CS headcount stalled or was slashed in 2023, and teams were asked to do more with less.
Here's how our most successful partners have delivered best-in-class outcomes with flat headcount.?
Spoiler alert: the answer is NOT to tell your whole team to "just work harder."
The key is to be proactive?/ strategic vs?reactive / tactical.
Here are 8 practical ways to accomplish this:
- Measure and communicate tradeoffs: Because so much of CSM work is distributed across tools, teams and stakeholders, the true impact of your CSM team is often under-appreciated. Your best bet for gaining cross-functional alignment and buy-in for your requests (ex: additional headcount, product support, software purchases, etc.) is to have clean data that represents exactly where your team's efforts are going. This data will give you the necessary talking points so that you can get what you need to run your org. If nothing else, it'll provide clarity as to what tradeoffs leadership can expect if you are unable to get additional support.
- Spend time "working" vs "tracking" your work: In order to accomplish #1, many teams spend significant resources tracking time and running complex analyses on that data. In the age of AI and APIs, this is a huge waste of time. Tools like CultureScience can help you automatically measure where your time is going, whether you're hitting your client milestones, and what's getting in the way. Don't waste time tracking - prioritize doing the actual work.??
- Measure proactive vs reactive communication: It's essential to know how much of your team's effort is going to triage vs proactive strategy. The more they can be proactive, the more value your team will help clients unlock - retention & expansion will follow.
- Delegate "support" tasks if possible:?Regarding #3, any client that has your CSM's email address is more likely to ping the CSM vs a generic support email. Build the necessary motion and train your team to route support questions accordingly - otherwise support emails will become your team's day. If you don't have a support?function then templatize responses to the most commonly asked questions so your CSMs don't waste precious time rewriting the same email over and over.
- Manage internal collaboration time:?Most CSMs spend 40-50% of their time communicating internally vs with clients. Is your team getting pulled into sales conversations, marketing events, support tickets, etc.?The more you can pinpoint where internal communication is going, the more you can reduce overhead and focus on?driving client outcomes.
- Don't let the squeaky client get the grease: CSMs want to help, and as a result they will often treat a request from a $1M client as urgently as a request from a $1,000 client. You need a system for holding yourself and your team accountable so that effort aligns with revenue upside. In a world of limited time / resources, we need to be discerning with where we spend our time.
- Bridge silos to identify churn risk:?CSMs don't have time to read every support ticket, and support staff are not always equipped to read between the lines / escalate issues until it's too late. Don't rely on manual flagging - use AI to notify your CSMs of any negative sentiment tickets so that they can nip developing issues in the bud before it's too late.
- Plan resources using true capacity vs golden ratios: If your headcount is flat, you need to find bandwidth where you may not know it exists. Teams who rely on static ARR-to-Rep ratios for account assignment leave ~20% untapped capacity on the table.?Why? Not all accounts are created equally - two people often have the same book of business but entirely different capacities. You don't need to hire an in-house data scientist to identify this untapped capacity, just use a tool like CultureScience to help with this. You'll be able to unlock significant bandwidth within your existing headcount.
These are just 8 of the strategies our partners use CultureScience to accomplish.
I'm excited to continue working with our partners in 2024 to help them deliver outsized outcomes!
