I find the best CSMs are:
* Curious - they want to understand “why”. This translates well with customers
as it means they have an innate desire to understand their business. It also
means that they are likely to find the CSM role very rewarding.
* Builders - especially in the early days.
* Empathetic - Empathy has 2 components as a CSM: 1) it helps build a personal
connection 2) it allows a CSM to more successfully advocate on a customer's
behalf internally.
Customer Success Career Path
3 answers
Senior Director, Customer Success, Brex • January 13
VP Customer Success Engineering & Solution Architecture, Oracle • January 16
The best customer success candidates:
• Communication skills: The ability to communicate with customers and all
stakeholders clearly and effectively.
• Customer-centric mindset: The ability to put oneself in the customer's shoes
and understand their needs, pain points, and goals. A genuine passion for
helping customers succeed and a strong sense of ownership over their success.
• Adaptability: The ability to adjust to changing customer needs and priorities
and to be flexible in finding solutions.
• Empathy and active listening: Managing emotions is crucial for effective
conflict resolution, active listening, and building trust.
• Project management skills: Managing customer projects and initiatives
effectively to ensure timely delivery and customer satisfaction.
• Industry knowledge: Understanding industry trends, best practices, and
competitive landscape.
• Analytical skills: The ability to analyze customer data and metrics to
identify trends and opportunities for improvement.
• Product knowledge: A deep understanding of the product or service.
• Problem-solving skills: The ability to identify and resolve customer issues
quickly and effectively.
• Team player: The ability to work well with others and a willingness to
collaborate with other teams and stakeholders to achieve customer success and
effectively communicate and collaborate with other teams and departments within
the organization.
I put this in order of my personal preference. For a mid-level CSR/CSM, I expect
the top five. Industry knowledge will be a great asset and a nice to have. Rest,
I expect them to pick up on the job.
VP, Customer Success, Salesloft • January 24
Customer Success is different in every organization. Some companies see CS as
product experts or an extension of Support. I see Customer Success as
Consultants and Change Agents and so I hire for the skill set that will ensure
they succeed in a role at Salesloft. 3 main things I look for:
Leadership & accountability: Leadership isn’t always leading a team. It’s
ownership of your book of business and ownership of the success of your
customers. It’s being able to coach a customer and push back or manage
expectations, when it’s in their interest. And accountability falls into this
too. Are you accountable for your customer’s success?
Communication skills: This is imperative for anyone in Customer Success. Not
just because we spend a lot of our time customer facing and we need to
articulate key concepts in a succinct way, but because we need to understand how
to adapt our communication style depending on the audience. CSMs need to
understand what matters to a customer and then articulate their message in a way
that will resonate. We also need to sometimes be able to deliver tough messages
in a well thought-out way!
Organization & prioritization: CSMs need to have a method of organizing and
prioritizing their day. When you’re partnering with multiple customers who are
in different phases of maturity or “health”, prioritizing where you spend your
time becomes really important. You also then have multiple stakeholders within
each customer, goals to hit, queries to answer….organization is key!
2 answers
Director of Customer Success, Gainsight • January 12
Almost did not want to answer this question because it would give it away. Haha!
I ask: Has it ever happened to you if a very red customer is moved to your
portfolio? What's your first reaction when that happens? How do you solve for
it?
The answer to the first question tells me whether the CSM's current leadership
trusts them enough to give a red-hot customer. Only the best CSMs get really
risky customers because the leadership believes in the capability of the CSM to
save the customer.
The answer to the second question tells me about the attitude of the CSM. Did
they like the challenge or did it seem overwhelming? What are the words they are
using to describe their state of mind?
The answer to the third question tells me about their rigor and the playbook
they use to solve for tricky customer situations. People can fib in the first
two questions, but the third question is what gives most people away.
The best answer that I received was the following: 'I felt a sense of pride when
my leadership gave me a customer who was about to churn. I know that I have
earned the trust of my leaders and I was determined to rise up the occasion.
Then the person described in detail the situation, tasks, blockers, how they
circumvented objections, etc and finally the results. She completed turned this
customer around. Best interview ever!
Director, Customer Success Operations, mParticle • January 16
Question:
What does customer success mean to you? What is it, what is it not?
Why it's good:
It's open-ended, and gives the candidate a big opportunity to talk about CS as a
field, the success of a customer on an individual basis, and more.
Example of a great answer:
"To me, Customer Success is the driving of client business outcomes by providing
value through our product and services." From there, the best candidates talk
about being able to do this at scale (do more with less!), using technology and
data to drive results, and give examples of how they actually prove ROI to
customers.
1 answer
Director of Customer Success, Gainsight • January 18
One example of a Customer Success Operations framework is the "Customer Success
Management Framework" developed by Gainsight. The framework includes five key
components:
1. Strategy: This component includes defining the overall customer success
strategy, including identifying customer segments, defining key performance
indicators (KPIs), and setting goals for customer retention and growth.
2. People: This component includes building and managing a customer success
team, including roles and responsibilities, hiring and training, and ongoing
performance management. Note that people go beyond just CSMs. People should
also include CS ops, digital CS, enablement and training.
3. Process: This component includes creating and implementing customer success
processes, including onboarding, risk management, digital success customer
health monitoring, and renewal/upsell processes.
4. Technology: This component includes selecting and implementing customer
success technology, such as customer relationship management (CRM) and
customer success platforms, to support the overall strategy and processes.
5. Data: This component includes tracking and analyzing customer data,
including usage data, engagement with your team, customer feedback, and
financial data, to measure the success of the overall strategy and processes
and make informed decisions.
It is worth noting that the framework is flexible and it can be adapted to
different business models, industry, and company size. It also should be aligned
with the overall company strategy and business goals.
2 answers
Director of Customer Success, Gainsight • January 12
Must-have hard skills for a customer success leader include:
* Operationally rigorous and metrics-driven
* Knowledge of customer success best practices and methodologies
* Strong presentation and negotiation skills
* Cross-functional and be able to remove organizational barriers to get stuff
done
* Strong communication and interpersonal skills
* Problem-solving and analytical abilities
* Project management and organizational skills
* Knowledge of customer success best practices and methodologies
* Being reasonably good with numbers
Nice-to-have hard skills for a customer success leader include:
* Sales, Consulting or business development experience
* Technical aptitude and understanding of the company's product or service
* Familiarity with customer relationship management (CRM) software
* Knowledge of data analysis and reporting tools (or having someone reporting
to them who is good with these)
* Familiarity with industry-specific regulations and compliance requirements.
VP Customer Success Engineering & Solution Architecture, Oracle • January 16
Some essential hard skills that are considered must-haves for a customer success
leader include: (must have does not necessarily mean now - you can and should be
trained on the job)
• Analytical skills: the ability to analyze customer data and metrics to
identify trends and opportunities for improvement, as well as a deep
understanding of customer behavior and the ability to create actionable insights
from that data.
• Project management skills: managing customer projects and initiatives
effectively to ensure timely delivery and customer satisfaction.
• Technical skills: navigating technical tools and software used in customer
support and engagement.
• Product knowledge: a deep understanding of the product or service can help
customer success leaders effectively troubleshoot and provide solutions to
customer issues.
• Problem-solving skills: the ability to quickly and effectively identify and
resolve customer issues is crucial for maintaining customer satisfaction and
loyalty.
• Knowledge of Tools (soft and hard skills): CRM (Jira/SFDC/HubSpot/Zoho etc.),
CSM (Gainsight, Einstein, Totango, ChurnZero), and Analytical Tools like
(Tableau, SAS/ PowerBI, and Google Analytics). You should get some training as
part of your onboarding; however, self-help is the best help.
As for nice-to-haves skills:
• Industry knowledge: the ability to stay current on industry developments and
trends, as well as an understanding of best practices in customer success
management.
• Financial analysis skills: the ability to evaluate and analyze financial data,
such as customer revenue, churn rate, and lifetime value, to identify
opportunities for growth and improvement.
• Business Acumen: the ability to understand the company's goals and align
customer success strategies.
• Leadership skills: the ability to inspire, motivate and lead a team of
customer success managers and associates to achieve their goals.
• Communication skills: the ability to clearly and effectively communicate and
collaborate with customers and other stakeholders/inter-department and
intra-department are essential for building and maintaining positive
relationships.
1 answer
Director of Customer Success, Gainsight • January 12
When CSMs are being asked to give the same updates to different people in
different channels because:
1. Either there is no clear system of choice for the customer updates
2. If there is a system of choice, leadership is not enforcing its adoption, so
people are doing their own thing
3. Leadership themselves are not in that system of choice
If the leaders don't do what they preach and expect CSMs to update spreadsheets,
slack channels, CRM, create PPTs, give 1:1 updates, etc, it is a sign of poor
leadership and the CSMs suffer because of that dissonance. That way we can learn
a lot from our sales counterparts. No legit CRO or VP of Sales will ask you to
do updates in an excel sheet if you have a CRM like SFDC because they know that
there needs to be one system to show progress, impact and monitor results.
2 answers
Director of Customer Success, Gainsight • January 12
Weak leadership: A leadership that:
* Does not establish clear RACI for the role
* Do not have clearly defined metrics or a clear path to achieve them
* Does not adequately staff CS operations team to help the CSM team
* Does not invest in tooling to provide people with the right CS tools to do
their job well
* Does not remove organizational barriers for the CSM with cross-functional
leaders such as services, support, products, sales etc.
* Does not establish clear Rules of Engagement to work with other teams (sales,
architects, implementation, services) so that the CSMs don't become a
catch-all
Director, Customer Success Operations, mParticle • January 16
As a customer success manager, one of the most important skills someone can
develop is setting the right expectations and getting alignment between internal
and external stakeholders. The biggest frustrations I've exeperienced come from
when we haven't reached alignment.
The best CSMs do this as part of their process whenever they work with someone
new - internal or external. For example, a CSM's top priorities when being
introduced to a client should be to set expectations about what they can offer
the client in their working relationship (hint: a strategic, goal-oriented
thought partner, not technical support), and to align on the client's business
goals. When a CSM does this successfully they'll have meaningful interactions
with the customer throughout the relationship and can line all the work they do
together up to the client's business goals.
When the CSM ties the value they and their product can provide directly to the
customer's business goals, they prove the relationship to be important and
ensure the renewal.
What's frustrating is when they DON'T reach alignment. We've all had an
experience similar to this one: you start the client meeting, introducing
yourself and wanting to learn more about the customer's business, when suddenly
the customer derails. He says something like, "hey, before we talk about that I
was wondering, how do I pull a report from xyz product?" It puts the CSM in a
difficult and frustrating position. On one hand, you want to be helpful. And
let's be real, you're going to show them how to pull the report. On the other,
you have so much more strategic value to offer the customer than providing
technical Q&A. If you're not careful, you could spend the entire conversation
answering tactical questions. What's worse is you will now have misalignment
between the high level value you can provide and what the client will expect
from your relationship, and you'll leave the meeting with no deeper insight into
their business for the future.
However, the best CSMs can use situations of misalignment as opportunities. "Oh!
You'd like to pull a report on the weekly scheduler activities? I can definitely
help with that. So that I make sure we do it in the best way, can you help me
understand what you're going to do with the report?" Or, "the product doesn't
currently have the ability to export that information, but we do have a lot of
ways you can work with it. Can you help me understand what you'd like to do so
we can work together on it?" The CSMs can then use their responses to dig deeper
into the customer's goals and daily workflows, and be a partner in
problem-solving and achieving business goals.
2 answers
Director of Customer Success, Gainsight • January 12
Growth opportunities abound for really effective and successful CSMs.
* Jungle GYM: We have seen and heard of Customer Success Managers moving into
literally every department - Training, Marketing, Product, Analytics,
Operations, Consulting, Professional Services, HR and more. (Check out this
link to know more about the Jungle Gym concept of career progression:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-career-jungle-gym-matters-now-more-than-ever-pattie-sellers/
* Individual Contributor progression: We have also seen CSMs, thrilled to
remain ICs and become Principal CSMs or equivalent. Usually, these CSMs will
super-specialize and are responsible for highest ARR and/or most strategic
customers.
* Management progression: Skilled people can advance quickly, especially when
experienced CS professionals are in short supply. We even know a few people
that have gone from CSM to CCO in a very short period (2-3 years). Inside the
companies that have a successful CS practice, there is a growing level of
attention that comes to the function, even to the individual CSM. If you are
OKAY with a job where the CEO asks, in good or bad circumstances, 'Who is the
CSM on that account?', you'll be just fine. Typical management path > CSM >
Sr CSM > Manager of CS > Director of CS > VP of CS > CCO.
Director, Customer Success Operations, mParticle • January 16
There are so many career paths for a Customer Success Manager! I don't view the
CSM's path as necessarily linear, but a "typical" one might be:
1. Customer Success Associate
2. Customer Success Manager
3. Senior or Enterprise Customer Success Manager
4. Strategic Customer Success Manager
5. Manager of Customer Success
6. Director of Customer Success
7. Head of Customer Success
That said, there are a lot of different specializations, such as Customer
Success Operations, Renewal Management, or large-scale Customer Success
(sometimes called 1:many or "digital"). These specializations are great goals
for someone who has been in Customer Success for several years and would like to
advance in paths that are not necessarily management.
1 answer
Director of Customer Success, Gainsight • January 17
Here are some core skills:
- Being an established expert in your field or are you making an attempt to get
there with certifications, answering questions in your community, answering
internal questions, etc?
- Being cross-functional with sales, services, support and product counterparts
- Work in lock-step with your sales counterparts for renewals, upsells and
cross-sells. Have your sales team vouch for you!
- Thriving in the face of a challenge: Does your leadership trust you to give
you the most demanding customers because they know you will turn them around?
- Operational excellence: How do you stand out? Are you able to call out
organizational barriers that are stopping the customer from delivering value?
Are you helping your customers achieve ROI?
- Process excellence: Are you following all the processes laid down by your
leaders?
- Metrics over-achievement: Are you over-achieving your metrics?
- Team mentoring: Are you helping your immediate team members and your broader
team in the face of a technical or strategic challenge? Do you take the time out
for mentoring? Are you an established expert in your field or are you making an
attempt to get there with certifications, answering questions in your community,
answering internal questions, etc?
2 answers
Director of Customer Success, Gainsight • January 12
Metrics
- Gross Retention of your book of business
- Net retention of your book of business
Leading indicators that you are doing your job well:
- ROI delivered: We look at how many goals of the customers we have accomplished
and how much percentage of customers do have an ROI delivered in the last 365
days. Note these goals are about value delivered to the customer and not the
goal of your organization with the customer.
- Higher Usage/Adoption (if reported and tracked) as compared to your segment
- Stakeholder Alignment: Are you meeting your customers regularly and do you
have a multi-threaded relationship
Intangibles:
- How do you run your EBRs? Are you well prepared? Are you making sure that the
right people from both sides are joining and is it a good use of everyone's
time? Is your EBR valuable or ticking the box?
- Does your leadership trust you to give you the most demanding customers
because they know you will turn them around?
- Are you establishing trust with your customer? Are your customers vouching for
you?
- Do your sales counterparts vouch for you? Are you a good partner?
- Do you have a clear plan for your customers? What will make them successful?
- Are you able to call out organizational barriers that are stopping the
customer from delivering value?
- Are you an established expert in your field or are you making an attempt to
get there with certifications, answering questions in your community, answering
internal questions, etc?
Director, Customer Success Operations, mParticle • January 16
The best metrics to use to justify a pay raise are those that tie to revenue and
direct value impact (internally and customer-facing). I like to keep a private
list (for example, Asana) of the projects I've worked on and my contributions to
them so I can refer to it during performance reviews, promotion advocacy, etc.
Revenue metrics - must be quatifiable:
* Net Revenue Retention in my portfolio
* Expansion revenue
* Renewal win rate (this is a ratio or percentage, not a $ amount)
* CSQLs provided to sales (Customer Success Qualified Leads)
Value Impact:
* Significant contributions of customer advocacy events, including customer
speakers / event participation, referencability, creation of case studies
* Creation of 1:many customer-facing value drivers, such as webinars, podcasts,
training series, enablement materials
1 answer
Director of Customer Success, Gainsight • January 16
There are several ways to break into the tech industry as a customer success
manager:
1. Look for growth opportunities in your existing organization: Even if you
start in a different role, look for opportunities to take on more
responsibilities related to customer success, and to demonstrate your skills
and interest in the field. Shadow a CSM if you can for a day
2. Education: Pursue certification in a relevant field (Gainsight's Pulse+ as
an example). Read resources available online on Customer Success and attend
webinars that Gainsight and other organizations organize related to CS.
3. Networking: Attend industry events, meetups, and conferences to connect with
professionals in the tech industry and learn about job openings. There are
several meet up and online forums available.
4. Gain experience: Look for entry-level positions or internships in customer
success or related fields to gain experience and build your resume.
5. Build a strong online presence: Create a LinkedIn profile and share relevant
content and insights to showcase your expertise and interests in the tech
industry.
6. Get a mentor: look for experienced people in the field who can guide and
mentor you, this will help you get a better understanding of the industry,
the role and the skills you need to be successful.