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)

The important thing is to start measuring items. Your initial 'goal' may be off, but you won't know that until you start measuring it and having your team work towards a KPI. Be open with them that this is a trial period that nobody's performance will be managed based on if they hit the number out of the gate. And then adjust from there -- if people are overachieving, up the target; if people are consistently struggling to hit, lower the bar. Once you've found the sweet spot, then you can add compensation, performance management, etc. on top.

Developing quarterly or annual customer success OKRs and tying them to individual projects involves a structured approach: 1. Understand Company Goals: Align OKRs with overall company goals. 2. Define Objectives: Set specific objectives for the team. 3. Identify Key Results: Establish measurable Key Results for each objective. 4. Align Projects: Assign individual projects that contribute to Key Results. 5. Assign Ownership: Specify ownership of projects to team members. 6. Set Milestones: Break down projects into milestones with timelines. 7. Monitor Progress: Regularly track progress and adjust as needed. 8. Iterate and Improve: Continuously refine the OKR process. 9. Communicate Effectively: Keep teams informed and engaged. This structured approach ensures alignment with company goals, accountability for outcomes, and effective project execution to drive success in customer success initiatives.

This answer is entirely dependent on the what field/product the CSM works with, who their target persona is and what resources are available based on company maturity. For someone dealing in cybersecurity, working mostly with CISOs, technical skills are more important. For someone in general CRM, maybe not so much. My feeling is that process experts > product experts. I find the best CSMs have strong business acumen, can step into a customer relationship and understand where there is opportunity to either (1) inject their product into existing process to create efficiency or (2) suggest a new process built around their product that drives better outcomes. That is less about deep technical knowledge and more about an ability to understand what value means to your customers and how your product can deliver that. Assuming that you have resources available to you that allows you or the customer to solve a technical issue when they arise, your true value is driving results vs. troubleshooting.

This is going to depend heavily on your product. In our case, customers use our product to improve the way they work, so we have dozens or hundreds of users in a given account with high consistency role to role, and we have centralized administrator(s). That means we can talk to a few people to move the needle on the many. We do a few things: * Talk to someone! Start with the champion or the exec who purchased the product to understand if their needs are changing, if we should push on a different use case, or what makes the "good" users different from the "not so good" users. Refresh your success plan and move forward. * Roadmap as Bait: Many disengaged customers will show up for an exclusive peek at the roadmap. Offer a roadmap preview as a way to get the customer on the phone to check in on their priorities, and to get them excited for what's to come. If you don't have a customer-facing roadmap slide, insist on having one made. * Benchmark: Show your customers how they stack up against their peers. Our best customers are achieving X, you are way below... let's talk about how to get you there. You can do this at scale or in a conversation. * Engage users directly: You have to get the content right. Personalize according to roles and use cases that are likely important to them and push content directly through in-app, webinars/events, emails <- whatever works for your users. Always give them 2-3 easy things they can start doing in your app immediately and have big payoff. * The bold move: Send an adoption report to your exec buyer or champion. This highlights top users, what parts of the product they are/aren't using, and who is not using (Note: this is risky if you have a renewal coming up so experiment before going big.)

The main hard skill that stands out to me for a Customer Success Leader is change management. Because really this hits in 2 different ways in a Customer Success team: 1. You need to coach and guide your team through how to successfully drive change in their customers 2. You will often need to drive change internally. Customer Success is one of the most change-heavy departments as it often evolves as the business and the market does, so being able to get your team on board to an internal change is key. For optional hard skills, I think project management feeds nicely into change management. Often as a CS leader you have a lot of moving pieces and knowing how to organise that and other internal stakeholders is key.

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.

Some of the things I would focus on to up level my CS career: Sales Skills - Developing your sales skills will really elevate you as a CSM. Your ability to influence and strategically drive a conversation to mutually beneficial outcomes is the key to your effectiveness as a CSM. Understand How You Are Measured - You need to fundamentally understand how your individual performance is measured and be able to effectively tie that into your day-to-day activities. Leadership Skills - Leadership skills are not just for formal managers! Your ability to lead others through your influence and expertise is key to your advancement in your career. Product Expertise - This goes beyond just understanding how the product works, but you should fully understand how the product solves your customer's problems. The better you understand both of these, the better you can advocate to the product team about the features or product changes you 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. 

it's unlikely that companies will hire CSMs at a rate anywhere close to where they've been. As such, we need to accelerate our progress through AI toward helping companies scale without hiring additional staff. Companies are using a combination of AI and Digital CS to do 'more with more' (not more with less). So, we are seeing a trend in which companies allocate more resources to operational teams that can drive Digital CS and AI tools to make CS more efficient.