Our current path goes CSM - Sr. CSM - Principal CSM - Mgr, CSM - Dir, CSM - Sr Dir, CSM. I think there are options along the way as well to move into or come from pre-sales, sales, marketing, product, ops, or talent acquisition, depending on how your organization is set up.

I'd recommend starting with these key areas when creating a CS function: * Defining customer success - what does successful use of your product or platform look like? When a customer in successful in your platform, what are the outcomes? What is considered optimal use of your product, gathered from a variety of perspectives (product, leadership, marketing, beta customers)? * Defining the customer journey - considering how customer success is defined and what outcomes successful customers should strive for, what are the key touchpoints in the customer journey to promote that success? Examples include the onboarding experience, product adoption at certain time intervals, objective setting, progress check-ins, value-based discussions, renewal/commercial milestones. How does each customer-facing role engage in this journey? * Consider the overall team structure and the roles and responsibilities of CS - Based on the customer journey, what role will CS play in promoting customer success? Will CS train/enable customers on the platform or will this be done digitally/self-service? How will CS onboard/implement customers? What customer engagements/moments will CS own? * Establish team onboarding/training/upskilling - How will you ramp your CS team members? How will you ensure they maintain skills necessary for the job? * Consider necessary tools - What tools/internal platforms will be needed for the success of the CS function? How will customer outcomes be tracked? How will CS manage day to day responsibilities? How will CS stay connected to internal functions such as engineering and support? * Define measurements, reporting, and accountability metrics - Which customer metrics (adoption, health, sentiment) will best predict outcomes (churn, retention, renewal growth)? Which inputs (activities, customer engagements) promote those customer outcomes? How will your report on customer wins and risks? How will you hold the CS team accountable to these inputs/outputs?

Early in my career, I didn't. I was at a larger company with many functional and department heads. Not everyone will/should work directly with the C suite, but if the work you're doing has a high impact on the entire company, you will. My first real work with the C suite was when I was building a new Customer Success function at a mid-stage company. We had built our first churn/retention forecast and our CFO needed to understand our projections and have confidence in them before taking it to the board. We walked through my model, which varied from our tops-down Finance projections. Every month, we would review recent churns, top risks and our quarterly and annual churn forecast with the CRO and CFO. This became a rhythm they depended on. As time went on, I was tasked with more strategic initiatives because of the confidence I built with them.

Self-onboarding is becoming an increasingly popular approach for SaaS products. Follows are some strategies that can help ensure customers achieve successful implementation even without direct CSM engagement: Product Complexity: Recognize that self-onboarding success hinges on product complexity. For simpler products, robust on boarding and implementation resources can suffice. However more complex solutions may still require direct engagement. Note: It is important to understand the underlying reason as to why the customer wants to self-onboard. It is also important to create resources tailored to different user personas (e.g., beginner to advanced). This ensures users find content relevant to their needs and skill level. Before allowing customers to self-onboard it is important to have a strong foundation of self help resources in place. * Comprehensive Knowledge Base: Create a well-organized and searchable knowledge base with clear step-by-step guides, FAQs, and troubleshooting articles. * Interactive Tutorials and Onboarding Flows: Develop interactive tutorials and in-app onboarding flows that guide users through initial setup and core features. * Video Resources: Offer video tutorials and explainer videos to cater to visual learners and provide alternative learning methods. * Community Forums: Foster a vibrant online community forum where users can ask questions, share best practices, and support each other. Proactive Customer Health Monitoring: It is important to have a mechanism to track customers that are self-onboarding. Here are some of the methods we use at Sitecore. * Product Telemetry: We leverage product telemetry data to track user engagement and feature adoption. We identify users who might be struggling and proactively reach out with targeted support. * Warning Triggers: We set up automated warning triggers based on key adoption metrics. These alerts flag potential customer health issues and allow for early intervention. Provide Options: For customers that want to self on-board - we can give them options to do otherwise if needed, while at the same time clearly communicate self-onboarding expectations. We clearly outline the available resources and support options. * Follow Up: We will then follow up and check in with customers as needed.

In my mind, I believe that it’s generally more beneficial to have the right soft skills when joining a new team, as I’ve seen it is often harder to teach than hard skills. Soft skills like communication, empathy, active listening, problem-solving, and adaptability are key to building relationships with customers and typically things that I try to get a good understanding of during interviews. Then once you have a solid foundation of soft skills, you can more easily learn the necessary hard skills, such as specific tools, processes, or product knowledge, because you’ll already know how to engage with customers effectively. That said, a balance is ideal when you’ve been on the team for a bit of time, as both sets of skills are important for success in the role. In fact, over time, some of the hard skills become a bit more important as I feel product knowledge from a tenured Customer Success Manager is extremely important.

As per me, a startup should hire its first Customer Success Manager when it secures recurring revenue and has at least a few paying or subscribed customers. This is typically around Series A or earlier if customer retention and onboarding are key to growth. The goal is to drive adoption, reduce churn, and turn early customers into advocates. And also to promote as much as possible of their product in the external market. I'd also have a flavor of having playbooks in place to ease up the war coming ahead.

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!

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!