AMA: Apollo.io Director of Customer Success, Nina Wilkinson on Scaling a Customer Success Team

In PLG, CS is an adoption & activation engine, not a renewal ops team, the volume is just too high and the juice isn't worth the squeeze here. You need to focus on activation paths, in‑app nudges, growth ops, and expansion playbooks driven by product signals. Named CSMs exist only for strategic accounts; everyone else is owned by automated journeys and proactive comms. You'll be partnering far more closely with your product team to build and iterate on this motion. There are structural diffe ...Read More

I like to think of CS teams as 3 distinct phases (rowboat, sailboat, cruise ship). Each phase is going to be different to navigate and progressively harder to quickly change directions. The Rowboat: At a Series A/early stage company you need a versatile CSM (a jack/jill of all trades hero) who does all of the things–renewals, adoption, onboarding, VOC work, and helps you build out your V1 of your customer journey. You're a small crew– founder and likely 1 CSM. Be scrappy, track your forecasting ...Read More

For me culture is paramount. If you have a bad or toxic culture on your team, you won't be successful. Especially at an early stage company/team, your culture is the single most important driver of success you can have. Early stage companies have to pivot all the time, change segments, change product focus, change process. It's exhausting. It's frustrating. It can be hard to rally your team around that change or the frequency of changes. But if your team is bought in on you as a leader and you a ...Read More

For me, without a doubt, it's Logo Retention (LRR), especially in the SMB/MM space. While everyone's chasing that shiny Net Revenue Retention number, many leaders are using expansion revenue to paper over cracks in their core retention. LRR is the ultimate truth teller: it tells you if customers are sticking with your product purely because of the value it delivers. In the current market where teams are having to reduce headcount, LRR will tell you whether they value your product and your team's ...Read More

It's not really series dependent, but if you're just starting out and have less than 100 renewals my go to tools in the tech stack are the following: Front- love them for shared email inboxes (great if you have a few team members or a pooled CS model and need folks to jump in and out of email threads. I also love it for it's internal messaging function. It's a great way to help coach your team on responses for trickier situations. Real time feedback is always best. Vitally- hands down one of the ...Read More

I've actually seen founders make two costly mistakes when building their CS team. Hiring: Too early (burning cash on overhead you don't need) Too late (watching churn rates climb while you're heads-down on product development) Building your CS team is a balancing act between those two. And no, there isn't a magic number on when you should hire. The answer isn't "at 50 customers" or "at $1M ARR." The real trigger is founder pain and business complexity. I recommend starting the hiring process whe ...Read More

I've lived this one and it was PAINFUL. The biggest mistake for me as I've grown teams is not hiring my first line manager fast enough. At one point I was doing 18 1:1s per week. Yes, 18 of them. It got to a breaking point where I was so over extended that I needed to hire, but didn't have the bandwidth to invest in recruiting. I ended up having to cut down 1:1s to every other week which was a crummy experience for my direct reports and I wasn't able to give my best as a manager. So learn from m ...Read More

It's absolutely a balancing act. I broke down the specifics of how we use AI on our CS teams to improve efficiency and enable us to hire more strategically and we discussed this a little bit in an earlier AMA but generally speaking, no one wants to speak to more robots. How many times have you been on a customer support number screaming "agent! agent!! AGENT!!!" in the vain hope that you'll actually get to talk to a person. AI isn't going to replace human connection, on the contrary it should ac ...Read More

I say this a lot when we're building out capacity planning and hiring budgets, is the juice worth the squeeze? You only have a limited number of dollars to spend on your department, you have to stretch it to maximize the number of accounts you can help and take care of well. When you're investing those dollars to a specific segment are those dollars going to be well spent (i.e. are you going to have high renewal returns or increased expansion dollars), is that juice worth the squeeze. As you're ...Read More

I look at 3 metrics in addition to the standard GRR, NRR, and CSAT; LRR, Speed to Adoption, and multi-product line adoption. LRR (logo retention): especially in the SMB space, where volatility is high, whether a customer chooses to stay with you despite layoffs or headcount changes, is important and shows the value of your product to them as the business. Your CSM can't help prevent a layoff, but they can stress where your product helps them. Knowing what %age of your customers are staying on th ...Read More