Salesforce Associate Director | Financial Services

As Associate Director of Financial Services at Plative, you will report to our Senior Director of Salesforce Delivery and will lead our Salesforce Financial Services consulting practice. Associate Directors at Plative are key members of our leadership team, and are responsible for: (a) maintaining delivery excellence and customer satisfaction throughout client engagements; (b) building and nurturing a high performing delivery team; and (c) driving commercial success of the business.

Maintaining Delivery Excellence and Customer Satisfaction:

• Maintain executive alignment with client leadership, regularly solicit and listen to employee and client feedback with empathy, and support both our employees and clients in proactively addressing critical project issues and risks.
• Build deep customer loyalty and drive follow-on business beyond initial Salesforce implementations.
• Champion and advocate for our Plative delivery methodology across your team, ensuring strict compliance and effective use of our leading practices and tools across your full project portfolio.
• Regularly conduct project design and build reviews in concert with Architecture and PMO leadership to ensure we are solutioning and delivering well and minimizing quality issues, rework and non-billable time on your projects.

Building and Nurturing a High Performing Team:

• Coach and mentor your team members to support their wellbeing & quality of life at Plative; promote continuous skill-up on both technical & soft skills; and advocate for their ongoing career growth and progression.
• Instill a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement with your team -- soliciting, sharing and building on lessons learned from every project experience so we continue to get stronger as an organization.
• Make strategic hiring and people management decisions to ensure your team has the right mix of resources to drive both delivery excellence and profitability. This means responsibly balancing talent/skill set levels, geographic mix, employee vs. contractor mix and resource cost mix. 
• Pro-actively  manage individual performance to improve and mitigate underperforming team members if any.
• Partner with leaders in rolling out change initiatives and be a champion; Ensure your team is following new processes and hold them accountable

Driving Commercial Success:

• Validate and ensure that new project opportunities and change orders are scoped, sized, staffed and priced in such a way that they set our employees and customers up for success and achieve revenue & profitability targets.
• Actively manage resource forecast, utilization and contribution margin across your team to drive financial success of your business.
• Partner with Sales & Marketing to help bring in new business by building go-to-market strategies, demonstrating thought leadership, and by tapping members of your consulting team to support sales cycles and marketing opportunities as needed. 

Basic Qualifications:

• Minimum of 5 years managing complex Salesforce projects 
• Minimum of 3 years of practice management and leadership experience
• Knowledge and experience with both waterfall and agile project methodologies.
• Strong executive presence and ability to interact with C suite
• Ability to handle client escalations, strategic alignment conversations and conflict resolution at executive levels

Desired Qualifications:

• Direct experience with Salesforce.com, Discovery Data, Broadridge, and SS&C products
• Experience spearheading digital transformation projects for Financial service organizations
• 2+ years of people management experience
• Experience creating datasets and stories on BI platforms like Tableau, PowerBI or Qlik 
• Formal Agile methodology and/or design thinking training
• Salesforce Sales Cloud Certification 
• Salesforce Service Cloud Certification 
• Salesforce Financial Service Cloud Certification
• Project management experience

How you’ll be measured:

• Practice growth 
• Contribution margin
• Team utilization and maintaining billable targets 
• Customer satisfaction score