How to Break into Customer Success Management
With the rise of the subscription-based business model, businesses are seeing more and more the impact of their existing customers on their compani’s growth.
As I have been on the front lines of Customer Success in the past 3 years, I have seen how customer success brings a significant positive impact on businesses’ sustainable growth. The successful customers become advocates of your brand and bring new customers through referrals.
If you enjoy consulting businesses and experts in a particular field, and you want to see them succeed, you might be a perfect fit to become a Customer Success Manager.
What do Customer Success Managers do?
I get it. You might be seeing lots of Customer Success job posts or one of your peers getting into the Customer Success space and wondering what this job entails. You are not alone. I get a lot of LinkedIn requests where young professionals are asking what exactly I do on a day to day basis.
Let’s start with the industry that has created this role in the first place, Software as a Service company as known as SaaS companies such as Salesforce, Slack, HubSpot, LinkedIn, Udemy, Cisco, Amazon, and the list goes on and on.
The renewals of these SaaS products are not easy battles as there is always a big competition in the industry, and the customers have still alternatives to choose from. As there is a variety of different product offerings in the market and competitors are making it easy to breeze through the conversions from one service to another, it is getting harder and harder to keep customers loyal to a single service provider in the long term.
This is where Customer Success Managers come to the rescue. To lose an existing customer is way more expensive than acquiring a new customer. If you can’t believe this could be true, here is excellent study research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company, who is also known as the inventor of the net promoter score.
A customer success manager makes sure that the customers get the most out of your product and succeeds at what they do in any business by using your services.
Customer Success Manager role covers a lot of responsibilities ranging from:
Onboarding the clients: If we look at customer success as a whole, there are two significant types of customer success. The first one is way more product focus to help clients get onboard on your company’s services and product. The second one is more towards managing renewals and contractual conversations with your clients. Onboarding, your clients, would be the core part of your job if you are towards the first type of customer success management role. This requires jumping on calls with your clients to walk them through the product or services your company offers. You may need to help with the implementation and integration of the new product with the existing solutions your client is currently using.
Managing account strategy and health: This is the second phase of customer success managers’ engagement with their clients. Once you fully onboard your clients, you want to make sure that your customers are leveraging the product to the fullest. Some of the KPIs could be as simple as several logins a month to more complicated formulas to measure the health of your clients. These KPIs could vary from product to product. That’s why there is no specific way of calculating the health score of a client. This should be highly customized depending on your product and the way your clients are using your product.
Business Reviews: Business reviews provide an excellent opportunity for customer success managers to review the success of your clients with the use of the product and how they drive value by using your product on a day to day basis. If you are a customer success manager who is managing high touch clients (Enterprise or the top revue driver for your company), then you most probably want to run business reviews in person and in a bi-annually or quarterly basis to make sure you reconnect with your key customers and focus on major points below:
Adoption of your product
Usage statistics
Review of success metrics and fundamental strategic changes in your client’s yearly/quarterly plans
Renewal Conversations
Expansion & Upsell or Cross-sell
All these essential components of the role can vary depending on different business models from B2B Saas to pay-as-you-go. However, what keeps a Customer Success Manager awake at night is knowing that there is an existing customer who might not want to renew the contract that quarter.
Breaking Into Customer Success Management
My journey into Customer Success took over a year of working with an excellent Customer Success Manager when I was working in the marketing department as an intern which then transition into a full-time role as a Customer Success Manager, as I have a great passion for understanding the hurdles of customers and helping them succeed wherever I go.
As a pointer to anyone who is looking to move into Customer Success Management, don’t expect it to work out on the first try but always look out for opportunities to show your passion for facing clients and taking the lead in the conversations with your customers. There is a learning curve to becoming a good customer success manager as in any other expertise.
New Grad/Fresh Grad, you might be looking into getting your footstep into Customer Success. Leverage all the school projects you may have done. Showcase your leadership skills in understanding problems of any project you worked on and if you have ever done a project where you went out and talked to external stakeholders, make sure to emphasize that in your interview process. Don’t forget, everything counts.
As a marketing professional, you have expertise in the marketing landscape. You might want to start discoverying the opportunities in the marketing software and technology space. The industry expertise is significant for some companies when they are looking for the next Customer Success Manager to hire for their team. As you are the current customer of these technology providers, you see the pain points first-hand, which makes you a great candidate.
As a marketing professional, you have the advantage of knowing your customer’s persona pretty well. You are already well aware of what kind of problems your company’s product is solving. With the empathy you have in mind, you have the benefit of knowing who your customers and prospects are. In addition to knowing your customers, as a marketing professional, you already know how to communicate a specific message and create different communication strategies depending on your customer profile.
Excellent communication skills are fundamental for the success of any CMS as communication via email, phone calls, or in-person meetings makes up to 70- 80% of the job.
Recommendation: Spend time with colleagues in the sales and customer success department and ask them to have you join one of their calls ranging from discovery to implementation and even renewal conversations and try to shadow them to learn more about their day to day. Also, you might want to work closely with CSMs on building success stories, blog posts, or whitepapers to get to know more about the issues your customers are dealing with.
As a sales professional, CMS may be the next role in your career path to consider as sales professionals interact with CSMs very often and they get the chance to shadow some of CSM’s calls or events get CSMs to help with some of the key clients.
Customers see CSMs as product experts, and they are well aware when the account executives or sales representatives get involved with the customers. The relationship between the customers and sales representatives is mainly about contractual conversations. Therefore, CSMs mostly do not get involved in the pre-sales phase unless the customers think that they will feel more comfortable meeting the potential CSM before signing off the deal.
Recommendation: There is a big difference between a sales pitch presented by a sales rep vs. a product walkthrough led by a CSM. Make sure to spend time with the CSMs in your company and make sure to join their discovery and implementation calls to see how they are presenting the product. Believe me, you will know the outcome from a different way angle, which would be more strategic.
As a Designer, you already have an understanding of the customer journey as you spend a lot of time immersing the customer’s problems and trying to find ways to improve the customer’s experience to create a seamless flow and make their lives easier.
Similar to what I recommended for marketing professionals, try to spend time with clients and get in front of them with the help of product and customer success managers. As the CSM role requires a lot of social and communication skills, spend some time giving the product pitches and walkthroughs to your colleagues and see if you feel comfortable giving these walkthroughs in front of your colleagues or potential clients.
Final Notes
The right mindset for CSMs requires you to be innovative and considerate as CSMs represent the company while trying to satisfy customers’ requests and needs through the product and services. If you think you have a thirst for learning, don’t mind facing clients and spending time with them online/offline while prioritising your time to focus on what matters most by always keeping an analytical mind, then you might be a great fit as a CSM :)
Useful Resources
About Churn Calculations and the nature of SaaS business
Books
Do you have questions and want to learn more about how to break into a customer success management role? Feel free to reach out to me on Linkedin.