AMA: Confluent Director, Customer Success EMEA, Conor Holmes on Developing Your Customer Success Career

I wouldn't present metrics to ask for a raise. Firstly, I would understand how my company typically provides salary increases and align with that process. In the interim, I would look for opportunities to drive impact for the business and look for growth opportunities, for example, Take on a new project and quantify the impact of that project Make a substantial contribution to a company initiative Review the company OKR's and figure out how you can create results against them If you feel you are ...Read More

It's still a misunderstood function, and there are many different ways to deploy customer success, leaving a consistently referenceable best practice methodology challenging. From my perspective, CS should not be seen as a cost centre but as a function that can drive retention and growth and impact a business's bottom line. It's crucial that CS leaders are data-orientated and that they can use metrics to demonstrate why companies should deploy CSMs, scale resources, and other relevant roles that ...Read More

Levelling up will also mean ensuring you consistently deliver excellent work against your core competencies in your role. If you are unsure whether you are doing this, ask your colleagues and manager for feedback. Make sure you put in regular reviews to discuss this if the company doesn't have a cadence. My main suggestion to level up is to focus on developing business acumen. Understanding how the business works will help you tie your day-to-day activities to outcomes and impact on the business ...Read More

I answered a similar question for new grads looking to get into a CSM role, the same advice applies. Learn about the role. I have included some links below that can help with this. Network (don't be afraid, I've found the majority of people are more than willing to offer guidance and advice) Ask for a mentor Look for internships https://www.csinfocus.com/community https://www.customersuccess.community/feed https://gaingrowretain.com/ https://hub.practicalcsm.com/ https://catalyst.io/community/co ...Read More

The attributes/skills of the most successful CSMs that I have seen are as follows; Customer Empathy: They genuinely understand how to internally represent the customer's challenges and what the organisation needs to do to ensure customer projects are successful over the long term. Clear and concise communication - they can distil complex problems into easily consumable summaries. Timely and detailed follow-up - surprising, but this is something I see often lacking! Analysis and recommendations - ...Read More

This depends on the type of product your company sells. However, I would say it's essential that CSMs deeply understand the product and its benefits. I would ensure I know the technical and value-proof points for a customer using your product across the life cycle. Onboarding - what technical and commercial proof points can I look at to understand if a customer has successfully been onboarded? Nurture - in the stages post onboarding, what do technical gates and commercial success metrics look li ...Read More

I see several trends happening; Business models will continue to evolve to be more customer-centric based on usage. This means that landing the customer will be aligned to a specific skill set, but there will be more overlap across AEs and CSMs to lead the customer from the initial landing to growing them into larger customers. I see that either CSMs or AEs will lead the relationship in the future, not both and that their KPIs will be more aligned towards customer retention and expansion. CSMs w ...Read More