A successful first 90 days breaks down to focus across three key areas: (1) Deep learning and curiosity around the product and the experience of the customer within that product; relationship building, (2) Hypothesis based experimenting and feedback collection and (3) Planning and alignment of go-forward motions 30 days: * Dedicate ample time to learning about your product - both internally and directly with customers. Why do customers purchase the product? How does the product function within a larger tools ecosystem? What are the barriers to success in using the product? What's the value narrative or ROI in the customer's language? How does the product influence outcomes that customers care about? How is the product priced? How is it viewed in the competitive landscape? * Build relationships internally - meet with cross functional partners to orient yourself to their priorities and OKRs, and how their teams drive customer success (we all own this job collectively). Develop perspectives on how you can best partner with these cross functionals - how can your goals ladder to their goals, which ladder to customer goals and outcomes. * Consider how you will spend your time. Set initial and ongoing goals for time spent internally and with customers. Make it a priority to stay close to the customer either personally through customer advocacy or sponsorship programs, through customer call shadowing or listening strategies, or through skip level/team 1:1s. * Build a bi directional, prioritized relationship with sales. Understanding the organization's pre-sale strategy will be critical to building an effective post sales experience. * If leading an established CS function, assess current processes and measurement strategies 60 days: * Leverage learnings to begin building hypotheses around your ongoing strategy. If setting up a CS team from scratch - you might start building the customer journey and determining the most effective touchpoints for successful product optimization and adoption. If leading an established CS team, this may look like assessing where changes can be made to optimize customer and team outcomes. * Involve the team in priority setting or priority refinement - generate energy around shared goals * If possible, choose a 1-2 key areas of investment to test your perspectives and strategy * Gain buy in from critical cross functionals (sales, marketing, enablement, product/engineering) * Build perspective around a metrics and measurement strategy - how will you know the team is successful? Does the team have the right "skin in the game"? Are you influencing things both within the circle of control for a CS org (for example, team activity targets), but also extending beyond that into circle of influence metrics (customer use of product, value optimization)? 90 days: * Begin synthesizing your learnings from your ongoing internal and external engagements, coupled with anything you have piloted or tested. Refine your strategy across key areas: the customer journey, how other teams will contribute to this journey (marketing, digital teams, services teams), metrics and measurement for the CS org, team culture & morale * Focus on team morale and strategic alignment - host team conversations around how the CS strategy drives customer results, which in turn drives business results. Create clarity in R&R and how results will be measured * Spend time socializing how you are investing your time and focus - this can help to build trust with cross functionals and anchor initiatives to broader business goals (ex: retention, churn mitigation, customer ROI, etc)

With a self-serve product, you probably want to stay away from some of the more product-based KPIs (e.g., product adoption or health score if it's largely adoption driven) but retention, NPS, etc. are still critical metrics for Customer Success. The business has a value proposition for why it's investing in Customer Success despite the product being self-serve so it's incumbent to figure out what that investment thesis is and tie you and your team's KPIs around it.

Ultimately, the executive team wants to know that the business is healthy and growing, and that they won't have any surprises coming at them. I see a lot of discomfort / unfamiliarity with the Customer Success teams among executives because the field is still relatively new, doesn't always have consistent definition, and is sometimes not quantifiable enough. Given that, here are a few questions that come to mind for execs when it comes to Customer Success and how your work helps to address them: * What is the true health of our revenue and what are we doing to improve it? Do we have a good handle on where the risks are? Are we running repeatable/proven plays to address risk? Is anything going to pop out and surprise me later? * Having good customer health indicators and keeping them clean * Running playbooks for risk (and building new ones) * Save plans for unhealthy accounts * Good hygiene in your CS platform <- builds confidence * Proactively flagging risks or things that might turn into risks * Having a tight renewals process to get them done on time and with high predictability * Are we getting customers to value quickly after they sign? Are we delivering more and more value over time? * Tracking key milestones along the journey for each customer * Using success plans and tracking value that the customer has achieved * Sharing stories internally regarding customers achieving value * Getting lots of customers to serve as references * Are we identifying areas to grow in our accounts? * CS Qualified Leads * Having reliable conversations with customers on where we're going next (often this is a QBR / EBR type conversation to understand their evolving business and how you fit into it) Of course, as an old high school teacher used to say "Don't Tell Me, Show Me!" so all of this is only as good as the reporting/tracking you use to demonstrate it... and the results it drives.

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.

I think that Enterprise Customer Success means different things to different companies. This term Enterprise is used very freely and generally means CS for your larger organisations. But you must first determine for your business size, what is a large organisation to you? And why do you think they need a different level of service? What's the feedback you've been getting or what are the difficulties you've been facing with your current model for these customers? That should tell you everything you need to know.

Scenario-based questions are my favorite but I especially like this one as it breaks the ice and allows the candidate to show their personality & you can have fun with the scenarios. Three emails hit your inbox, which do you answer first, second, and last and why? No wrong answers here! 1. You ordered lunch and the delivery person is running an hour behind and asks if you still want your order. (symbolizes a higher-value downgrade scenario) 2. Your friend wants to reschedule your plans for the evening and is asking for a confirmation (symbolizes a mid-value cancellation scenario) 3. You were given an Amazon gift card that needs to be claimed (symbolizes a lower-value upgrade scenario)

I find the best CSMs are: * Curious - they want to understand “why”. This translates well with customers as it means they have an innate desire to understand their business. It also means that they are likely to find the CSM role very rewarding. * Builders - especially in the early days. * Empathetic - Empathy has 2 components as a CSM: 1) it helps build a personal connection 2) it allows a CSM to more successfully advocate on a customer's behalf internally.

I love this question! My top 4 thoughts: * Every sales team is different. Find out how they work – in Eightfold, we have Account Executives (they are front end pre-sales deal closers), Account Managers (focused on install base after implementation), Sales Development Reps (responsible for lead generation and first connects), and Solution Consultants (demonstrating our platform to potential clients). Find out what your sales folks do and how that impacts you. * Talk to more than 1 salesperson in each department – everyone is different and has unique ways of working. I was referred into Eightfold by someone in sales and had some great conversations with that person. However, that was just one person, and it was also a friend. Looking back, I should have reached out to more folks in different areas of the sales team to learn more. * From your conversations, compile a list of what potential clients are trying to solve for – those will be the same pain points you will hear about once they go live. Do your research – take that list and run it by your leadership, professional services, product, engineering, etc. and see if it all is consistent. Learn what you can about those issues and see what ideas you might have to address some of them. * Ask the sales team what they expect from CS. You may get very different answers, and most likely won’t be able to be everything to everyone. Listen, ask questions, talk to your leadership, and decide the best way for you to work with those on the sales team.

Unlike a lot of Customer Success departments, we’ve chosen to align our team to customer KPIs rather than commercial/upsell targets. As such, we have less overlap in goals between CS and Sales. Of course, we’re both targeting Gross Renewal Rate and ensuring we maintain the customer base, but we don’t extend that to upsell targets in the same way as commission-based CS teams. Currently, we’re focused on exploring how we can share “time spent” efficiency and reach KPIs to help keep us accountable for spending as much face time with our customers, tech, and agency partners as we can over the course of many key city hubs whilst being mindful of the cost of trips.