Mike Grace

About Mike Grace

Customer success is about more than offering support and achieving renewal rates - it is about anticipating customer needs, managing the customer lifecycle via a portfolio of solutions and driving expedited time to first value. I am a strategic thinker and collaborative senior leader with an extensive record of achievement in customer success, service delivery, IT, and service supply chain operations. I excel at directing project portfolios and managing large + globally diverse high-performing teams. In addition, I bring special expertise in improving operational performance, reducing costs, managing multi-million dollar budgets, and increasing efficiency while implementing programs and new technologies.Measurable Results:Cohesity: Adopted customer success operating model that resulted in 112% net retention rate. Attained Net Retention Rate on average of 12% higher than company baseline. Attained churn average of 3% less than company baseline. Drove Customer Success Program and acted as a Customer Success Manager for the top enterprise accounts, delivering 8% higher net retention rate over the average and zero customer churn out of a portfolio of more than 50 accounts across 2 years. Cisco: Led Service Delivery Americas team that delivered greater than 45% account growth in FY 2018 and more than 85% renewal rate for the service, while keeping expense growth to less than 9% for the same period. Managed more than $4.5M of quarterly spend on resourcing and projects within +/- 2% variance Cisco: Established the Services Entitlement Exceptions program projected to increase services revenues more than $25M per year while reducing Americas entitlement exceptions by 50%. Our team reduced contract renewal preparation activity 28% and facilitated a 22% increase in add-to-contract dollars while growing account base that leveraged \'Services First\' initiative by 500%. Contributed to the closing of $200M in contracts with Thomson Reuters, Ford, Citigroup, Federal Express, Bank of America, HSBC, and Morgan Stanley by providing operational and margin inputs & criteria.

Experience

1. Manager, Managed Cloud Customer Experience

   SAS

   Sep 2025 — Present · Cary, NC, US

Education

• Buffalo State University

  Bachelor of Science (BS), Criminal Justice/Law Enforcement Administration

  1985 — 1989

Skills

• Cross-Functional Team Leadership
• Program Management
• Solution Selling
• Technical Service Delivery
• Operations Management
• IT Infrastructure Management
• Compliance
• Managed Services
• Project Portfolio Management
• Voip
• Strategy
• Salesforce.com
• Sales Enablement
• Business Intelligence
• Network Architecture
• Outsourcing
• Training
• Business Development
• Telecommunications
• Product Management
• Global Account Management
• Management
• Storage
• IT Strategy
• Strategic Partnerships
• Partner Management
• Pmp
• Leadership
• Crm
• Service Delivery
• Process Improvement
• Team Leadership
• Vendor Management
• Global Organizational Management
• IT Service Management
• Sales Operations
• Professional Services
• Account Management
• Channel
• Enterprise Software