EMEA Customer Success Manager

Overview

You manage a portfolio of 15-25 EMEA customers who use Sift to prevent payment fraud, account takeover, and content abuse. Your job is to keep them renewing (90%+ net retention target) and find expansion opportunities when they add new products, geographies, or transaction volume. You work across time zones (EU morning = US afternoon for internal calls) and deal with technical issues that have real business impact—when fraud detection fails, customers lose money.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Late-stage (300+ employees, established customer base of 700+ brands)

Size: 301 employees

Growth: VP of CX just hired and immediately opening roles—signals investment in post-sales scaling

Market Position: Established player in fraud prevention with recognizable customers, competing against point solutions and homegrown systems

GTM Reality

Your Book of Business:

• 15-25 accounts across EMEA (UK, Germany, France, Nordics typical)
• Mix of e-commerce, fintech, marketplaces, travel companies
• Contract values range from $50K to $500K+ ARR
• Most are multi-year customers, some inherited from previous CSM

Internal Support:

• Solutions Engineers help with technical implementations and optimization
• Support team handles day-to-day product questions
• AEs occasionally loop you into expansion deals for new use cases
• Product team wants feedback on feature requests (you're the voice of EMEA customers)

Renewal Process:

• Start outreach 90-120 days before renewal
• Most contracts auto-renew but need active engagement to prevent churn
• Procurement involved for larger accounts (legal redlines, security reviews)
• Usage data and fraud metrics drive the renewal conversation—they'll point to false positive rates or missed fraud

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors: Legacy fraud tools, homegrown ML models, other fraud prevention platforms, payment processor built-in fraud tools

How They Differentiate: Global data network of 1T+ events annually, cross-industry fraud intelligence, machine learning that improves as network grows

Common Objections: "Too many false positives blocking good customers," "Our fraud rates are already low," "We built our own model," "Too expensive for our transaction volume"

Win Themes: Catch fraud other tools miss, reduce false positives vs legacy systems, scale globally without rebuilding rules per market

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Customer Meetings (35%) | Data Analysis (25%) | Renewals/Expansion (20%) | Internal (15%) | Firefighting (5%)

Key Activities

• Monthly check-ins with 15-25 accounts: Review fraud trends, false positive rates, upcoming product launches or peak seasons. Some customers need weekly attention, others are quarterly. You're constantly juggling who needs focus.
• Quarterly Business Reviews: Build decks showing fraud caught, false positives prevented, ROI vs fraud losses. For bigger accounts, you're presenting to their fraud/risk directors with data they'll scrutinize closely.
• Troubleshooting performance issues: Customer says "We're seeing more chargebacks" or "Too many good orders declined." You dig into their rule configurations, work with SEs to tune their setup, analyze edge cases in their data.
• Expansion conversations: Customer launches in new country, adds subscription product, or wants to use Sift for account abuse (not just payment fraud). You scope it, get SE to demo, navigate their procurement process.
• Renewal negotiations: Pull usage data, build business case, handle objections about cost vs value. Some renewals are smooth, others involve multiple stakeholders who weren't in the original purchase.
• Internal advocacy: Product team wants EMEA feedback on roadmap priorities. Sales wants intro to expansion opportunities. Support escalates unhappy customers. You're the internal hub for your accounts.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Time zones: EMEA customers expect responses during their business hours. US-based internal teams (product, engineering) work your afternoon/evening. You're often bridging 6-8 hour time differences.
• Technical credibility: Customers ask detailed questions about machine learning models, API integration issues, and fraud pattern analysis. You need to speak their language or quickly loop in technical resources.
• High-stakes renewals: When fraud spikes or false positives hurt their conversion, the renewal is at risk. You're defending budget against "let's try a cheaper solution" or "let's bring this in-house."
• Expansion is hard to predict: Usage-based revenue means your commission depends on customer transaction volume growing. External factors (their business struggles, market downturn) kill expansion regardless of your effort.
• Reactive firefighting: A customer's fraud rate suddenly jumps, or they accidentally block VIP customers. You drop everything to diagnose and fix it because their revenue is on the line.

What Success Looks Like

• Hit 95%+ gross retention (minimize logo churn) and 110%+ net retention (expansion covers any downgrades)
• Customers reference you in sales deals and give positive feedback in QBRs
• Identify expansion opportunities early (before renewal pressure) and bring AE in to close
• Proactively prevent churn by catching red flags (declining usage, complaints in support tickets, new stakeholder who wasn't in buying process)

Who You're Selling To

Primary Buyers:

• Head of Fraud/Risk (day-to-day owner, your main contact)
• Director/VP of Payments or Trust & Safety (economic buyer for renewals)
• Engineering/Data Science leads (technical evaluators, especially for API/ML questions)

What They Care About:

• Fraud caught vs missed: Did Sift stop the fraud that mattered? What's slipping through?
• False positive rate: How many legitimate customers are we blocking? Every false decline is lost revenue.
• Operational efficiency: Can they manage fraud rules without constant engineering support? Do they need to hire more fraud analysts?
• Cost vs fraud losses: Is Sift's fee lower than the fraud they're preventing? ROI needs to be clear and defendable.
• Scalability: Can Sift handle Black Friday volume spikes, international expansion, new payment methods without breaking?

Requirements

• 3-5 years in B2B SaaS customer success, account management, or technical support
• Experience with technical products (fraud, security, data/analytics tools preferred)
• Based in EMEA or comfortable working EMEA hours from another region
• Can read and interpret data (SQL/analytics tools helpful but not required)
• Handle renewals and expansion quota-carrying responsibility
• Willing to occasionally travel to customer sites (London, Berlin, Amsterdam typical)
• Comfortable explaining technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and vice versa