???"Can Our CSM Team be a One-(Wo)Man Department?"???

Your company finally knows that CSM is the right strategy for technology adoption and growth and is ready to make a seemingly risky, yet right decision and establish a CSM department!

Most of the time at Customer Success Institute we lead such conversations with Chief Executive Officers who at the early stage of a startup wear multiple hats in business, with CSM being one of many roles they have to fill to facilitate the business growth.

CEOs who initiate such conversations, both male and female, are oftentimes in a position of straight-A students, brilliant minds who aspire to nothing less than excellence, and who finally came to a conclusion that now it is not about their ability to know the right answers to the right questions. It is now a matter of capacity, since there is that much business and adoption growth one person working even 300 hours a month can generate.

The business growth has stalled, the team is getting nervous about the future, the CEO is getting nervous about the dead-end problem where more business requires more expense, and more business growth is required to allow more expense.

Customer Success Management holds a very complex business operations role, glueing cross-functionally between technology, business/sales and product marketing powers of the company. You can find my expert view on how this works exactly in my earlier piece What Is Customer Success Management, At All?

To complete the puzzle of the function setup, companies spend fortunes on hiring, onboarding and training their CSM officers, to only find out they have hired the wrong talent.

Our industry research, performed across 100+ tech-driven company leaders in 2021 and 2022, indicates that it takes on average 3 months to hire a CSM, after which the talent has 1-3 months to complete onboarding. And yet, with all the expense of the process, in new CSM teams 20-40% of hires fail in the first 12 months. This happens due to a variety of reasons: poor job fit, inability to onboard on time, inability to own and manage client business relationships, lack of the English language fluency and lack of auto-didactic skills have been reported by business executives responsible for hiring as the most frequent reasons for early departure of CSM hires.

Some companies experiment with delegating to Customer Support perform CSM together with Support. Note that Customer Success Management is NOT Customer Support. Your CSM officer needs to sit in meeting rooms with both your internal and external key stakeholders, he or she needs to talk business - both your business, and, more importantly, the business of your customers. Customer Support, on the other hand, has a higher weight of technical capabilities and when it comes to complex technology questions, Support talent can develop into Tier 1, 2, 3, 4 etc. Support Engineers. You need to make the career landscape very clear to each function and their future in your company.

Both internal and external transitions from Support to CSM often fail because the character of support is reactive (answering requests, closing tickets), while CSM implies proactive outreach. CSM, while not selling, are measured and brought onboard with the clear goal of increasing the technology adoption and consecutive business growth. If you have a great support person in your team, and they want to move up to a CSM department, make it clear to them that their KPIs will change, and their behavior on the job needs to change for them to be successful. "Closing tickets" is not a good KPI for CSM.

With the right CSM, though, business growth won’t take long to appear. The customers who already forgot your company's name will suddenly reach out to increase their volume of service. The product features that your product held in the backlog of the backlog will suddenly get released because your customers want them! You get exposed to new amazing challenge: as your clients finally feel the love, care and attention from your company as the CSM starts to properly own the relationship, ask the right questions and set the right goals for each clients’ success and development plans, you will start seeing more opportunities that are coming from your very own customers.

Are you ready for it? Are you ready to need to create new features for the clients who, invigorated by increased communication and trust, are willing to buy more from you and are creating a queue of requests that they want to get in your product? Are you ready to see the list of technical issues go up once the skeptical user becomes a champion and proudly agrees to share every success, as well as every failure, question, bug or issue with your CSM officer? Are you ready to read reviews of your reengaged clients in the network and in your emails, answer to the Word of Mouth inquiries and increase the number of sales demos as the business expands?

Change is always uncomfortable. We know how to be in control when the growth is well managed and under our logically-defined KPIs and processes we all so meticulously built all these years. This allows us to keep things perfect, to avoid problems and issues. And yet, it also holds us back from opportunities for growth. When CSM is brought onto the team, it will never be just a one-(wo)man department. You need to be ready to hire in numbers when you take the CSM-led growth path, because that's how it works!

Want to know how others did it and succeeded? Follow our updates and success stories by staying up to date on Customer Success Management news on our LinkedIn channel here. Reach out to our team to find out what it is that we can do for you by filling out the details on our website here. And just comment and share this article if you whatever you learned today created a spark in your day! ???