Vertical Growth Lead - Professional Services.
United Kingdom - Remote•United KingdomEurope•December 11, 2025
The purpose of this role is to own and co-ordinate all the activities required meet UK PS Bookings and Revenue Targets across individual verticals.The ideal candidate is able to perform both in a consultative and authoritative style in managing our largest customer and/or partner presales and implementation projects for a variety of services solutions related to the Rackspace Professional Services consultancy. This position will report directly to the UK Regional Partner.You will be working with diverse presales, sales, technical consultancy and service delivery and support teams ensuring Professional Services engagements are scoped, planned and delivered to maximise value for customers and Rackspace. These engagements may include application migration, infrastructure consolidation, transformation, automation, optimization, and lifecycle services. You will be responsible for achieving bookings, revenue and profit targets for the vertical ensuring deals in the vertical are solutioned, resource demand is raised and supporting the pre-sales activity. You will be accountable for the delivery of multiple projects across multiple customers at various phases, both helping to secure new business and delivering against the contracted services and revenue realisation targets. You will ensure that executives both in the customer organisation and within Rackspace are informed and engaged and your team remain focused. You will work closely with resource line managers to manage Racker performance levels.This is a line management role, with Programme Managers and Project Managers reporting into the Vertical Partner role
Key Accountabilities
- Pre-Sales Engagement & Commercial Expertise
- Achieving vertical targets for bookings, revenue and profit typically covering $2-5m revenue per year.
- Pipeline generation for PS Services into the sector in close collaboration with sector leads from Sales and Customer Success, along with the Regional Growth Partner.
- Orchestrate and lead the professional services elements of a wide range of presales efforts including proposals, RFP/RFI responses and generating Statements of Work (SoW) as the means to help customers realise the value of Rackspace.
- Use expertise and experience to work with ambiguity and unknowns to build assumption based plans, commercial models and proposals for complex transition programmes.
- Confidently present plans, methods and proposals to customers at all levels, including technical stakeholders all the way to “C Suite” decision makers.
- Lead / contribute to opportunity qualification for complex migration, transition and transformation projects.
- Work closely and cohesively as part of a cross functional pre-sales team, ensuring realistic, innovative sound commercial and technical solutions to meet customer objectives and expectations in a timely manner.
- Lead commercial negotiations for professional services SoWs with Customers, with values typically between £50k - £2m.
- Produce, effort, cost and price models to support proposals.
- Ensure resource demand is raised for unsold and sold work.
- Lead / contribute to partner selection and on boarding to support pre-sales and project efforts.
- Manage partner performance through project delivery.
- Seen as a thought leader / key contributor to Professional Services & Partner commercial modelling amongst internal teams
- Programme Management
- Act as first point of contact for assigned customers during delivery of professional services. Accountable for all client project / programme communications, conflict resolution, and compliance on client deliverables and revenue.
- Leads internal teams and customers at all levels within the organization to develop programme and project parameters, including time, resource, dependencies, and cost estimates.
- Accountable for programme and project management deliverables including the project plan, project schedule, status reports, meeting minutes, issue logs and any other documentation related to the management and administration of the project.
- Accountable for ensuring your portfolio of projects remain on schedule and budget at all times; ensuring timely customer milestone completion and Rackspace revenue realisation.
- Lead the entire programme and relative project managers that report into that function. Represent Rackspace on customer project boards.
- Lead the effort to find creative approaches to problem solving and quality deliverables supporting business needs and processes, confidently interacting and influencing “C level” executives within Rackspace and your customers to create win-win situations.
- When required facilitate project meetings focused on status reporting, problem resolution, feedback, fostering open communication within the team on project planning and execution.
- Works closely with account managers and service delivery, providing regular two-way communication between the client and team, to provide strong team representation and set proper client expectations.
- Forecast, track and report on utilisation, resource burn and requirements, project P&L and cashflow, ensuring timely invoicing / revenue realisation against agreed plan.
- Seen as a thought leader internally and by customers in relation to the governance and key processes of highly complex and technical transition programmes.
- Provide FANATICAL experience by ensuring 100% customer satisfaction for all Rackspace Professional Services engagements.
Person Specification
- A minimum of 15+ years industry or related professional services delivery, implementation, leadership, partner and / or account management experience.
- Expert knowledge of business operations across various industries, competence in core elements of financial acumen (including cash flow, P&L).
- Knowledge of Sales Processes and experience dealing with Sales Managers and their teams to jointly scope, pitch, and close business.
- Demonstrated success of leading several complex programmes and managing people in a customer facing role.
- Advanced knowledge of service management and project, programme and portfolio delivery methodologies.
- Strong understanding of IT managed services and reasonable technical competency with the ability to learn and apply new technologies.
- Highly organised with outstanding communications skills (including presentation skills, diplomacy, and influencing), process thinking, directing work through others, initiative, building relationships and trust, and consensus building.
- Knowledge of industry metrics and how to positively impact those figures by identifying them in customer and market interactions.
- Experience in coaching junior members of the team in sales techniques, cost modelling, pitch delivery and deal closing.
- Experience interfacing with clients at all levels and managing client expectations.
- Demonstrated competency such as impact & influence, enabling change, program management, customer focus, strategic thinking, creativity, and drive for results.
- Ability to deal with ambiguity by making the appropriate decisions considering the relative costs and benefits of potential actions.
- Ability to prioritize effectively and handle shifting priorities.
- Proven ability to motivate responsible parties to ensure project timelines and deliverables are met.
- Proficiency in using enterprise project portfolio management applications such as Microsoft Project and Office applications (Excel, Word, PowerPoint).
- Bachelor’s degree or equivalent work experience is required.
- PRINCE2, Managing Successful Programmes, or equivalent certifications preferred.
- Ability to travel as required
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