What is a good baseline ARR and account volume for an Enterprise Customer Success Manager?

Everyone always wants to know a baseline for ARR or number of accounts for CSMs, no matter what the segment. I think it is more important to understand how to model that based on your own business! I'm not going to say that an ECSM needs to have 10 accounts because it might be 20 or it might be 1... so here's how you figure it out! You will recognize this as bottoms-up capacity planning.

1. Create a spreadsheet with the first section being internal overhead (team meetings, updating an CSP or CRM, trainings, supporting sales, etc.) hours per month

2. Subtract that internal overhead to calculate how much time remains for customer work (most models will use a 200 hour month)

3. Create sections for these time periods: weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually

4. Within each section, list out the expectations for work for the customer segment. For example, weekly might be the CSM looking at usage metrics, quarterly might be gathering product feedback and reporting out on where their feature requests are falling in the product roadmap.

5. Don't forget to add in ad hoc time you know on average is needed for each customer; you can ask your top CSM to look at their calendar and recommend an average. Likely it is something like 8 hours a month.

6. Assign time to each line item and build the formula to show the amount of hours per month for that activity

7. Add up all the monthly hours

8. Now do the simple math. Let's say after internal overhead, you have 180 hours left. If an Enterprise Customer needs, on average, 20 hours a month, 9 customers is the maximum.

This type of modeling also helps you cut down on internal overhead and recalibrate if all the scheduled events are essential to making a customer successful.