MarketStar - Associate Director - Client Delivery

Associate Director - Client Delivery Location: Bangalore, India Function: Client Delivery / Operations Level: Associate Director Sales Team Scope: 400+ employees Industry: B2B Technology | Digital Advertising | Sales & Marketing Services Role Overview: We are seeking an accomplished, commercially astute, and highly execution-oriented Associate Director - Client Delivery to lead a large, complex portfolio supporting a strategic client that is a global leader in B2B professional networking and digital marketing solutions. The Associate Director will have end-to-end accountability for a 400+ member organization delivering services across the customer and advertiser lifecycle, including Acquisition, Onboarding, Account Management, Renewals/Retention, and Advertising Operations. This is a senior leadership role that goes significantly beyond managing day-to-day operations. The Associate Director will be expected to own the business and client outcomes - translating client priorities into executable strategies, delivering predictable performance, anticipating risks before they become escalations, developing a strong leadership organization, improving the commercial health of the engagement, and continuously increasing the value delivered to the client. The successful candidate will combine the operational rigor of a scaled delivery leader, the commercial mindset of an account leader, the customer and revenue orientation of a sales organization, and the strategic perspective required to build a long-term client partnership. Key Accountabilities: Client Delivery & Operational Excellence: - Own end-to-end delivery across the portfolio, ensuring consistent achievement of SLAs, KPIs, revenue/business outcomes, quality, productivity, and customer/advertiser experience goals. - Establish strong operating rhythms, forecasting, performance management, and accountability mechanisms across programs and leadership layers. - Anticipate performance risks and ensure teams move quickly from identifying gaps to diagnosing root causes, developing recovery strategies, and delivering measurable improvements. - Drive standardization, continuous improvement, and replication of proven practices across programs and geographies. Strategic Client Leadership: - Serve as a senior delivery leader and trusted advisor to client stakeholders, building strong relationships across operational and executive levels. - Develop a deep understanding of the client's business, products, customers, advertiser ecosystem, and evolving GTM priorities, translating them into clear operational strategies. - Lead executive governance, including business reviews, strategic planning, performance discussions, and critical escalations, bringing forward insights, recommendations, risks, and opportunities - not simply reporting performance. - Build client confidence through proactive communication, predictability of execution, sound judgment, and ownership of outcomes. Commercial & Account Growth: - Understand and actively manage the commercial health of the engagement, balancing client outcomes, revenue, cost, productivity, workforce economics, and profitability. - Identify and address potential revenue or margin leakage arising from performance, staffing, utilization, productivity, or operational gaps. - Partner with account and commercial leadership on strategic planning, renewals, and opportunities to expand the partnership through new capabilities, programs, solutions, or geographies. - Build compelling business cases for investments and transformation initiatives that demonstrate measurable client and business value. Sales, Customer Lifecycle & Advertising Operations: - Provide leadership across revenue-generating and customer-facing programs spanning Acquisition, Onboarding, Account Management, Renewals/Retention, and Ad Operations. - Drive strong performance management across relevant metrics such as customer/advertiser engagement, conversion, revenue attainment, retention, product adoption, quality, productivity, and customer experience. - Ensure successful sales, account-management, and operational practices are identified, standardized, and scaled across the portfolio. People & Workforce Leadership: - Lead and develop a strong multi-layered leadership organization, creating clear accountability, succession depth, and independent business ownership across leadership levels. - Build a high-performance culture centered on ownership, client focus, collaboration, execution excellence, transparency, and continuous improvement. - Partner with HR, Talent Acquisition, L&D, and Workforce Management to proactively manage capacity, hiring, skill requirements, attrition, engagement, succession, and operational resilience. - Ensure workforce decisions appropriately balance client requirements, growth readiness, employee experience, productivity, and commercial considerations. Transformation, Technology & AI: - Champion the use of AI, automation, analytics, and digital tools to improve sales effectiveness, productivity, quality, customer experience, and scalability. - Challenge traditional ways of working and identify opportunities to simplify, automate, augment, or redesign processes rather than relying solely on incremental headcount. - Partner with Technology, Analytics, and Transformation teams to build and implement solutions with clear business cases and measurable impact. Risk, Governance & Compliance: - Ensure adherence to contractual commitments, client policies, information security, data privacy, compliance requirements, and internal controls. - Proactively identify and mitigate operational, talent, commercial, compliance, and business-continuity risks, ensuring material risks have clear ownership and mitigation plans. Critical Leadership Competencies: - Business Ownership: Operates with an owner's mindset and takes end-to-end accountability for the health, performance, and future of the engagement. - Strategic & Commercial Acumen: Connects operational decisions to client strategy, revenue, profitability, customer outcomes, and long-term account growth. - Execution Excellence: Converts strategy into clear plans, operating mechanisms, ownership, timelines, and measurable results. - Executive Client Presence: Builds credibility with senior executives, communicates confidently, constructively challenges when appropriate, and operates as a trusted advisor. - Proactive Leadership: Anticipates risks and opportunities and acts before circumstances require client or senior-leadership intervention. - Analytical Problem Solving: Moves rapidly from symptoms to root causes and uses data, structured thinking, and sound judgment to determine interventions. - Performance Orientation: Establishes high standards and creates a culture where commitments, timelines, and business outcomes matter. - People Leadership: Builds strong leaders beneath them, develops talent, addresses performance issues decisively, and creates organizational depth. - Influence & Collaboration: Mobilizes cross-functional and geographically distributed stakeholders regardless of formal reporting relationships. - Change Leadership: Successfully leads organizations through changing client priorities, commercial models, operating structures, technologies, and market conditions. - Innovation & Digital Mindset: Challenges conventional ways of working and actively identifies opportunities to leverage AI, automation, analytics, and process redesign. - Executive Communication: Simplifies complex information into clear, concise, decision-oriented narratives appropriate for senior client and internal stakeholders. Candidate Profile: Required Experience: - 15+ years of overall professional experience, preferably within outsourced sales, managed services, digital operations, technology-enabled services, SaaS, customer lifecycle management, or related industries. - Ideally 5+