AMA: Hook Head of Customer, Natasha Evans on Customer Success Soft and Hard Skills

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.

It's better to have the right soft skills, always! In fact, I'd go one step further than that and say it's even more important to have the right attitude/mindset first. Because if someone has the right mindset, and they're hungry to learn and take feedback on board (we call that Growth Mindset) then the soft skills and the hard skills can always be taught.

Great question! Retaining great CS talent is the same as retaining any good talent, but I do think that there are a few extra things to consider... The role of a CSM can often be high pressure when things go wrong and little recognition when things go really right. So I would always go out of my way to recognise great talent at every opportunity. That could be everything from nominating them for High Achiever's Club and shouting them out at company meetings, all the way to dropping them a meaningful message to thank them for something they did. I also think that more often than not, CSMs love the variety of the job and the variety in skills that goes with it. Which means they often want to learn and grow. So clear PDPs with each CSM and helping them develop in new areas is key. Finally, CSMs want achievable targets and they want to be rewarded for all the hard work that they put in. So design an incentive plan that does just that.

There's only one that springs to mind and it's "Put the customer at the centre of everything you do". If every department thinks customer first, then the whole company wins, as well as the customers!

Soft skills * Communication - (This is everything from how to communicate with an Executive, to how to deliver a training session, how to manage expectations with customers in the right way and get their buy-in to a Success Plan) * Organisation & prioritisation - More and more is expected of CSMs as the role progresses, balancing time and workload effectively and focusing on the right customers at the right time is key * Storytelling with data - As we get more and more data heavy, CSMs need to be able to interpret the data into insight for their customers and explain it in a way that the customer is able to understand and take action, to influence their goals Hard skills * Change management * Project management * And increasingly tech expertise in CRMs, CS tech (like Hook!) and Sales Engagement software

Relationship management is where Customer Success and Sales meet in the middle, but I liked the other skills that I'd develop in CS like project management and change management as well as that more consultative focus.

I want to first understand which activities or metrics correlate to churn, renewal and expansion. Then I know how to target my CS team and which activities to track off the back of that, as well as which metrics I need to keep a close eye on. So I don't think there's an easy one size fits all answer here. But I certainly think that broad strokes I will be tracking Health/adoption,GRR and NRR wherever I am, as well as understanding where you're losing WHY and WHO you're losing - is it specific company types, sizes, tenure etc.