1. Customer Success Managers (CSMs) are grouped into segments based on either Product Type or Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). 2. Each CSM reports to a CS Director responsible for leading their respective segment. 3. CS Directors report to the VP of Customer Success, who manages all CSMs. 4. The VP of CS reports to the Chief Customer Officer (CCO), who oversees all post-sales teams, including Renewal Managers. 5. The CCO, in turn, reports to the CEO of the company

My focus is on learning, optimising, and driving impact. Here’s my structured 30-60-90 day approach: 30 Days – Learn & Align Deep dive into company goals, customers, and key metrics (ARR, GRR, NRR). Meet stakeholders (CS, Sales, Product, Support) & assess CS playbooks. Know your team - Listen & Learn Identify quick wins—engage with top accounts & address renewal risks. 60 Days – Optimise & Engage Strengthen customer health monitoring & playbooks for onboarding, adoption, outcomes and renewals. Build alignment with Sales & Product for expansion and feedback loops. Empower the CS team with training & automation to improve efficiency. Carve out initiatives and boost morale in the team. 90 Days – Execute & Scale Implement data-driven engagement strategies to boost retention & expansion. Establish a Customer Advisory Board (CAB) & enhance VoC programs - leverage Community Present a long-term CS roadmap with measurable business impact. Evaluate and Recognise. Success in CS isn’t a one-time plan/change...it’s an ongoing cycle of learning, improving, and evolving with customers!

KPIs are the ultimate indicator of where you want your team to spend their time. The old adage that people do what they're get paid to do holds true. If you're paying people to do QBRs, they'll do them. If you're not, it will be harder for them to do so. So as you're developing your KPIs, think about where you want your team to spend their time. If that's where they're spending their time today, great. Write some KPIs that will add motivation to their already busy days. If, however, they're spending times on areas where you don't want them to focus, use the KPI rollout to pivot their time and attention to an area that will be a better use of their time.

There are many facets of CS that may differ based on the size of the organization. With differences in organizational size, come differences in priorities, growth strategies, cost measures and balance for scale, as well as customer journey architectures/needs. A few specific areas to note: * At least initially, the size of the CS org is likely to grow based on the expanding customer pool. In the early days of an organization, more customers may equal more customers success managers until a balance of scale is introduced. * The skillsets of CSMs may evolve. Small companies may start with CSMs who are versatile in nature - technical, yet consultative, able to work well and closely with engineering and product teams, leadership capability for player/coach models. This agility allows an organization to flex to determine the ideal longer-term skillset of the customer success persona based on the needs of the customer. * Organization priorities are likely to shift, impacting how customer success teams are measured. In small companies, building brand and retaining customers at all costs may be key; therefore, customer success deliverables may be more extensive with less of a focus on ability to scale. CS teams may be measured on retention/churn. As companies grow in size, the need to balance cost and ability to scale likely becomes more prominent, so there's a need to assess scalability of what a CSM delivers. CSM orgs may be measured based on cost to serve or other margin-related factors. * In larger organizations, there may be more teams contributing to the customer journey - including services organizations that may have point-in-time deliverables (either for fee or included in price of contract). Examples may include onboarding or implementation specialists, technical consultants, insights analysts, etc. It becomes more important to align on a holistic customer journey when there are multiple points of interaction.

Based on my experience, here are the most important soft and hard skills CSMs can build to be successful: Soft Skills 1. Empathy: Building trust through understanding of customer challenges. 2. Communication: Clearly articulating solutions and guiding customers. 3. Problem-Solving: Proactively addressing issues and driving positive outcomes. 4. Adaptability: Thriving in dynamic environments and adjusting to customer needs. Hard Skills 1. Technical Literacy: Understanding product functionality to better support customers and guide them on adoption. 2. CRM Proficiency: Managing customer engagements through platforms like Salesforce or Gainsight. 3. Project Management: Ensuring smooth onboarding and execution of a Customer Success Plan. 4. Data Analysis: Using insights to track a customer’s success with your product and to also predict churn. While there are other skills like negotiating, time management, and conflict resolution that are important, the ones above are what I feel are the most important. If you are able to master the ones above, you will deliver lasting value and drive your customer’s success in any industry.

Question: You've got a brand new Enterprise customer starting tomorrow, $X ARR and X users. (Align the scenario to your business). You're walking home from work and you spot a lamp on the side of the road. You pick it up, rub it and a genie pops out. He says you can have 3 wishes that apply to this new customer and you can ask for anything in the world that you think will make this customer successful with you. What I'm looking for here: 1) How you handle having things thrown at you that you didn't expect :-) 2) What you focus on, in terms of what you think would lead to success. If you focus on training or product requests, you're not at the level of change management, project management or stakeholder alignment that I need.

I've found two KPIs to be difficult to commit to: 1. Customer Health. If you have a robust algorithm to measure customer health (influenced by a number of inputs ), it can be hard commit to a certain outcome. To frame this another way, I've often observed customer health scores as being a bit of a black box where it's hard to tie the actions you take to specific outcomes when there could be a number of variables outside of your control that influence the ultimate score. I much prefer to commit to lead measures that are directly within the control of the team. KPIs related to customer engagement are a good example of things that are more directly within the team's control. 2. Upgrade rate. Many CSM teams are measured on Net Revenue Retention. As part of this, your CSMs may be responsible for identifying growth opportunities within the install base of customers. I find it's effective to measure the team on how many growth opportunities the team identifies but not the close rate or upgrade rate, especially if the Sales or Account Management team owns the closing motion. 

The two areas I would recommend are 1) Sharpening your Sales skills and 2) Adopting some Product Manager mindsets. When working with customers and the further upmarket you go, the more enriched these conversations need to be and the immediate areas for many customers are to understand their contracts, how they can scale with your product, value alignment, and ROI. Supplementing this, customers want to know how your product will be evolving and how their feedback can influence the roadmap. Being able to cut right to the value of a product, requirements, outcomes, and how those align with the customer's values will set your customer and Product teams up for mutual success!

Rather than just asking a candidate about their background, I prefer to ask about real situational questions. Here are a few of my favorites: * Tell me about a time you had an unhappy customer. What was the issue and how did you resolve it? * Take me through a time when a customer provided a churn notice and you were able to save them. What was your process and how did you turn things around? * Walk me through one of your recent renewals. When did you start the renewal conversation and what did the entire process look like? Also, in my opinion, all candidates need to do some type of live presentation for the hiring manager/team before an offer is sent out. Keep in mind, presenting to customers is a major part of a CSM's job and is not a skill I recommend you judge based on an interview and/or resume. While a candidate can tell you all about their communication style and experience, I believe the only way to truly judge their presentation skills is to see it live. 

Technical Support response targets! We’ve all been there, and being the first Success Hire is super exciting. You get to wear many hats, get involved all the way through the customer lifecycle and be scrappy to get customers what they need. For us at the beginning, that meant taking on a lot of Technical Support tickets for our EMEA customers, especially in the morning before our then US-based tech support team was online. On the one hand, this gives you a lot of valuable product knowledge that can help you be an impactful CSM, but on the other hand, it can mask the business need to expand technical support teams and can hurt your focus in the long term. If you can, explain early the difference between CS and Tech support KPIs and ensure that anything you take on is temporary!