AMA: GitLab Senior Director Customer Success Operations, Jeff Beaumont on Scaling a Customer Success Team

This can vary wildly. Areas It depends… CSM/Pooled CSM Digital Renewals Support Professional Services Implementation Education Operations/strategy Enablement So when you look at all those, a CS org structure could be complex even with a small team! My recommendation is to start small, ensure your definition of success and annual strategy is clear for where you need to go based on your product/service, is aligned with other teams, avoids the errors of 1) being overly complex, 2) being non-ambitio ...Read More

Before I start, know this is a difficult question to answer. Here is how I approach it: Review the job description and make sure I understand it Review it with my manager to ensure we're aligned. The point of this is uncovering any gaps between you and your manager Note: if there are others involved, you should make sure they're aligned too! Establish a priority list. I prefer Google Sheets/Excel so they can be stack ranked with health status (red, yellow, green) Other fields Description (in 1-2 ...Read More

We've used several methods, depending on the size and type of the company. Roadshows. One of the more effective yet costly in terms of time and useful for larger changes. We share a slide deck, explain the process, and run an AMA Join team calls and/or join leadership calls to walk them through the changes, collect feedback, and share learnings A monthly (or quarterly) "team update" doc that is shared in company standard mediums (e.g., Slack, email, message board...). This is usually a collectio ...Read More

Expectations will likely be tricky for you and leadership as you both may be figuring it out together. This highlights many opportunities and risks. Understand if the role expects you to be primarily a technical CSM, a customer advocate (share feedback internally), expand CSM (more like an account manager to grow/renew accounts), a renewal manager, or other focus. This will significantly help you understand what the job is explicitly or implicitly stating Continue to check in with leadership on ...Read More

The most important part: do not be single-threaded. Make sure you build connections with multiple people at the organization. Ask your champion who else you should talk with. If you struggle to get the champion to divulge that, share tidbits, insights, and other recommendations so your champion wants to carry those into the organization. From there, run EBRs with your champion and slowly, over time, build the trust to ask for other contacts. Ask again. During the renewal cycle, get in front of p ...Read More

Do things that scale. I had a CEO who said the perfect sized organization was an org of exactly one. Once you went beyond that, communication became critical because you had to share information and gain alignment between two people, then three, then four... So when going to multiple people, establish: Consistency: concern yourself with areas such as playbooks, how/when you reach out to customers Operations: ensure there's an agreed-upon funnel or customer journey that everyone uses (again, for ...Read More