Senior Director, Services Consulting, EMEA
Zendesk · London
Job Description
We’re looking for a Senior Director to lead Professional Services across EMEA. You will own the regional services business and guide a team responsible for shaping, selling, and delivering high-value customer engagements.
You will evolve our services model toward AI-enabled, outcome-driven engagements. That means starting with the customer’s business goals, defining measurable outcomes, and selecting the right combination of expert consulting, repeatable methods, automation, and AI. You will help customers realize value faster while building a scalable, high-quality, and financially healthy services organization.
You will partner closely with Sales, Product Management, Engineering, Finance, Customer Success, and global Professional Services leaders. You’ll bring customer needs into the company, help shape the solutions we take to market, and ensure our teams can deliver what we promise.
What you’ll do
Lead the EMEA Professional Services business
- Own the strategy, performance, and growth of the EMEA Professional Services organization.
- Lead Engagement Managers, consultants, and their managers; set clear expectations for customer outcomes, delivery quality, and business performance.
- Build a strong leadership culture through coaching, mentoring, and developing managers and senior individual contributors.
- Plan for organizational growth, including hiring, skills development, succession, and capacity.
- Serve as an executive sponsor for strategic and complex customer implementations, building trusted relationships with customer executives and delivery teams.
Build an AI-enabled, outcome-driven services model
- Establish an engagement approach that begins with customer goals and measurable business outcomes, rather than focusing solely on activities, hours, or implementation milestones.
- Work with customers and internal teams to define success measures, value milestones, and a practical path from deployment to realized value.
- Apply AI and automation thoughtfully across scoping, delivery, knowledge management, quality assurance, and reporting to improve speed, consistency, and insight.
- Guide teams in identifying where AI can augment expert work, improve customer experiences, and reduce repetitive effort while maintaining appropriate human judgment and delivery quality.
- Develop repeatable service offers and delivery patterns that combine advisory expertise, implementation, optimization, and ongoing value realization.
- Use engagement data and customer feedback to assess outcomes, identify delivery risks, and continuously improve the services portfolio.
Partner across the business
- Work proactively with Sales to qualify opportunities, shape solutions, scope services, support proposals, and align commitments with delivery capacity and customer outcomes.
- Collaborate with Product Management and Engineering to bring customer needs, implementation insights, and recurring friction points into product planning and solution design.
- Partner with Customer Success to create continuity from implementation through adoption, optimization, and value realization.
- Work with Finance on forecasting, margin management, planning, and business reviews.
- Coordinate closely with Professional Services leaders in other regions to align methods, standards, and global customer delivery.
- Represent Professional Services in executive and cross-functional planning, helping the company make informed decisions about customer commitments and investment priorities.
- Collaborate with Partner eco system to maintain a healthy Partner portfolio
Deliver high-quality, scalable services
- Establish clear methods for discovery, solution design, scoping, staffing, governance, risk management, delivery, and closeout.
- Ensure projects are appropriately staffed, actively managed, and delivered on time and within budget, with quality and customer expectations maintained.
- Build frameworks for portfolio forecasting, resource allocation, utilization, and capacity planning as the business scales.
- Maintain a quality assurance model that supports consistent delivery across teams, countries, partners, and engagement types.
- Identify delivery risks early, align stakeholders on mitigation, and resolve escalations with sound judgment.
- Use operational and customer data to improve predictability, delivery effectiveness, and customer satisfaction.
Own business and financial performance
- Own the regional Professional Services P&L, including revenue, margin, pipeline, forecasting, and annual and quarterly targets.
- Monitor the financial and operational indicators of a services business, using them to guide investment, prioritization, and corrective action.
- Balance growth, delivery quality, customer outcomes, and commercial discipline.
- Ensure services are scoped and priced appropriately, with delivery plans that support both customer value and sustainable margins.
What you bring
- 15+ years of experience in SaaS or technology, including 10+ years hiring, leading, and mentoring teams; enterprise SaaS experience is preferred.
- Significant leadership experience running a Professional Services, consulting, implementation, or technology delivery organization.
- A record of selling and delivering large, complex, enterprise-grade consulting engagements and solutions.
- Experience owning a services P&L and managing revenue targets, margins, forecasting, pipeline, and business performance.
- Strong knowledge of services portfolio management, resource allocation, capacity planning, and delivery economics.
- Experience building repeatable engagement and delivery models that can scale across a growing customer base.
- Experience applying AI and automation to services delivery, customer reporting, or operating processes, with a practical focus on measurable value.
- The ability to manage complex, multi-stakeholder enterprise relationships and communicate confidently with both customer executives and solution architects.
- Strong judgment and influence across organizational levels and functions, including Sales, Finance, Product, and Engineering.
- The ability to connect detailed operational issues to broader business priorities and act with initiative in changing conditions.
- A collaborative leadership style, with a track record of building accountable teams and developing strong managers.
- Willingness to travel approximately 20–25% nationally and internationally.
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