Customer Success Career Path

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.

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.

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!

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!

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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. 

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. 

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. 

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?

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?

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

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.