The person will manage strategic client relationships, complex delivery projects, commercial account growth, and multidisciplinary internal coordination.
Company Context
The company is a sustainability SaaS and consulting business focused on helping clients manage, measure and improve sustainability performance across agricultural supply chains. The business combines:
• An online sustainability management system
• A separate online carbon footprinting tool
• Sustainability consulting expertise
• Data collection and analysis support
• ESG, environmental and social reporting services
The company works broadly across sustainability, including:
• Agricultural supply chain sustainability
• Social data collection
• Environmental data collection
• Corporate carbon footprinting
• ESG reporting
• Biodiversity
• Water stewardship
• Science-based target setting
• Sustainability performance management
• Climate and carbon-related advisory
The business operates in a Matrix Operating Model, meaning client delivery requires close collaboration between Client Success, Sustainability Data, Reporting, Consulting, Product, IT and Onboarding teams.
Purpose of the Role
The Senior Client Success Manager is responsible for owning and growing strategic client relationships while ensuring the successful delivery of complex sustainability projects and technology-enabled services.
This role combines:
• Strategic account management
• Client engagement
• Project and budget setup
• Project management
• Client evaluation and scoping
• Commercial growth
• Client retention
• Internal team coordination
• Leadership of other Client Success or Account Management team members
The successful candidate will act as the main commercial and relationship owner for a portfolio of clients, ensuring that clients receive excellent service, achieve value from the company’s platforms and consulting services, and continue to grow with the business over time.
This is a senior role requiring maturity, strong commercial judgement, excellent project management skills, and the ability to lead within a matrix structure.
The ideal candidate will have experience managing strategic accounts, leading client-facing projects, setting up project scopes and budgets, coordinating internal teams, and driving client retention and growth.
Client Success owns:
• Client relationship
• Client communication
• Project coordination
• Client health
• Commercial growth
• Retention
• Renewal strategy Specialist teams own:
• Technical sustainability analysis
• Data validation
• Reporting outputs
• Platform configuration
• Product improvements
• IT support
The Senior Client Success Manager must therefore be highly effective at influencing without authority, aligning teams, and ensuring accountability across functions.
Key Responsibilities
Strategic Client Relationship Management
The Senior Client Success Manager will own relationships with key clients and ensure they receive consistent, professional and value-adding support.
Responsibilities include:
• Build and maintain trusted relationships with senior client stakeholders.
• Understand each client’s business, sustainability priorities, supply chain context and commercial drivers.
• Act as the primary relationship owner for assigned strategic accounts.
• Manage client expectations throughout the full client lifecycle.
• Facilitate regular client engagement meetings and strategic review sessions.
• Identify client risks early and implement appropriate mitigation plans.
• Ensure clients experience the company as professional, responsive and wellcoordinated.
• Represent the client’s voice internally across Product, Consulting, Data and Reporting teams.
Client Evaluation, Scoping and Opportunity Development
The role will be involved in evaluating client needs and shaping the appropriate service, product or consulting response.
Responsibilities include:
• Lead or support client needs assessments.
• Understand whether the client requirement should become a consulting project, platform implementation, carbon footprinting engagement, reporting project or broader sustainability programme.
• Translate client needs into clear internal briefs.
• Support scope development and proposal preparation.
• Clarify deliverables, timelines, responsibilities and budget requirements. • Identify whether an engagement should progress into a product/platform phase, a consulting delivery phase, or a commercial close.
• Ensure client expectations are clear before delivery begins.
Project and Budget Setup
The Senior Client Success Manager must be able to set projects up properly from the beginning.
Responsibilities include:
• Define project scope, deliverables, timelines and milestones.
• Set up project budgets in collaboration with the relevant internal teams.
• Confirm internal resource requirements.
• Identify dependencies between client actions, data collection, analysis, reporting and platform configuration.
• Ensure all parties understand what success looks like.
• Establish clear project governance, communication rhythms and escalation channels.
• Monitor budget performance during delivery.
• Identify and manage scope creep.
• Ensure change requests are documented and commercially managed.
Project Management and Delivery Coordination
This is a core part of the role. The Senior Client Success Manager must be an excellent project manager who can manage complex, multi-stakeholder sustainability engagements.
Responsibilities include:
• Manage multiple client projects at the same time.
• Develop and maintain project plans.
• Track milestones, deadlines, risks and dependencies.
• Coordinate across Onboarding, Data, Reporting, Consulting, Product and IT teams.
• Ensure delivery remains on time, within scope and within budget.
• Run effective internal project meetings.
• Run effective client project meetings.
• Ensure actions are documented and followed through.
• Identify bottlenecks early and escalate appropriately.
• Maintain project discipline while remaining flexible to client realities.
• Ensure a high-quality handover between sales, onboarding, data, reporting and ongoing account management.
Client Health, Retention and Growth
The Senior Client Success Manager will be responsible for driving client success outcomes across their portfolio.
Responsibilities include:
• Monitor client health and satisfaction.
• Track engagement, platform usage and delivery success.
• Identify at-risk clients and develop recovery plans.
• Lead renewal planning and retention activities.
• Identify opportunities for account expansion.
• Develop growth plans for strategic accounts.
• Work with Sales or Business Development on upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
• Ensure clients understand the value they are receiving.
• Support long-term partnership development.
Platform Adoption and Product Feedback
Because the business uses online sustainability tools, the Senior Client Success Manager must help clients adopt and gain value from the platforms.
Responsibilities include:
• Encourage effective use of the sustainability management system and carbon footprinting tool.
• Understand client pain points in using the platforms.
• Identify opportunities to improve adoption.
• Gather structured product feedback from clients.
• Work with Product and IT teams to resolve platform-related issues.
• Help prioritise product improvements based on client value and strategic importance.
• Support clients in moving from manual or consulting-led processes toward more scalable platform-enabled workflows.
Leadership and Team Development
The role requires the ability to lead other Client Success Managers, either directly or functionally.
Responsibilities include:
• Mentor Client Success Managers.
• Support team members in managing difficult client situations.
• Help establish good project management discipline across the Client Success team.
• Share best practices in account management, client engagement and delivery coordination.
• Support workload planning across the client portfolio.
• Promote a collaborative and professional team culture.
• Lead by example in client communication, project discipline and commercial judgement.
Continuous Improvement
The Senior Client Success Manager should contribute to improving the way the company delivers client work.
Responsibilities include:
• Identify recurring delivery challenges.
• Improve client onboarding and delivery handover processes.
• Help standardise project plans, account plans and client review templates.
• Support the development of client health scoring.
• Improve internal communication between Client Success and specialist teams.
• Capture lessons learned from client projects.
• Contribute to the maturity of the Matrix Operating Model.
• Help build scalable processes as the client base grows.
Experience Required
The ideal candidate should have approximately 6-8+ years of experience in a client-facing, project-led or commercial role.
Relevant backgrounds may include:
• Client success
• Account management
• Key account management
• Sustainability consulting
• ESG advisory
• Professional services
• Project management
• Agricultural supply chain programmes
• Enterprise SaaS implementation
• Environmental or carbon advisory
• Corporate sustainability services
The candidate must have experience managing complex client engagements involving multiple stakeholders, timelines, budgets and deliverables.
Essential Experience
Candidates should demonstrate experience in most of the following:
• Managing senior client relationships
• Managing multiple client accounts or projects at once
• Coordinating multidisciplinary teams
• Setting up or managing project budgets
• Managing project scope, timelines and risks
• Leading client meetings
• Handling difficult client conversations
• Identifying account growth opportunities
• Supporting renewals or long-term client retention
• Working in a consulting, SaaS, professional services or sustainability-related environment
Advantageous Experience
The following experience would be highly advantageous:
• Sustainability consulting
• ESG or carbon-related project delivery
• Agricultural supply chain experience
• SaaS or technology-enabled service delivery
• Platform implementation
• Customer success or client success leadership
• Experience working in a matrix organisation
• Experience leading or mentoring account managers or client success managers
• Exposure to biodiversity, water, social compliance, science-based targets or sustainability reporting
Academic Background
Essential
A relevant undergraduate qualification in one of the following areas:
• Sustainability
• Environmental Science
• Environmental Management
• Agriculture
• Business / Commerce
• Engineering
• Economics
• Project Management
• Supply Chain Management
• Development Studies Advantageous
• Postgraduate qualification in Sustainability, Environmental Management, Business, Agriculture or related field
• Project management certification such as PMP, PRINCE2, Agile, Scrum or equivalent
• Training in carbon accounting, ESG reporting or sustainability frameworks
Technical and Domain Knowledge
The successful candidate does not need to be the technical expert across every sustainability topic, but they must be able to understand client needs, ask good questions and coordinate specialists effectively.
Required Technical Understanding
• Sustainability fundamentals
• Client account management
• Project management
• Budget management
• SaaS or digital platform environments
• Data-driven service delivery
• Agricultural supply chains or complex value chains Advantageous Sustainability Knowledge
• Corporate carbon footprinting
• Greenhouse Gas Protocol
• ESG reporting
• Sustainability reporting frameworks
• Biodiversity
• Water stewardship
• Science-based targets
• Climate risk
• Social data collection
• Responsible sourcing
• Supply chain sustainability
• Sustainable agriculture Digital and Systems Skills
The candidate should be comfortable with:
• CRM systems
• Project management tools
• Excel or spreadsheet-based tracking • Online platforms
• Client dashboards
• Data collection workflows
• Digital reporting tools
Experience with tools such as Monday.com, Power BI or similar would be advantageous. The Microsoft office suite is essential, and a high proficiency is required.
They must be able to communication well in both Afrikaans and English. A third language will be beneficial.
Email CV: cvs@agricruitment.co.za