Customer Success: A MultiDiscipline Role

Intro

In this article, I’m going to share my thoughts about the necessary skills that someone needs to have to be successful in a High-touch Enterprise CSM, in a similar environment such as the world of IoT.

The Versatility

Someone, that is already in the business, knows that Customer Success is quite vast in the areas it touches.

Even more when there is no unified standard way to do things we CSM do.

A Customer Success role in Company A can be completely different in another compared to Company B.

That is just how it is.

In essence, a CSM needs to be quite versatile to accommodate the requirements that are needed to fulfil a role.

Product Management

As a Customer Success, we have quite an important job when it’s related to Product Management. We are the voice of the customer, the ones that are on the front line, seeing firsthand the struggles that they have and the achievements they accomplish.?

Product Managers rely on us, to deliver feedback, ways to improve our product, ways for them to build the roadmap, and sometimes even rethink strategic decisions.

Giving them stories, feedback, data, and usage isn’t enough.

For everyone to achieve success, it’s fundamental to understand what they do and how they do it. If you don’t have any clue about what they do, invest and build the relationship. You will see that you have a return on investment along the way.

Service Management

We are providing a service to our customers, right??

But here, I’m talking about a much more boarder spectrum. From management to operations, to support, from infrastructure to help desk, there is a multiplicity of teams and disciplines that is necessary to understand.

And this will vary quite dramatically from one company to another. Sometimes even within the same company you have completely different departments and teams, ensuring the continuation of services.

SLAs, SLOs, First-Response, and Time-to-Resolve, are just a few examples of what is needed to be known, for you to understand not only your team's but also the needs and requirements of your customers.

For example: How can you make your Customer Successful, if you don’t know the specifics of their Service Agreement?

Marketing

One of our goals as a Customer Success is to retain revenue.

But, how did that come to us in the first place?

Yeah, it starts with Marketing by delivering a strategy on how we can get more visibility, that will transform into a prospect, and ultimately a customer.

From the Marketing perspective, they view it, as the Customer Lifecycle. However, for us in the Customer Success world, we have a different name for it, we call it the Buyer’s cycle.

For us, the Customer Lifecycle only starts after a purchase or a deal is made.

A couple of years ago, I heard that Marketing was working on their SQLs. My thoughts were, why would they want to work with databases? I didn’t get it at that time.

So, knowing how to talk and understand what Marketing is saying, is also very valuable to us.

For example, we can better explain to Marketing what our ICP is, and therefore they can target the market in a different, more effective way.

Who better can explain what is ICP than Customer Success?

By comprehending more of what and how Marketing does its job, we as a team can be more successful. That translates into being more efficient, more effective, with less friction, and ultimately more revenue.

Project Management

I can certainly understand, that not all Customer Success have this need, but from my experience, there is an expectation that a Customer Success needs to manage projects (sometimes large ones others not that much).

I do also believe, that when we are establishing, or defining a Success Plan with our Customer, that is a project timeline that we are defining it.

Let’s see a definition of what a Project is:?

“A project is a temporary and unique endeavour designed to produce a product, service, or result with a defined beginning and end (usually time-constrained, and often constrained by funding or staffing) undertaken to meet unique goals and objectives, typically to bring about beneficial change or added value.”

As you can see, in the simplest explanation, a Success Plan is a Project. You establish a plan that has a strategic value for the Customer, with a specific goal that needs to be achieved.

Customer Success does have a lot of common areas with Project Management.

Both have Stakeholders, Capacity Management, and Engagement Model/Communication Model, …

Account Management

This is one that I think everyone can agree with, we might even say, that Account Management is what has been done, before Customer Success.

And some traits still exist in Customer Success.

I’m just going to talk about two of them:

Sales capabilities are for sure something that is required and mandatory. Having the ability to sell yourself, sell your product, and sell your services is fundamental to what you do as a CSM.

How can it be otherwise?

Let’s think about, why any company would want to have or invest in Customer Success. Of course, they want to shift to a Customer-Centric approach, but ultimately, it’s all about revenue.

A company shifts its strategic approach to a Customer-Centric one because it believes that is the best path to ensure revenue growth.

And so, if this is the expectation of the Company, this is what needs to be delivered by a CSM.

Building the relationship, may not be the same in every CSM role. If you are talking about long tail, for sure this is going to be quite difficult, if not impossible.

Ever since I started this article describing the PoV of a B2B high-touch scenario, it’s essential that Customer Success must build a relationship with the Customer.

In my previous article, I talked about how to engage with the different stakeholders, and how to know their views and position. Have a look at it to know more about this.

Conclusion

A Customer Success Manager is expected not to be a master, but at least be knowledgeable about these areas.?

As you might already have interpreted from this article, my view on Customer Success is that it’s an intersection of other roles that culminates in putting the Customer in the center.

Customer Success is ever-changing and ever-evolving, so be opened minded that skills may also change in the future to come.