work closely together with the Account Managers to ensure successful renewal. Close cooperation with the Customer Consultant and the Account Manager is key to drive upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Important success factors are continuous learning, team work and the sharing of knowledge and experiences between the different team members and sub regions. And you will also work closely with the Global Customer Service teams to successfully onboard new customers.

You will report to the Regional Account Director and this position should be based in Johannesburg or Capetown

Your responsibilities

• Create and execute on the solution/product penetration plan in the territory.
• Align territory and account solution portfolio plan with holistic territory/account plan
• Develop a strong understanding of competitor landscape, be able to successfully position against these
• On-going customer engagement, monitoring customer value to ensure renewal growth and minimize attrition risk
• Support account team in the demonstration of solutions value and ROI in support of renewal negotiations. Together with AM, prepare tailored customer value stories to support renewal negotiations
• Focused on total renewal growth (i.e. retention and price uplift)
• Uncover up-sell or cross-sell opportunities in order to grow total revenue base, pro-actively working with AM and SSM in the maturing of these opportunities
• Align the specific solution engagement plan for the Solution portfolio with the holistic customer engagement plan owned by the account manager
• Actively support the implementation of the country sales plans for the Journal Level Sales, in coordination and under the supervision of the relevant SSM
• Own the post-sales process for the solution portfolio
• Ensure successful implementation and adoption of solution at customers; ensure delivery of appropriate training (self, via 3rd parties, via on-line offerings) in line with customer engagement plan
• Systematically monitor and analyse usage at customer and regional levels against targets, develop mitigating actions where usage is not meeting objectives
• Coordinate to ensure delivery of monthly usage reporting by central Usage team to key customers
• Stay abreast of development in field and market segment, and share with Elsevier. Active thought-leader in the domain in the specific territory
• Provide customer feedback to product and marketing teams and plans to help direct marketing efforts in meeting strategic sales objectives

What you should bring

• Master degree
• Successful track record in customer engagement and driving customer adoption (minimum of 2 years)
• Fluency in English
• Experienced in working in an international matrixed organisation
• Self starter
• Frequent travel required (40%)
• Driver licence

What we offer

We welcome you to a truly global, dynamic and challenging environment with great opportunities to develop yourself. Elsevier’s benefits are very competitive.

Variable Compensation

• Flexible working arrangements
• Several local and global networking communities to share best practices and knowledge
• Various social responsibility programs, channeling knowledge and strengths to help communities around the world improve education, science, healthcare and protect the environment.

Trainings

Access to a vast array of career development resources including:

• Defined and tailored Learning Path.
• Miller Heiman solution selling training.
• Vantage negotiation and consultative selling training.
• World of the Researcher training.
• Numerous training, coaching and e-learning modules for long term job opportunities and development

An assessment or business case could be part of our selection procedure. Please be aware that we request references and a copy of your diploma in the offer stage.