Merchant Advocacy Manager

Shopify has redefined commerce, raising the standard for how businesses of all sizes manage, market and sell their products and services. With over 1,000,000 merchants in more than 175 countries, powered by the most innovative platform on the market, we continue to grow rapidly while constantly looking for new ways to impact and disrupt markets.

As the Merchant Advocacy Manager you'll be responsible for delighting merchants, building their loyalty, and enabling them to be powerful advocates for Shopify through effective merchant engagement. You will create the strategy, operationalize the processes, and execute the day-to-day activities for our formal merchant advocacy program. The ideal candidate is an advocate first for our merchants and who is passionate about understanding their needs, telling their stories, and building relationships that are mutually beneficial that will earn us their advocacy in return.

The Merchant Advocacy Manager will interact with the Merchant Education and Community teams, GTM, Content Marketing, Merchant Success and other teams in our Revenue organization.

Responsibilities

• Build the strategy for how we empower happy customers to become advocates, in partnership with key stakeholders across regions, marketing, brand, sales, and merchant success

• Identify and build touchpoints that enhance the merchant's relationship with Shopify and demonstrate our deep customer appreciation.

• Support the regions to create a multi-tiered advocacy program to reach merchants where they are and encourage references, participation and storytelling.

• Identify how we engage our most important merchants and cultivate relationships through exclusive events and building a community with the stakeholders in each brand.

• Work with our global community and engagement teams to identify opportunities where our merchants can interact with Shopify and their peers, as well as speak about their experience.

• Establish the process and systems for keeping track of merchant participation, references, logos, stories, and their usage so we have a clear view of whats available and a history of a customers involvement with our engagement and advocacy programs.

• Gather and analyze data to assess the health of merchant advocacy efforts and use insights to develop action plans for improvement.

• Cultivate mutually beneficial relationships that shine a light on merchants innovation and activate storytelling on our behalf by working with relevant teams.

• Be an evangelist and spokesperson for our merchant-first engagement and advocacy programs

• Contribute best-in-class expertise to operational and continuous process improvement efforts for customer engagement programs, working with teams in merchant education and community.

• Engage with our merchants directly and empowers others to do the same in our digital communities and at virtual and IRL events

• Working with Operations, identify tooling and technology to scale the program globally as necessary

• Experience in community and advocacy engagement or marketing programs.

• some experience managing cross-functional advocacy/reference programs

• Strategic thinker who can execute as well

• Strong storytelling, communications and relationship building skills

• Deep curiosity, excellent listening skills, empathy, and ability to get things done in a collaborative team environment

• Comfortable working in a fast-paced environment with a positive attitude

• Experience effectively representing corporate brand values, building and advancing the reputation of the organization and its customers.

• The ability to thrive in chaos, resolve ambiguity, and think quickly on your feet.

• Project management, excellent communication, and strong organization skills.

• Experience using data and analytics to measure the impact of your work.

Added Bonus

• Strong experience in B2B software, software-as-a-service preferred

At Shopify, we are committed to building and fostering an environment where our employees feel included, valued, and heard. Our belief is that a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion enables us to truly make commerce better for everyone. We strongly encourage applications from Indigenous peoples, racialized people, people with disabilities, people from gender and sexually diverse communities and/or people with intersectional identities.