Customer Success Lead - VC backed startup (Berlin)

Cherry Ventures is supporting our portfolio with this hire

Company: Forgent AI

Location: Berlin (Hybrid)

Type: Full-time

Start: ASAP

About Forgent AI

Europe's public sector spends €2.4 trillion a year, but the best companies can't compete because they're drowning in paperwork. Forgent AI builds domain-specific AI agents that automate the entire tendering process, from discovery to proposal generation to compliance, cutting manual effort by ~80%. We've onboarded 40+ organisations in under a year, we're backed by Cherry Ventures and angels from OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind, and we're scaling fast from Germany into Europe.

The Role

As Forgent AI’s first Customer Success hire, you’ll own the post-sale customer journey end-to-end: onboarding, adoption, value realization, renewals/expansion, and turning early customers into referenceable champions. You’ll work hands-on with our earliest customers to embed Forgent AI into tender workflows and build the CS playbook from scratch.

This is a founding role: you’ll sit at the center of customers, product, and GTM, and you’ll help shape what we build next.

What You’ll Do

Own onboarding and time-to-value

• Lead structured onboarding for procurement/tender teams and cross-functional stakeholders (BD, legal, technical SMEs).

• Map each customer’s tendering process and implement Forgent AI into it end-to-end.

• Drive fast time-to-first-submission and repeatable rollout motions.

Drive adoption, retention, and expansion

• Build adoption plans and run QBRs/value reviews tied to measurable outcomes: hours saved, cycle-time reduction, tender throughput, compliance error reduction, and improved input to win rate.

• Own renewals and expansions in close collaboration with the leadership and sales.

• Multi-thread relationships (bid manager, procurement lead, compliance/legal, exec sponsor).

Be the customer voice in product

• Translate tender pain points into clear product requirements (e.g., form automation, compliance checks, discovery/matching).

• Create feedback loops with Product/Engineering on AI quality, accuracy, compliance, and human-in-the-loop review workflows.

• Help define “quality bars” for AI-generated tender responses (factuality, completeness, tone, locality, compliance).

Build the CS function from scratch

• Create onboarding templates, success plans, customer health scoring, playbooks for risk/stalls, and escalation paths.

• Build enablement: training, best-practice guides, internal champions program.

• Develop reference assets: case studies, lighthouse accounts, and proof points for GTM.

Navigate complex environments

• Support customers in regulated, high-stakes procurement contexts where QA/compliance gates matter.

• Coordinate stakeholders across procurement, legal, and exec teams to keep implementations moving.

What Success Looks Like (first 6–12 months)

• Fast time-to-value: first successful tender submission with Forgent AI achieved quickly and repeatably.

• Deep adoption: Forgent becomes part of weekly tender operations, not a “pilot tool.”

• Clear ROI: measurable reduction in prep time and admin workload; increased tender participation capacity.

• Retention + expansion: strong renewals and expansion path as product broadens into discovery/compliance/workflow.

• Scalable CS motion: a repeatable playbook the next hires can run.

Who You Are

Must-haves

• 5+ years in Customer Success / Implementation / Solutions / Customer Ops for B2B SaaS (mid-market/enterprise).

• Strong track record owning onboarding → adoption → renewals (and ideally expansion).

• Excellent stakeholder management and project execution in complex environments.

• Comfortable working with technical and non-technical teams; able to explain AI workflows simply and credibly.

• Builder mindset: you create structure, obsess over outcomes, and thrive in ambiguity.
• C1 German and business fluent English language skills.

Nice-to-haves

• You can troubleshoot a SaaS product, reproduce a bug, and write a clear ticket for engineering without hand-holding
• Experience with regulated/compliance-heavy workflows (procurement, legal, public sector, govtech, RFP/RFI/bid management).

• Experience defining and tracking ROI metrics and customer health frameworks from scratch.

Why Join Now

• You’ll be the first Customer Success hire, shaping how we deliver outcomes and scale retention from day one.

• You’ll influence the product roadmap directly as we expand from proposal generation into a broader procurement operating system.

• You’ll work onsite in Berlin with the founding team, moving fast and learning directly from customers.

Practical Details

• Location: Berlin (Hybrid); we are a high-intensity onsite team in Berlin (4 days/ week) because building from 0 to 1 requires high-bandwidth collaboration.

• Compensation: Competitive salary + meaningful early-stage equity

Cherry Ventures is an equal opportunity employer and values diversity. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, or disability status.