Customer Success Manager

“My customer success managers today know how to do this. They come to a new project, they onboard them, and they tell them, I'm going to explain to you this entire tool and all of its features, but here is the five minute thing, that if you do this once a week,…”

“There's no excuse for a sales rep or a CSM or a support rep to not have context about your account, to know what you're doing.”

“I think it takes a lot of work to get that last mile good enough where you would say, Hey, we're actually going to feel confident actually having the AI act as the sales rep or act as the CSM in these equations where it's going to get there. It's going to get …”

“And the models that we have today, like CSM, for example, And probably some of the models that we'll have in the short term that will make the experience better will still not be modeling the conversational dynamics because they're making decisions that kind o…”

“In fact, if I give you one piece of like advice from the beginning, it's don't just hire a bunch of CSMs, maybe one or two. It's heretical for me to say, by the way, but it's true. Go fix all your processes, your product, make it so you can scale without a cra…”

“And by the way, on all these functions, like support, CSM, whatever, we're using his product inside of HubSpot. And we're using it in the group where it's like very, what ECF has a thousand accounts.”

“A sales DNA at the core is just, you can get those people to have like empathy for the customer and like understand and care about making them successful, but I don't think you can take a CSM and make them, you know, like a quota carrying rep.”

“To trust the output of an LLM to send an email to a million dollar customer. It's like, you know, when you present that to a CSM, they're like looking at it and they're like, they're questioning every word. You have no idea. They're questioning every word in t…”

“In B to B, especially early stage, you're typically hiring like customer success managers before you have anyone who does support the CSM kind of like owns all of post sales customer communication.”

“We're actually tying the compensation of our CSMs not to an upsell. I guess it's sort of embedded into the NDR piece, but it's frankly more about, are you getting users active?”

“Actually, we did that at Glean, but we haven't systematically done it. So, for example, you know, the companies that did these multi-million dollar expansions, we actually strategically gave a large spot bonus to the CSM that was on that because we wanted to r…”

“If you have to choose between a CSM profile that's going to own revenue or an account manager profile that needs to be like customer success oriented, a hundred times out of a hundred, I'm picking the account manager that needs to be customer oriented because …”

“The customer success, by the way, doesn't happen just from customer success teams. There's only so much a customer success manager can do. If the product isn't good enough, like how many workarounds is a CSM going to advise each customer on if the product does…”

“I was doing all the sales. I was doing marketing. I was doing implementation of the product. I was doing a lot of those things until we got to about one and a half million or thereabout in revenue. That's when we hired our first CSM. To help implement so that …”

“In my experience, it can often, both of those functions can be a crutch for a broader issue inside of the company.”

“The second, I think, is blending of a role. There'll be no more SDRs, CSMs, AEs, BDRs, XDRs, all of these. I see them converging into one role, essentially.”

“I see lots of resources in this category of CSM, which is like ongoing maintenance and servicing of customers and under resourcing in implementation. And I just think the initial experience that a customer has on a product or with a company has so much influen…”

“The second thing you need in those early days is you need people who communicate exceptionally well because they're the ones who are going to be your feedback loop to product, engineering, and even leadership to help you understand what is it that you need to …”

“I am biased toward hiring ICs first. Ideally, you can find somebody who either has been a manager before, or has aspirations to be a manager, or, you know, if you can assess for leadership qualities in your early interview processes, somebody who has the poten…”

“I think you need at least one of the founders on the loop. I think you need the head of product and or the head of engineering, and you need somebody from a go-to-market function. And I'm assuming that all of these are filled. I bias in the early days, if we'r…”

“The second is People who have a hard time balancing customer interest with business interest, who get really bogged down in the volume or the pain that's coming in from customers. And one of the big roles that the customer facing teams play is funneling all th…”

“A very strong commercial mindset, which is hard to find in people who also have some of these other skills around customer curiosity, deep Customer empathy, bias for action, where people who like to help customers build their programs alongside our software, s…”

“The first hire does need to be that firefighter bias for action. I think by about your third or fourth, you need to make sure you have that skill set somewhere in your team.”

“Sometimes even in those cases, you don't really need a lot from a CSM, like a success motion, and sometimes that success motion gets, gets shipped over to the sales team. Sometimes I've seen that happen, and sometimes that works, like that's how Snowflake does…”

“The problem with that is CSM Brett does an implementation and onboarding process once, maybe twice a year. Because that's how many net new customers you get in your portfolio. Versus if you have a group of implementation specialists, they do it all day, every …”

“There are so many companies out there that hire CSMs as a band-aid over the customer experience, over the product.”

“If all you have is CSMs and like a kind of a people-driven approach, then it looks like everything requires a CSM. And so kind of what I would say here is just early on, get a lot of the basic stuff in place. Like, you know, people should be able to open a tic…”

“Take your best salespeople and make them see a sense. There's no point. There's no point in having your best salespeople sell. Well, what's the point? People aren't going to buy anyway. I mean, and if they do, they're going to buy in onesie twosies, not in the…”

“We do have a target, but not a revenue target. Like they're not gold on making more money. They're gold on making the customer happy.”

“The CSMs are measured mostly on NPS. They're not sales people. They want to make sure the customer has the best possible service. They kind of do have like NPS and renewal rate, which is kind of proxy, but it's a very small A portion of their compensation, so …”

“CAB is a great way to build customer advocates. Our CSMs saw these kinds of changes in the relationships and conversations that we were having with folks, and if folks jump from company to company, they'll be able to bring those stories with them and bring you…”

“Yeah net expansion yeah, should be at least two percent uplift from previous month the space, and then they earn Also the same amount of commission based on that, but yeah, it's a new scheme.”

“In a product led model, it kind of flips over where no matter how small a customer is, you have to make sure that there is somebody who has eyes on it. And what CSMs can help you do is look at your target opportunity and expand the market because they are In t…”

“Every single person, once you get to like 50, 75 employees, You need a CS operations person. Don't just hire CSMs. CSMs are really important, but just like you have in sales, salespeople and sales operations people, you need customer success operations to unde…”

“What's the minimum number where having like, say like a dedicated CSM or kind of Salesforce makes sense where you're having calls. And that's like 700.”

“They're not sales people. They want to make sure the customer is making, like, the best possible service. They kind of do have, like, NPS and renewal rate which kind of proxy, but it's a very small portion of their compensation, so they don't try to pressure t…”

“Typically accounts owned by an enterprise, CSM is in the range of 50 to 60, while an SMB account a manager could actually own up to a hundred accounts.”

“I personally believe that CSM should be responsible for driving product adoption, building a customer champion, and making a customer responsible. Expansion will happen naturally if all those three things are happening. Now, what happens is if you give your CS…”

“And we do give our AE's credit for the first six months expansion. ... CSMs are involved at that point, but six months after then they take over.”

“For each of these three metrics, our CSMs have targets every quarter, so they're held accountable for moving a certain number of customers into the green level of the health score every quarter, achieving a certain number of customer success qualified leads, a…”

“Having a modest amount of a customer success manager's money tied to either expansion in the account or NPS in their accounts and having it be around 10%, 15% of their total compensation is, is a good starter.”

“Why on earth would you pay a salesperson commission before you know if you're going to retain your customers? So it's that first hundred customers, maybe first 10, 20 customers, depending on your business model, before you even think about commissioning a sale…”

“With a CSM, you don't want somebody who is over sympathetic to the customer that's working against the org. You want somebody who's, you know, some of you have, you're at minimum viable product. You're trying to do a specific thing. You want somebody who's goi…”