Developing Your Customer Success Career

The most important skills for a Customer Success Manager are: Ability to conduct discovery with a customer. In sales, we've heard the phrase "Always be closing." In Customer Success, we should Always

Operational Rigor: ‘The buck stops with me' Understand, follow and contribute to processes Deliver on metrics Ownership of customer situations Problem-solving ability: 'I am knowledgeable about my b

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 skil

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 negotiati

As a CS leader, it's critical to have the ability to analyse, interpret and understand data. Most organisations have various data sources to understand what is happening in the customer base. What's i

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

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 t

One example of a Customer Success Operations framework is the "Customer Success Management Framework" developed by Gainsight. The framework includes five key components: Strategy: This component incl

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 c

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 frus

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 hel

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: Customer Success Associate Customer Success Manager Sen

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, Pr

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 question

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 project

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 custo

There are several ways to break into the tech industry as a customer success manager: Look for growth opportunities in your existing organization: Even if you start in a different role, look for oppo