Your Customer Success Interview Blueprint

If you recall, in my article "How to Hire Your First Customer Success Manager (or 50th)", I discussed how to build out your interview process along with various exercises and a presentation component. This blueprint is married with that guide to create a comprehensive interview plan.

I've been using a plan very similar to this one for over 7 years now and have had success with finding great Customer Success Managers!

In this guide, the customer success interview has three key steps. This guide can and should be adjusted to meet your needs (culturally and logistically):

• Price of Admission: The Phone Screen
• Next Round
• Presentation

Price of Admission: The Phone Screen

Applicants should have the following qualifications before proceeding to speak with the bigger team: 

• They can hold a conversation on the phone or over zoom in an engaging manner.
• Understands what your service or product does. They should be able to show that they've done their research. Remember, the CSM is the face of your company to your customer. 
• GSD (gets stuff done). This is hard to assess, but it's essential. Questions you can ask that can help evaluate for this are:

Tell me about a time that you had to do something outside of your usual job to help better the team?

Tell me about a time when you were up against multiple deadlines and couldn't complete everything? How did you communicate that you were going to miss the deadlines? Or what did you adjust to meet those deadlines?

• Ability to deescalate issues. Questions you can ask that can help assess for this are: 

Give me an example of a challenging customer issue that you've recently experienced and how you resolved it.

Give me an example of when you had to deliver a tough message to a particularly challenging customer. How did you handle that? 

Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a team member? How did you handle it? What did you learn from that situation? Would you have changed your approach?

Exercise for phone screen: 

You are starting your day and have these five things on your plate. How are you going to prioritize them (Note the clarifying questions the candidate asks): 

• A newly signed customer needs to be onboarded.
• An enterprise-level customer is having a major technical issue that is hurting their ability to use your product.
• An EBR (executive business review) that you need to give in 7 days.
• You have to get your OKRs updated for a meeting that is happening the next day.
• 10 unread Zendesk tickets

What do you do first?

Hiring Manager: There are a few things that you are looking for:

• Can the candidate critically think their way through this, and will they ask clarifying questions? They mustn't spend too much time on this. This activity should take around 3 minutes to talk through. Do they know what the acronyms mean? Do they ask clarifying questions or guess? 
• There are many ways to answer this question correctly, and there is mostly no wrong or right way. Ideally, they'd address the technical issue first, skim through Zendesk to see if there's anything else bubbling up that's urgent, then move on to getting the onboarding started. 
• Generally, candidates prioritize the EBR (executive business review) last because they have seven days. I always ask a follow-up question around what data would they include in their EBR to double-check that they know what it is. Yes, I have had candidates prioritize this without knowing what an EBR is and without asking what it is. 
• The same for OKRs. Candidates will occasionally prioritize OKRs pretty high on the list but not know what OKRs are (objectives key results). But, depending on what projects you are working on, you could possibly get an extension on your deadline, or it may take minutes to update. 

Next Round

So, they made it past the phone screen! Great. Now what? It's time to get them in front of other team members so there can be a mutual assessment on fit (remember, they are interviewing you as much as you are interviewing them). You want your candidate to have a great experience but also dig deep on aptitude and attitude. While there will be some non-negotiable skills, always be sure to assess the harder to teach. If someone has a positive attitude and the aptitude for learning, there's a lot you can teach them.

Build out your interview team and have everyone own particular areas that they are going to assess. Make sure they take thorough notes and are trained on how to ask situational questions to get an accurate picture of the candidate's fit. Make sure everyone leaves plenty of time for the candidate to ask questions.

Here are a few competencies/skill sets that you can potentially interview for, along with some questions that you could use. This is not an all-inclusive list. You will need to add skillsets and questions that help you assess for your particular situation.

Culture Add:

• Pick 1 of our values, describe what that value means to you.
• Describe a time when you upheld that value.
• What do you value most about the culture of your current company? The least? 
• How do you learn the culture of a new organization when you join?
• What are some of the core questions you've historically asked that have provided insights into culture fit?

Customer Success/Relationship Management:

• What are the most important metrics to measure to understand the health of a customer?
• Walk me through how you would create a churn reduction plan.
• Give me an example of an at-risk customer relationship and how you worked to solve that. What was the outcome?
• Talk me through how you've proven ROI (return on investment) with a strategic customer? Have you ever had a customer that you failed to prove ROI on? What happened? How did you correct it? How did you incorporate that learning into your day-to-day?
• Have you ever had a "wrong fit" customer? How did you handle it? 
• Have you ever had a strategic customer churn? What happened? What were the next steps?
• Can you walk me through the basics of a customer lifecycle in a typical SaaS product? 
• What part of the lifecycle is the most crucial, and why?

Teamwork: 

• Tell us about a specific time that you built positive relationships with other team members? 
• As a team, we all own our success, and we all own our failures. What does this mean to you? Do you have an example of when you were part of a team that was failing? How did you help turn it around?

Communication:

• Tell me about a situation where your communication skills/style made a difference in the situation?
• Describe a time when you had to win a person over who was reluctant?
• Give me an example where your listening skills were crucial to the outcome?

Motivation:

• What gives you excitement/motivation for work in the morning?
• How do you motivate yourself to do a task that you may not be excited to do?

Working Remote:

• Have you held a position where you've worked remotely? 
• Share with me what the specific expectations were for the prior positions where you've worked remotely?
• Can you give me an example of how you typically motivate yourself to feel engaged about your work?
•  In your experience, is it more difficult to feel engaged if you're remote? If so, how have you successfully overcome that?
• If you accept this job and succeed, when looking back one year from now, what will that success look and feel like?
• What are some of the advantages and disadvantages that you suspect may be at play in terms of a long-distance working relationship?
• What interests you most about the possibility of working remotely?
• What are your biggest concerns about not being in the same building as your boss and peers?
• What do you think it takes to deliver A-level performance consistently when you're working remotely?

Round 1 Exercises (not necessary to use all of them):

Exercise 1 

On the whiteboard, please map out your current customer lifecycle (at your current employer or previous) and the various phases of a customer's journey through your product. How have you guided them through these phases successfully?

Hiring Manager: You are looking for their understanding of the customer lifecycle and the phases a customer goes through and specific examples of how they've ushered this growth. (Onboard, first value, growth, renewal, start the cycle again)

Exercise 2 

Now that you've done some research on our product, who we are, and how customers use our product, what are some key data points that you would use to define customer health?

Hiring Manager: You are looking for their understanding of your product and how they view health. The typical answer would be log-in data, usage data, MRR/ARR, previous upsell/expansion data. Look for answers that are specific to your product.

Exercise 3 

This is your customer base. All things regarding these customers are equal. They have similar ARR and are from the same industry/market segmentation. They solve the same issues in the same region; the key is everything is pretty much the same. 125 customers in red (unhealthy), 50 in yellow (neutral), and 25 in green (healthy). Who do you contact first and why (draw the below diagram on a whiteboard if possible)?

Hiring Manager: You are looking for a proactive answer. Human nature will dictate that we contact the red (in danger) first because we are worried about churn. But, if we take the proactive stance, we have a lot to learn from the green (healthy) customers. Once we have learned what makes them successful, then and only then, we should contact the red. We will then have best practices and action items to share with them. 

The Presentation

Set up a panel of about 5-7 individuals (small enough to not overwhelm the candidate too much, but big enough to see how they present under a tad bit of pressure). The presentation should be around 15 minutes and allow for an additional 15 minutes for questions. Each person that sits on the panel should ask questions as if they were the customer. Throw the candidate some curveballs and see how well they think on the fly. An example of a presentation scenario that I've historically used is:

• We just signed a large and strategic customer. There is plenty of growth potential within this account, so building a strong relationship out of the gate will be necessary. Customer Success owns the relationship after the sale has closed. We are responsible for onboarding, implementation, and ongoing relationship health. Please provide a presentation as you would to our new customer with the following details:
• What is your role in their onboarding process, and how will you add value?
• What features of our product will be most beneficial giving their workflow?
• How are you going to partner with them throughout the life of their relationship? 
• Anything else that would help the panel understand how you approach Customer Success and nurture the customer relationships?

It might feel like an impossible task to find the perfect fit for your first customer success role. But believe me, it's all well worth your time and attention.

At the end of the day, your first Customer Success Manager will directly impact your customers and team's health and happiness. They'll also be the leaders for CSMs to come.