Customer Success? This Is The Start Of Something Big

In my article last week I shared a few possible career paths which can help you become a Customer Success Manager. While I referred to Sales and Customer Support as possible starting points, these are by no means the only ways to break into this fast-growing new discipline. Customer Success requires a healthy balance of 'Soft Skills' like Cross-Functional Communication and Empathy alongside the 'Hard Skills' of technical product knowledge and domain expertise. What matters most is the way in which someone approaches their work, whether that begins with Sales, Customer Support, Marketing, Product, or something else. A commitment to seeing the entire scope of your clients' goals, as well as how your solution effects the lives of individual users, is key.

But once you're working in Customer Success the fun is just getting started. Last week I described a journey leading up to Customer Success, and in this article I treat Customer Success as the launchpad to something even greater: the next next step in your awesome career.

Before I launch into this exploration, a word of warning: the paths I am about to describe are not for everyone. No one is saying you have to advance beyond Customer Success (or Sales or Customer Support, for that matter). If you continue to feel fulfilled, rewarded, and valued as a Customer Success Manager, congratulations! You've found what most people only dream about, and you don't need to look any further. Let's be clear, being awesome is for everyone, and it's not restricted to those with a certain job title or salary. However, if you feel like you're ready to take on additional responsibilities with an even greater stake in your company's performance, keep reading.

Who's In Charge? Why Customer Success Needs Skin In The Game

If we're going to create a clear career path for Customer Success, we need to recognize it as a distinct business function with unique KPIs and goals. If Customer Success were simply an offshoot of Sales or Customer Support, then professionals in those roles wouldn't have to change their focus to do the job well... but as we saw last week, clearly that's not the case. 

Picture an employee at your company who is interested in Customer Success. If they are ready to assume direct responsibility for generating recurring revenue from existing clients, they will feel frustrated if the rest of your organization doesn't share those goals. And if they have talent and a preference for building strong partnerships with existing clients, but they're not rewarded for those types of behaviors, how much upward career mobility does that individual have at your company? The options are slim indeed.

When we ensure that all our clients are receiving the maximum value from our solution, and we provide members of our team with the resources to follow through on our promises, then we can also solve the career question. The role of Chief Customer Officer (CCO) is emerging in SaaS in parallel with Customer Success teams. The CCO is responsible for all recurring revenue from existing clients, which includes guiding their team of Customer Success Managers to hit their numbers, and leading them to explore new opportunities within client relationships. Now our hypothetical employee from above has some firepower to back up their career mojo, and at least one option for how to aim higher. 

The key: for Customer Success to have any value whatsoever, it must not only have its own short-term goals and ambitious projects (just like every other department), but it must also have its own budget while being held accountable for a certain amount of revenue. The CCO needs to be on equal footing with VP Sales, VP Marketing, and other Senior Executives when it comes to weighing in on the company's strategy. And finally, the CCO needs to have veto power over any decision that might hamper their department's ability to achieve its goals (for example, whether or not to onboard a poor-fit customer).

Greater responsibilities and an opportunity to influence company strategy as it relates to Customer Success? Sign. Me. Up! 

Whoa... whoa there, easy cowboy! Remember what I said at the beginning, about these paths not being for everyone? Being the CCO shares some similarities with being a Customer Success Manager (you both have the same burning passion, for one thing), but it definitely does not consist of the same activities.

Think of the data a Customer Success Manager reviews all day long... data from hundreds of users per client, across dozens of clients. A CCO has access to that same data, but they can't afford to analyze each account up close and personal. The same attention to detail that served them so well as a Customer Success Manager, they now need to direct towards a new set of customers: the members of their team who look to them for direction and inspiration.

As a CCO you have a much greater responsibility to empower members of your team, more so than you ever did as a Customer Success Manager with clients. Your sensitivity for gauging clients' behavior, you can now use to help your team reach their goals: personal as well as professional. And just as a Customer Success Manager needs to balance the immediate, hair-on-fire challenges with clients' long-term strategic goals, the CCO needs to balance the day-to-day challenges of managing with the higher-level responsibilities of leadership... which includes guiding team members as they advance in their careers.

Does this sound like you? If your answer is, "Not yet," the good news is that many of these skills can be learned. If you want to be CCO, it's essential you choose an organization that gives some teeth to Customer Success, and that you continue your relentless focus on driving recurring revenue. 

Give The People What They've Always Wanted

Bear with me for this part, because on the road to a new career we're about to go offroading. There are many Customer Success Managers reading this who used to work in Sales or Customer Support, and perhaps even some CCOs who used to be Customer Success Managers. But I'm interested in a path that's a bit more... unconventional:

What if a Customer Success Manager wants to be VP of Product?

Spoiler Alert: What happens is they help their company be awesome while bringing a holistic perspective to product development, testing, and marketing. Let's walk through the process to understand the different parts of this transition. 

A Customer Success Manager needs to be intimately familiar with their product already, or at least get there very quickly. Before beginning work with a new client - whether that's before the close or during implementation - they need to understand all the opportunities and shortfalls their customer will encounter at every stage of their journey. How does the product behave with 10 licensees? How about 50? How about 500? What features of the product make it more or less suitable for different business functions? If product rollout is easy to scale in one department, does that mean it will be easy to scale in another department? Why or why not?

These are the types of questions that fascinate a product-minded Customer Success Manager and keep them up at night, but there's one question that transcends all of these and unities the client's business goals with the goals of the company:

What steps can I take to improve the flow of information between the Customer Success team and our Product team?

This question, this attitude, defines an empowered Customer Success Manager and sets the tone for a future career as VP Product. A Customer Success Manager can be an expert with the product, they can learn it inside and out, they can drill themselves on likely business use cases... and they will still learn something new about how their clients are using it every single day. Product-minded Customer Success Managers go beyond "What functions does our product perform?" to "What business goals does this help my client achieve, and how?" And the more they try to answer that second, deeper question, the more they'll want to share their findings with Product in the hopes that the next version helps clients identify and achieve goals faster, at a lower cost (just for starters). 

This is the fork in the road, the junction that leads on one hand to an empowered Customer Success Manager and on the other to a future VP of Product. Because future VPs of Product understand that not all customer feedback is created equal. Some clients are superusers and they're stretching the product in ways it was never meant to be used: some of those ways lead to new innovations and other ways take us away from our Ideal Customer. Other clients are submitting tickets for features the product doesn't have now, and likely won't have, ever. Future VPs of Product know the differences among all of these, and they know how to present both types of feedback to the Product team. 

Improving the flow of information between the Customer Success Team and the Product team has as much to do with quality as it does with quantity. Choosing how to present product feedback, in a way that's congruent with the product road map as well as the future goals of Sales and Marketing, is one of the key skills that separates most Customer Success Managers from those who are focused on the product. For this information to flow freely in both directions, in a ways that makes relevant data transparent to all parties, structures need to be created that prioritize this type of sharing. 

And that is one of the primary responsibilities of the VP of Product. No department operates in isolation, and sharing your department's status and progress with the goal of helping members of every other department perform their roles better is one of the key tasks of that department's leader. One of the most important conduits for this type of Cross-Functional Communication is the one between Customer Success (which receives ongoing product feedback related to clients' business goals), and Product (which develops the solutions to make clients successful). And who better to begin working on the organizational structures that make this sharing more effective, than a product-minded Customer Success Manager?

Does this sound like you? Then get to know your Product team, how they work and how they work together. Just like the CCO the VP of Product must balance the psychological and personal needs of their team members with the company's business goals. Success means more than just making great products, just like a great CCO knows that their team members need to do more than just have great conversations. Executives in both positions need to channel the ambitions of their team members into lasting results for their clients and their company.

Where Do We Go From Here?

I'm painting a optimistic picture for ambitions Customer Success Managers, and with good reason. The world really is your oyster, if you acknowledge the challenges ahead and demonstrate a willingness to learn. I gave a spoiler before about Customer Success Managers that want to be VP Product, and now I'll give another one for any Customer Success Manager that wants to grow their career:

You're not here to follow a playbook. You're here to create new plays that delight clients and accelerate your company to new heights

As you leverage your experience in Customer Success to advance into a new career, make this new role your own! Innovate constantly, both how you work and how you work with others. This is your opportunity to develop new insight into your market, to see opportunities and pitfalls long before they arise.

Because who knows? If you want to be CEO, Customer Success is a great place to start.