Are technical skills necessary to be an effective CSM?

This somewhat depends on the company and its products. In general I  would say that having technical skills can be helpful for a CSM…an additional plus in the trusted advisor role.

The CSM's primary responsibility is to develop strong relationships with the customers key stakeholders, understand their business objectives and requirements, and ensure they are achieving their desired outcomes and obtaining value from the company's products or services.

Having some technical knowledge can be an advantage if the company's products are very technical and / or complex. If the CSM has some technical proficiency then this can enable the CSM to better understand the customer's challenges / problems and provide more effective solutions. This elevates the CSM as the trusted advisor in the eyes of the customer. These skill can be particularly useful when looking for expansion opportunities within their existing assigned accounts 

The technical skills should be secondary to the softskills required of a CSM as I described elsewhere.  I believe the technical skill should be more broad and solution oriented rather than in-depth knowledge on a product or technology. The CSM should be mindful that they don’t get pulled into areas that are out of scope for the CSM such as technical support and sales engineering.

No technical skills are not always necessary to be an effective CSM, however having a basic understanding of technical concepts can he helpful particularly if working in certain subsegments of the tech industry. The level technical skill required is also to a degree dependent on the company and the scope of the role.

Some CS roles in deeply technical companies may require you to have a level of familiarity with technical concepts however for many CS roles this is not the case. However in either scenario familiarity with the product or service being supported can be beneficial as as a CSM while you may not be responsible for technical troubleshooting you will be required to have a good understanding of the product offering and will need to be capable having conversations with customers about the products features, functions and capabilities.

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 like for customers who have successfully deployed your product?

• Expansion opportunities—What are the technical and commercial prompts for potential expansion? For example, more usage and testing of the x or y feature could allow customers to take advantage of additional platform benefits.

• Risk mitigation—Focusing on the customer's long-term goals, I would understand the technical aspects that represent they are getting value in combination with spending/usage and the signals that point to a lack of or decline in value realisation.

This answer is entirely dependent on the what field/product the CSM works with, who their target persona is and what resources are available based on company maturity. For someone dealing in cybersecurity, working mostly with CISOs, technical skills are more important. For someone in general CRM, maybe not so much. My feeling is that process experts > product experts. I find the best CSMs have strong business acumen, can step into a customer relationship and understand where there is opportunity to either (1) inject their product into existing process to create efficiency or (2) suggest a new process built around their product that drives better outcomes. That is less about deep technical knowledge and more about an ability to understand what value means to your customers and how your product can deliver that. Assuming that you have resources available to you that allows you or the customer to solve a technical issue when they arise, your true value is driving results vs. troubleshooting.