Customer Success Manager - Partners - SMARTLY

A Bit about Smartly, a Datacom Company

We exist to make it simpler for Kiwi businesses to look after their people. We’re known as the simple way to sort your payroll for over 20,000 businesses. Our slick software combined with our awesome support team help businesses pay their people on time, accurately and in line with legislation. As a fast-growing FinTech expanding into adjacent markets, Smartly offers a fast paced, fun work environment with great opportunities for personal and professional development.

What Does the Job Involve?

The Customer Success Manager - Partners is responsible for managing an assigned portfolio of Smartly partners, responsible for growth of referrals, owning retention, adoption, and expansion outcomes across that portfolio. The PSM ensures partners are realising measurable value from Smartly’s platform, proactively identifies risks and opportunities, and builds relationships that drive long-term loyalty and revenue growth within the partner ecosystem.

The CSM - P operates as the partner’s primary ongoing relationship with Smartly post-activation, monitoring partner health, conducting regular check-ins and business reviews, coordinating internally to resolve issues, and identifying opportunities to deepen product usage or expand into additional products through partner-led initiatives and co-sell opportunities. The specific portfolio composition (segment, size, complexity, partner-managed vs direct) will be determined by business need and may evolve over time. This role combines relationship management with commercial awareness; the PSM is expected to protect revenue through retention discipline and grow revenue through structured expansion motions with partners, not simply maintain partner satisfaction.

This means you will:

• Grow your partner base of primarily accountants and bookkeepers through referral growth and expansion into existing clients of the accountants and bookkeepers.

• Identify and progress expansion opportunities within your portfolio, including cross-sell (People Management adoption), upsell (tier or feature upgrades), and volume-based growth (employee count increases).
• Work with Sales to progress larger or more complex expansion opportunities while owning straightforward expansion conversations directly.
• Own the retention for your assigned partner portfolio and their clients.
• Proactively manage account health, identify churn risks early, and develop and execute intervention plans that protect renewal confidence.
• Monitor leading indicators of churn, including declining usage, support escalations, billing issues, and disengagement, and take action before risks materialise. You’ll be measured on gross retention, logo retention, and renewal rates within your portfolio.
• Ensure partners in your portfolio are realising measurable value from Smartly’s platform.
• Monitor adoption metrics, identify underutilisation, and proactively engage customers with guidance, best practices, and enablement resources to deepen product usage.
• Help customers connect platform capability to their business outcomes, ensuring they understand the value they are receiving and see Smartly as essential to their operations.
• Surface opportunities through regular partner engagement, account reviews, and usage analysis.
• Build trusted, productive relationships with key contacts within your accounts, including business owners, payroll administrators, HR managers, and finance contacts.
• Conduct regular check-ins, business reviews, and proactive outreach that demonstrate Smartly’s ongoing value and commitment.
• Position yourself as a knowledgeable, reliable point of contact who understands the customer’s business context and anticipates their needs.
• Ensure the handoff from Activation into in-life success management is seamless, with full context on the customer’s onboarding journey, configuration, and any open items.
• Act as the customer’s internal advocate, ensuring their needs are heard and addressed.
• Capture and communicate customer feedback, feature requests, and competitive intelligence from your portfolio interactions.
• Contribute to structured voice-of-customer reporting that informs Product roadmap priorities and GTM strategy.
• Maintain accurate, current CRM records for every account, including health status, engagement notes, risk flags, expansion pipeline, and renewal dates.

What We’re Looking For

The Cutomer Success Manager - Partners will bring demonstrated experience in Partner growth and success, account management, or relationship management within a SaaS or technology-enabled subscription business. They will have a track record of managing a customer portfolio with measurable retention and adoption outcomes. Experience using CRM and customer health tools to manage a book of business is essential. The successful candidate will be comfortable balancing relationship-building with commercial outcomes, understanding that partner success exists to protect and grow revenue, not just maintain satisfaction. Familiarity with payroll, HR technology, or SMB workforce software is desirable but not essential.

Generally, we are looking for candidates who have:

• 5 – 7 years’ experience in partnership success, customer success, account management, or relationship management within a SaaS or technology environment.
• Demonstrated experience managing a partner portfolio with retention and/or expansion accountability and consistent engagement cadence, clean CRM data, and structured follow-through whilst identifying churn risks early, developing intervention plans, and protecting renewal outcomes through structured account management.
• Ability to monitor product usage, identify underutilisation, and engage customers with guidance and enablement that deepens adoption and demonstrates value.
• Understanding of SaaS expansion motions (cross-sell, upsell, volume growth) and the ability to identify and progress expansion opportunities within a portfolio.
• Strong interpersonal skills with the ability to build trust, conduct business reviews, and communicate effectively with a range of customer stakeholders.
• Comfort working in CRM platforms (e.g. HubSpot), maintaining clean account records, and using health and adoption data to prioritise actions and report outcomes.
• Ability to work across teams, including Sales, Activation, Product, and Service Operations, to resolve issues and ensure seamless lifecycle transitions.
• Ability to anticipate partner needs and risks, acting before issues escalate rather than responding reactively whilst managing difficult customer situations calmly and constructively
• Desire to actively deepen knowledge of Smartly’s product, market, and partner needs to improve advisory quality.

What You'll Get

• An attractive salary & commission scheme.
• Great employee benefits including Health and Life Insurance

• Flexible working, with work from home up to two days a week.
• Conveniently located right next to the Lower Hutt shopping mall.
• Awesome company-wide culture where we love a massive morning tea, an epic work party, and the random rolling lunch.
• We’re also truly passionate about our people and seeing them thrive.