The Multi-Faceted CSM

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The Customer Success landscape has massively evolved in recent years and the demand for Customer Success talent consistently grows. As the domain is relatively young in age, there is a shortage of experienced CS professionals consequently posing challenges on CSM recruitment and later, on their, training and professional development.

The role of Customer Success Manager (CSM) has been a subject of interest in various webinars and professional forums leading to meaningful discussions among industry leaders. While there is a common agreement on the “MUST-HAVE” characteristics, the CSM role gradually becomes more demanding and multifaceted. As such, CSMs are expected to integrate various skills such as project management, task prioritization, time management, domain expertise, data analytics, relationship building, stakeholder management and more.

With these challenges, there is a need for a different approach which is based on hiring talented candidates that may not have CS experience per-se but have sufficient experience in other customer-facing roles.

Recruiting is only one part of the journey. CS professionals and leaders should look closely into developing and promoting talent, not just for their organization’s benefit but also as part of their contribution to the industry as they strengthen the customer management practice.

This has been one of my core objectives and as such, I created a framework that simplifies the recruiting process and helps me develop a variety of competencies in my team. The underlying assumption of the framework is that anyone stepping into CS should have solid customer facing experience coupled with effective communication skills, empathy, and the desire to make customers successful.

With this assumption in mind, I changed my approach towards the recruiting process. I did not insist on searching for candidates with explicit CSM experience. Instead, I identified core CSM profiles that require more specific experience and focused my effort on these profiles. My view was (and still is) that I would be able to develop additional expertise within the team and allow CSM with one profile to expand their capabilities to match other desired profiles.

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The CSM profiles in my team

CS leaders is in a great position to analyze and map the necessary skill sets their team should be proficient at. I used this analysis to create 4 CSM profiles applicable for my team. For each profile, I listed the relevant experience and characteristics expected from the candidates.

?The “Project Manager”

o??Experience in creating and maintaining Project and Onboarding plans

o??Defining Roles and Responsibilities with customers

o??Scope management

o??Task Prioritization

o??Task Execution and monitoring

o??Risk management

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The “Data analytics”

o??Analytical person - Attention to details and numbers

o??Natural curiosity to numbers and metrics

o??Experienced in driving usage and adoption based on data analysis

o??Comfortable presenting data analysis and conclusions.

o??Nice to have – coding experience to develop ad-hoc and customized scripts.

The “Domain expert/Trusted Advisor”

o??Ability to conduct proactive questioning and unveil customer challenges

o??Domain Expertise

o??Consultative approach

o??Value articulation – translate product features to business value

o??Relationship “builder”

o??Comfortable presenting Industry and product best practices.

The "Negotiator"

o??Demonstrable experience managing difficult conversations

o??Active listener

o??Driving the conversation to resolution

o??Thrives under pressure

o??Problem solver

o??Stakeholder management

The benefits of creating CSM profiles?

●???????CS leaders can better define the roles and skills needed in their team (It is a good exercise to conduct as part of the team structure planning).

●???????Expanding the search and recruitment of CSMs to match one or more profiles thus creating more hiring options

●???????CS Leaders identify the domains of knowledge and expertise that their team should improve and plan to close the professional gaps.

●???????In the mid-to-longer term, the framework supports skills diversity across the team and reduces the “single point of failure” scenario.

●???????Align recruitment, onboarding, training, and mentoring efforts in the team.

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The Playbook (How to implement the framework):

●???????Look for the underline skills needed in your team and define the relevant CSM profiles.

●???????The profiles I created are not “set in stone” and you can define your own profiles. The ones I listed above worked well for me, however there could be other profiles depending on your customer touch model, product complexity, type of industry and other factors.

●???????Map your team members capabilities to the CSM profiles and understand their core and strengths.

●???????Put a plan in place to improve the skillsets of your team members. More examples and suggestions listed in the last section of the article.

●???????Use your team strengths and experience to perform a joint collaborative learning experience. The leader is not necessarily the sole mentor or trainer in the team. Other CSMs can leverage their own expertise and experience to support and mentor other team members. In this regards, CSM who spread their knowledge cross the team , will sharpen their own mentoring and training skills, to further develop their career

Training and skill development examples:

Theory is good but now it is time to put it into action. I am sharing a few practical ideas and examples to develop additional competencies across the team. The goal is for the CSMs to become multi-faceted and eventually match more than one CSM profiles.

The “Project Manager”

o??Explore the onboarding process and suggest efficiencies (for example, “Can we optimize any existing processes to shorten time-to-value?”)

o??Ask the CSM to shadow another CSM experienced in project management and let him/her review risks and suggest mitigations.

o??Ask the CSM to be the focal point to the product team and manage feature request prioritization

The “Data Analytics”

o??Ask the CSM to review existing internal CS reports/dashboard and suggest improvements.

o??Propose new metrics and present internally in the team.

o??Work with Product/Engineering to automate alerts and improve internal monitoring.

The “Domain expert/Trusted Advisor”

o??Ask the CSM to review existing Playbooks and suggest improvements.

o??Ask the CSM to research certain topics and obstacles customers face in their market, then present it internally as part of the exercise.

o??Review and Improve QBR /EBR Templates based on customer feedback and new product features and capabilities.

The “Negotiator” – simulations of difficult conversations to perform with the team:

o??Provide an explanation to a product defect reported by the customer.

o??Update customer following service interruption including lessons learnt (if applicable).

o???Update customers about a delay in delivering important product feature.

Summary:

Mapping the skills in your team is a good exercise to perform. You will create the CSM profiles, consequently, expand your candidate search and recruit talented candidates. You will know what their strengths are and plan their professional development accordingly. Doing it right and you will benefit from having a more skill-diversified team ready for their new challenges. ?At the same time, your team will be appreciative of your efforts to give their career a major boost.