What are the top traits of an excellent Enterprise Customer Success Manager ?

The top traits of an excellent Enterprise CSM are:

• Communication so flawless C-level folks are pleased

• A relationship builder with deep empathy and super high EQ

• Obsession with value delivery so much so that they can leverage relationships to deliver hard messages

• Able to take the long view of building ROI while attending to many details at the same time

On top of all the usual traits of being a great CSM, I think of 3 things when I think of great Enterprise CSMs:

Stakeholder engagement: To me in Enterprise CS this is the ability to confidently communicate with the C*suite, the ability to multi-thread across an organisation and the ability to achieve the buy-in of multiple stakeholders towards a common objective.

Change management: As an Enterprise CSM you're usually dealing with much bigger and more complex organisations, and so you can't take all the action items yourself. This means you've got to get out of the weeds and focus on the bigger picture; driving a change to meet the customer's objective. You've got to be much better at both holding your customer accountable to executing their actions AND guiding them through what they need to do to drive this change.

Project management: Essentially, being great at tracking all the strategies and corresponding actions that need to be completed in order to achieve the customer's objective, as well as being able to communicate this in a clear and concise manner to the customer. Your goal here is to keep everyone on track.