Overview
You own the relationship with HockeyStack customers after they sign. Your job is to make sure they're getting value from the marketing analytics and account intelligence products, prevent churn, and find opportunities to expand contracts. You're the bridge between what they bought and what they're actually using.
Role Snapshot
| Aspect | Details |
|---|---|
| Role Type | Retention-focused AM with expansion responsibility |
| Sales Motion | Land-and-expand, product-led growth assist |
| Deal Complexity | Consultative - requires understanding their data stack and GTM motion |
| Sales Cycle | 4-8 weeks for expansions |
| Deal Size | Existing: $20-100K ACV, Expansions: $10-50K |
| Quota (est.) | $500K-750K net retention + expansion annually |
Company Context
Stage: Series A/B stage (YC S23, ~2 years old)
Size: 98 employees
Growth: Aggressively hiring across 17+ roles, moving to onsite SF presence
Market Position: Challenger in crowded martech analytics space - competing against established players and point solutions
GTM Reality
Your Book of Business:
- You'll likely manage 40-60 accounts (mix of sizes)
- Customers are B2B marketing, sales, and RevOps teams
- They bought because their data was messy and they needed better attribution/insights
Support Structure:
- Implementation team helps with initial setup
- You're on your own for ongoing relationship and expansion conversations
- Product team is accessible but constantly shipping - you'll need to keep up with changes
Competitive Landscape
Main Competitors: Likely competing against 6sense, Dreamdata, Bizible/Adobe, and point solutions like Segment + homegrown dashboards
How They Differentiate: AI-powered insights, unified data platform approach vs point solutions
Common Objections: "We already have Google Analytics and our CRM," "Too expensive for what we need," "Implementation looks complex"
Win Themes: Faster insights, less manual reporting work, better attribution for complex B2B journeys
What You'll Actually Do
Time Breakdown
Account Health Monitoring (25%) | Expansion Conversations (30%) | Customer Support/Firefighting (25%) | Internal Meetings (20%)
Key Activities
- Weekly/Monthly Check-ins: You run regular calls with customers to review their usage, answer questions about reports they're building, and surface new features. Some customers use you heavily, others ghost until renewal time.
- Usage Analysis: You monitor product analytics to see who's logging in, what features they're using, and where they're stuck. You proactively reach out when usage drops because that signals churn risk.
- Expansion Hunting: You look for opportunities to upsell additional products (they have marketing analytics, try to sell account intelligence) or expand seats. This requires understanding their org structure and finding new champions.
- Renewal Management: Starting 90 days before renewal, you're building business cases, updating stakeholders, and trying to prevent surprises. You'll spend a lot of time in procurement hell for bigger accounts.
- Internal Translation: You relay customer feedback to product team, push for bug fixes, and try to get your customers' feature requests prioritized. You're constantly balancing customer promises vs what engineering will actually build.
The Honest Reality
What's Hard
- Churn is constant: Martech budgets get cut, champions leave, companies decide to build in-house. You'll lose accounts that aren't your fault.
- Technical complexity: Customers struggle with data integration, tracking implementation, and understanding the AI insights. You're not technical support but you'll field a lot of "why isn't this working" questions.
- Expansion is a grind: Most customers bought what they needed. Finding genuine expansion opportunities requires deep account knowledge and creative problem-solving.
- Champion turnover: Your main contact leaves, and suddenly you're rebuilding the relationship from scratch with someone who didn't choose this tool.
- You're early stage: Processes are being built as you go. Product changes fast. Documentation lags. You'll figure a lot out yourself.
What Success Looks Like
- Net retention rate above 110-120% (renewals + expansions minus churn)
- Proactive churn prevention - catching problems before renewal conversations
- Customers actually using the product regularly (not shelfware)
- Clean renewals without last-minute scrambles
Who You're Selling To
Primary Contacts:
- VP/Director of Marketing (budget owner, cares about ROI and marketing performance)
- VP/Director of Revenue Operations (technical buyer, cares about data accuracy and integration)
- Marketing Ops Managers (day-to-day users, care about ease of use and reporting)
What They Care About:
- Proving marketing's impact on revenue (attribution is always messy)
- Reducing time spent on manual reporting and data cleanup
- Getting insights they can actually act on (not just dashboards)
- Integration with their existing stack (Salesforce, HubSpot, ad platforms)
- Accuracy of data and trustworthiness of AI insights
Requirements
- 2-4 years in account management, customer success, or sales at a B2B SaaS company
- Experience managing technical products - you need to understand data, analytics, and integrations
- Track record of hitting retention and expansion targets
- Comfortable with consultative selling - expansion isn't order-taking
- Ability to diagnose why customers aren't getting value and actually fix it
- Strong at building relationships remotely and in-person (NYC role is remote, SF is onsite)
- Willingness to work in a fast-moving early-stage environment with changing priorities