Conor Holmes

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 important for a CS leader is to combine these data sources to get a complete picture of what's happening. Within this area, cohort analysis is fundamental. Understanding customer cohorts allows you to segment the customer base into a distinct grouping that shares specific attributes and behaviour, allowing CS leaders and their teams to design dedicated motions to treat these cohorts. Other essential skills include; effective presentation and communication abilities, project management, collaboration with other teams and change management. Out of this list, I would classify project management as a 'nice to have' as there's software out there that can help with this, or if you are fortunate, you will work with a CS or Sales Ops person who can be a game changer for your organisation.

This will depend on how fast the team is expanding. 1 to 3 people will need a different approach than 1 to 10+ Generally, you will want enough processes to quickly get a team member up to speed. Yet, if you are adding only one more in the near term, onboarding could be done via shadowing and close collaboration rather than a heavy process. Here are some recommended processes; * Team member onboarding checklist - description of what the new members need to get started. This should include introductions to all the functions and people relevant to the role. * Set up a buddy system so that the next team member can ask questions * Customer assignment - clarify who the customers they will engage with initially * Design a how-to-work with a new account team and customer process * Create monthly, quarterly and annual expectations and goals * Think about the future roadmap for the team, run scenarios around new customer acquisition and what that means for the specific processes covering segmentation, compensation plans, additional processes and documentation * The future state will have many detailed playbooks for scenario-based customer and internal interactions

Generally, when hiring CS team members, for me, it's all about soft skills; * Deep customer empathy * Great communication skills * Strategic thinking * Time and project management * Active listening * Problem-solving The hard skills are more related to domain knowledge, which can primarily be trained on the job. However, there is a significant dependency on your company's stage and goals. For example, if the company is an early-stage B2B tech software company, you may want a profile that has been there and done that for the first hire. If not in the specific domain, you will need someone who has worked with a similar customer type at a similar scale for the new hire to be productive as fast as possible. Arguably the earlier the stage, the less time you will have for the person to be successful in their role.

The best candidates can relate their experience to how they will be successful in the role. They will have thought about scenario-based questions and be ready to describe how they have tackled specific problems and scenarios. I have found that having a reasonably open presentation brief in the interview process is an excellent way to understand how a candidate unpacks a brief. It's always telling how much research and preparation they have done for the presentation round. One common trait of successful candidates is whether they have used their connections to research the company and the role. If they have no other connections to the company, they ask for the opportunity before the presentation round. If your company is public, you will want to ask questions about the annual report or the latest earnings call. So, in summary, preparation and clarity in relating their experience to the role are good indicators of successful candidates. 

There are many signals of potential churn; at scale, that's the inherent problem with data points; there are so many. Nothing replaces speaking to your customers regularly and digging into what's happening in their environment. Yet as a guide, you could look at the signals/question below, put a score against each and create a simple weighted risk or engagement score against each customer to identify where you need to focus, i.e. healthy vs at risk. There are CS tools out there to optimise this, but it can be done in-house manually without investing in a tool if you want to quickly get something off the ground. * Has there been a successful onboarding? * Has a ticket been submitted in the last x amount of days? * Is the customer expanding? * Are they using specific features? * Has there been a portal login during the last month? * Was there QBR or value-driven engagement held in the previous three months? * Is there an upcoming meeting scheduled with the customer? * Has the champion changed in the last six months? * Has the customer confirmed (verbally or in writing) that they are receiving value from their investment?

This is undoubtedly a challenging scenario. Here are recommendations for smaller customer success teams to follow in this situation. 1. Understand the highest priorities for the business and how that translates to positively impacting customers. There are typically many tasks that CS teams can be doing, yet only some that drive significant internal and external (customer) value. Therefore, focus on those high-value activities that align with your business objectives. 2. Look for friction points in the customer journey and how to solve them. For example, you work on ways customers can self-serve on requests frequently coming to the CS team. 3. Leverage the teams around you to lighten the load and look for ways to automate some of the repetitive requests. 4. Segment the install base so you understand which customers to focus on in the short term. 5. Work through a weekly, monthly and quarterly plan around how to engage your customers. Typically there are a smaller number of customers that will de-risk your business by focusing on them initially. However, if you work in a higher volume, more transactional business, time would be best spent on understanding what touchpoints your customers require at a minimum to ensure they are getting value and building them out by leveraging digital where possible.

What I enjoy most about the customer success role is the lens of seeing customers grow from their initial commitment to successful renewals and expansions where the customer achieves their goals. Throughout this journey, many teams often engage and work with the customer to support this motion. Having a view of the end-to-end customer journey and a strong understanding of the motions that drive customer value is a perspective that can benefit most areas of the business. 

Every company is on some form of journey. Whether you are at an early-stage start-up or have been around for decades, your team needs to understand how what they do daily relates to the journey the company is on and how their daily interactions contribute to the company's goals. For me retaining good talent is ensuring that you have a team that has signed up to go on that journey with you. I operate from a position of transparency, which builds trust. If your team trusts that you are lobbying for their professional growth trajectory and aligning with the company's (and hopefully the customer's) goals. In that case, they are more likely to stay for a relatively substantial period. I'm a huge proponent of helping team members get promoted and grow their careers, and this should be a frequent conversation individually with each team member. 

Having been the first EMEA customer success hire at a couple of high-growth companies, I recommend several steps to tackle the priorities ahead; 1. Ask why the company requires a customer success manager and function, including how your experience can support that. This should be clarified in the interview process and help define your short-term focus areas. 2. Understand the install base - How many customers, what they spend with the company, plus what segment and geography they fall into. Once that view is understood, overlay the current team alignment to understand the existing customer engagement framework. 3. Analyse how your customers engage with you, leveraging whatever available data sources. Some examples may include support ticket usage, login's, no. of meetings, marketing case studies, 4. High-level customer journey mapping - it's good to understand the steps the customer goes through to become classified as a customer. Understand this, plus what happens immediately afterwards. Is there a clear path for how customers will derive value from their investment? Is that consistent across customers, or does it vary by customer cohort? 5. Historical and forward-looking views- review the trends. What's the retention rate currently and like historically? (go back years, if possible, can be helpful), what's the expansion rate? Is the company tracking NRR, or can you get a view of that? What is the forecast for the current quarter plus two next quarters? 6. Interview as many customers as you can, asking what's working, what's not and how you can improve 7. The trends will then give you an initial view of focus areas and recommendations for what the business and customers require you to do in the near to medium term. Next, leverage the customer journey map you did earlier in the process to layer on people, process and technology initiatives to improve the areas of the business you wish to impact. This should allow you to design the blueprint for the proposed customer engagement framework.

Scaling customer success doesn't necessarily mean adding more CS headcount, at least not immediately. Before that, some foundations and a solid go-to-market framework should be implemented. * Seek alignment from executive leadership on the metrics and KPIs the business wants to deliver upon and how this team will be deemed successful, or if that doesn't exist, provide a recommendation. * Create a detailed view of the customer journey and what the engagement framework should be, i.e. what exists today and what should exist in the future, including where there are gaps in documentation and process. * A point to note here is to be agnostic of who does what when going through this process, putting the customer first and focusing on what they need vs defining the roles that will support the customer can provide flexibility around role definition and alignment. * Once the gaps around what's missing are understood, see what resources are available internally to start building processes and documentation. * I would then work through the following steps to determine the next customer success hire or hires. * What gaps in customer onboarding do you have, and will the next hire need to focus on that area? * What are the most important customer segments that need coverage from a CSM? Look at the number of customers per CSM. * Which roles will typically engage with the customer? * How technical do they need to be? * What will the responsibilities of the CSM be (this can vary wildly from company to company) * What does the employee onboarding process look like, and what do you estimate their ramp time to productivity? What do you need to do to condense that process? * Understand your budget in the near term, set expectations around what you can do with that budget, and be explicit about what you cannot do. * Run scenarios based on the company's performance over the following quarters and years, and start planning what you would need for that. Think about customer segments and how to serve them, scaled CS and digital touch points.