AMA: Splunk Director of Customer Success, Ed Sowden on Developing Your Customer Success Career

There is no typical career path for a CSM. Some people may want to go into management and some may want to become a senior or strategic CSM. I've seem many CSM's grow their careers in leadership and go from CSM to VP of CS. Likewise I know a lot of CSM's who love working with customers and just want to become as senior as they can as an individual contributor. I've also seen many CSM's move into thought leadership, sales and solution engineering to name a few roles. The CSM role is broad and pro ...Read More

Two Key Factors That Have Accelerated My Career in Customer Success 1. Network Building and maintaining a strong professional network has been invaluable. This means staying in contact with colleagues, leaders, and team members from previous roles, attending industry events, meeting peers in the Customer Success space, and joining mentoring or sponsorship groups. You never know when you might need your network's support-or when they might need yours. Networks don't just open doors; they create a ...Read More

For me the two most important skills above all else for a CSM are Resilience and Problem Solving. In your role as a CSM you are the are the face between the customer and the company. Which means you bare the brunt of both the customer when things aren't going well and are the voice of the business when a message has to be delivered good or bad. Resilience allows you to adapt, recover, and keep performing well when faced with challenges, setbacks, or constant change. In customer-facing, fast-pace ...Read More

Great question. Customer Success has been asking itself this for the past two years: Are we primarily a revenue-generating function? Are we a technical team focused on product health and adoption? Or are we a paid-for service offering? Ultimately, there is no single "right" answer - what works for one vendor may not work for another. Take Splunk as an example: it's a highly complex, technical product. So what's the right CS model for Splunk? Should it lean toward technical expertise, commercial ...Read More

It's very feasible to break into the tech industry as a CSM without prior experience. The key thing is to understand what the tech provider is looking for from the role and what skills are critical. Generally most CSM roles will include some of the following focuses: Onboarding Adoption Retention Growth Stakeholder Management - Internal & External It's important to think about the skills you have today and how you would map these to the role you are considering applying for. I've hired CSM's ...Read More

This will depend on how you have set your customer success function up. Are you using CS to drive growth and retention, are you setting up the function to drive technical adoption and health or are you a paid for service? In my view the KPI's below are important to consider: Customer Retention - metrics such as renewal rate allow you to focus the department/team on retaining the customer base which is crucial for the growth of any successful business. Growth - metrics such as NRR, Pipe Gen, serv ...Read More