Welcome to Customer Success Monthly!

The Launch and ask to Subscribe!

I am excited to launch this monthly newsletter around Customer Success Topics.?My plan for this is to share my own ideas on Customer Success (CS) and link to some of the most interesting CS content I find on LinkedIn throughout the month.?

Thank you to everyone who provided me feedback on the logo and please keep it coming.?I want to make this newsletter as valuable as possible for current and aspiring Customer Success professionals, so all feedback is welcome. If you find this content interesting please subscribe so you will automatically get this newsletter in the future!

About Me!

Before we jump into the content, I want to take this time to introduce myself! I was born and raised in a small town in upstate New York .?After graduating with a degree in Sport Management from the University of Michigan (the logo colors might make more sense now) I started my career working in sales for the New York Mets . After a couple years in sales and account management, I started my Customer Success journey when I joined LinkedIn in 2014.

Over the last 8+ years I have supported three different platforms and held four different CS roles across two continents as in 2019 I made the move from New York City to Dublin, Ireland. In July of 2021, I started managing a team for the first time and my current role is leading a team who use LinkedIn’s data platform to help our customers find success mostly in hiring and recruiting. Working for LinkedIn has given me a view into one of the largest Customer Success Organizations in the world as well as an external view into the hiring patterns for CSMs globally based on the data we are able to see from the global workforce.

Over the past two year, I have held a leadership role with the Customer Success Network (CSN) and met CSMs from across the world. If you’d like to meet me in person, we are holding our next in-person CSN Café in Dublin on February 17th.?Register here!

Insights!

In the first few editions I plan to share insights from the 10 #AskCustomerSuccess interviews I did in 2022 and we will go from there.?I am going to take insights from those interviews and share my findings.?Whether they are interesting commonalities, big differences, or trends in CS topics.?You can find more information on this series at the bottom of this newsletter but let’s jump right into the insights!

The first thing that jumped out to me from these interviews was how many different career paths exist into Customer Success!

One of the fascinating things about these interviews was that everyone’s path to Customer Success was unique. While some had been doing Customer Success type work for their entire career, nobody had officially been in Customer Success their entire career.?Now, this is not surprising as Customer Success and the titles that come with it are relatively new and most of the people I interviewed had been working for 10+ years.

So, what the most common starting point for these professionals?

For a majority, the start of their career was in a sales role.?This is true for me as well. Since I did interview quite a few folks from LinkedIn, the HR and Recruiting background was the second most common. These two types of backgrounds make a ton of sense to me from what I have seen in hiring conversation for CSM. The options usually come down to professionals with client facing experience or those with industry specific experience.?

At The Customer Conference in London last summer one suggestion that came up a couple of times was to hire professionals with industry experience instead of hiring CSMs from other industries. So, for those looking to break into CS, finding a company that you would be a client of in your current role and have strong industry knowledge around would be a great place to break into the industry.

One other part in the path to CS that I found interesting was around the role they had before their CS role.?Many of them had roles that were similar to CS roles before making the move officially over to Customer Success.?These roles included Training/Support teams, Onboarding Specialist, Customer Operations, and Account Manager. So, having a role like these ones, could be a great half step as you think about your first role in CS.

Overall, we can see there is no one path to Customer Success.?However, there are some paths that are more common than others to get you into the CS world.?Having customer facing experience is a plus.?Being an industry expert can help you break in with companies that work in that space.?Being in roles that does similar work to Customer Success can work well if you can show the transferable skills that you would bring to the CS work.

For those in Customer Success roles now, what path did you take into your current role?

5 LinkedIn Posts I found Interesting this month!

Jay Nathan talks about the need for specializing within Customer Success as you grow as a company.

Grace Fuller recaps a Customer Success Network event about how to create amazing Success Plans and Mutual Action Plans.

Nick Mehta shares about current CS openings for all you of looking for a new CS role.

Carly Agar talks about acing your CSM Interview by creating better answers to some of the standard questions.

Morika Georgieva asks some hard questions about how we look at ROI.

Background on #AskCustomerSuccess !

In 2022, I did 10 interviews with Customer Success (CS) Professionals using the hashtag #AskCustomerSuccess .?In these interviews I asked them all the same 5 questions to learn more about their roles in CS, different career paths/trajectories, and hot topics in CS.?The 5 questions were:

1)??????????Can you give an overview of the roles you have had prior to your current one?

2)??????????What does a day in the life look like in your role?

3)??????????What are the main goals or KPIs for your team?

4)??????????What roles do people from your team usual go onto for their #nextplay ?

5)??????????What is the CS topic you are most interested in learning more about over the next year?

As you can see from the interviews, there is so much different work being done in Customer Success so my hope is this series will also help folks navigate the CS world to find the right role for them.

You can find all 10 full interviews below:

Kickoff Post

Laura Todres

Jessica Sullivan

Morika Georgieva

Dana Alvarenga

Cassandra Sitzman

Thalita O'Sullivan

Christopher Beerbower

Ryan Noakes

Raheem Kareem

Deena Bernstein