9 Questions To Ask Candidates for Your First Head of Customer Success
The good news today in SaaS, is there are tons of veterans out there. Including tons of customer success veterans.
Just a few years ago, it was hard to find enough folks with CS experience, both at a senior level and at a mid-tier level. Not today. The market is full of folks with 2-10 years of CS experience. And in today's world, many are fine or happier working for a distributed company.
So not only can you now find folks to join you in CS -- you can do so far outside of the traditional tech hubs of SF Bay Area, etc..
But the bad news is, many can’t really do the job a start-up needs at a leadership level, especially as your first CS lead. I’ve recently watched a number of first VP/Head/Directors of Success hires just not work out … so I thought it might be a good time to update our quick interview checklist from a few years back.
In particular, being an individual contributor customer success professional does not always breed leadership. And doing CS at a large company is often so process-oriented that these leaders, while impressive, after often too-far removed from the product to solve many of the problems you need solved in the earlier days.
So here are 9 questions that will tease out what type of candidate they are, what they know, and what they really can do for you:
- What are the most important goals / KPIs for Customer Success at a company of our size and stage? You’ll learn if they focus most on account growth vs. retention vs NPS growth, and in what order. And if they can “hold a number” in some fashion … or not.
- How often should we Zoom, visit, and check-in, with which customers? If they don’t get out of the office (at least pre and post Covid), that can be OK for smaller deals (<$20k). But it’s not a good fit for bigger deals and enterprise Customer Success.
- How do you think Customer Success should work with the Sales and Product teams? If they don’t have an answer, that may mean they don’t really know how to work at a SaaS start-up. Later, CS becomes its own process island. But in the early days, they should be at the vanguard of driving product changes, as well as being pulled into deals by sales that want help with more complex prospect needs.
- If we are on a tight budget, how should we staff the CS team? You’ll learn how they think about coverage ratios, and how much work they are willing to do themselves — if any.
- Tell me about the top 3 customers you lost. What, if anything, could you have done to save them? If they can’t answer this well, they aren’t a senior candidate. Move on.
- How do you measure the potential size of an account? How do you know which ones can be grown, and which can’t? If they don’t know, account expansion isn’t their strength. Maybe OK if you need support-on-steroids. Not OK if you want to drive to industry-leading net negative churn.
- When you visit customers, what sort of agenda do you like to use? If they don’t have a great answer, they haven’t really done enterprise customer success.
- How well do you tend to get to know the product’s ins-and-outs? Customer success after $10m-$20m ARR becomes a lot about process, and not too much about product limitations. But it’s the exact opposite in the early days. Don’t hire folks in customer success that don’t like to hack the product before $10m ARR or so.
- Can you show me your QBRs and other documentation you’ve built for customers? You can peer straight into their mind when you get these docs.
So many folks in CS these days are either (x) reactive or (y) not close enough to product. That can work later, as part of a larger CS team.
That doesn’t work for most start-ups, though.
SaaS executive, Investor, CEO of Balboa Solutions
4 年How have they grouped customers that need high touch separately from those that can be successful with a low touch engagement? And how have they used technology to scale low touch? This helps to make sure you can get someone that is experienced working with the types of customers you serve. There's a wide variance of experience in CS leaders based on company stage and whether or not you serve enterprise or smb customers. Jason this is ??
Product Designer
4 年Thank you, Mert Aktas!
Head of Marketing at UserGuiding | Reforge alumni, growth enthusiast, and startup advisor.
4 年It's safe to say that CS is in the middle of our team now, feeding all of us (marketing, sales, product) with very valuable insights directly from our users. Thanks for this. Suzan please check this out as well