Senior Partnerships Manager

Xero is a beautiful, easy-to-use platform that helps small businesses and their accounting and bookkeeping advisors grow and thrive.

At Xero, our purpose is to make life better for people in small business, their advisors, and communities around the world. This purpose sits at the centre of everything we do. We support our people to do the best work of their lives so that they can help small businesses succeed through better tools, information and connections. Because when they succeed they make a difference, and when millions of small businesses are making a difference, the world is a more beautiful place.

As the Strategic Partnerships Manager, you will be the link between Xero and its most important, non-financial services partnerships. These partnerships bring additional value to our mutual customers’ experience and use of the Xero platform, and drive growth and revenue for Xero. Working closely with global and regional colleagues and functions, you will use your creativity and relationship skills to form and manage long-term mutually beneficial partnerships.

What you’ll do

• Strategic Partnerships: Build senior-level relationships with new and existing strategic partners to build or expand our relationship to execute initiatives to improve mutual customer outcomes and increase Xero’s revenue.

• Manage Partners: Lead partnership initiatives against defined requirements - from assessment and scoping through to initiative execution and ongoing partnership management.

• Collaborate Internally: Secure the commitment of internal stakeholders, such as marketing, GTM, product and legal, to support the execution of partnership initiatives.

• Support Globally: Work with the global partnerships team to support the ANZ co-ordination of globally strategic accounts.

• Maintain Currency: Continuously review the market landscape to recommend, develop, and implement new and creative approaches to ensure Xero and its strategic partners’ objectives are met.

• Partnerships Evangelism: Represent and internally champion the partners within Australia and New Zealand. As needed, represent Xero at key internal and external events.

• Operational Excellence: Deliver against strategic and financial objectives (including partner engagement in key Xero events). Continually find ways to improve effectiveness through evolving key operational processes.

What you'll bring

• Strategic and Commercial Expertise: Possesses a strategic mindset with strong commercial acumen, including experience in business/product strategy, assessing commercial viability, and expertise in contract negotiations.

• Relationship Building: Demonstrated ability to build and manage complex relationships across all business levels, with strong executive influence both internally and externally.

• Partnership and SaaS Experience: Proven experience in partnerships, particularly within a SaaS company, with a deep understanding of technology, software development, and the B2B software industry.

• Effective Communication: Excellent written and verbal communication skills, crucial for influencing and building long-term, scalable partnerships.

• Empathy and Adaptability: Empathy for how partners operate and the ability to work with complex organisations to create mutual value and sustainable partnerships.

Why Xero?

Offering very generous paid leave to use however you’d like (plus statutory holidays!), dedicated paid leave to care for your physical and mental wellbeing as well as an Employee Assistance Program to access mental health care for you and your family, health insurance, life insurance, and income protection, wellbeing and sports programmes, employee resource groups, 26 weeks of paid parental leave for primary caregivers, an Employee Share Plan, beautiful offices, flexible working, career development, and many other benefits that reflect our human value, you’ll do the best work of your life at Xero.