Berner: Customer empathy and commercial mindsets are rarely found together in CSMs
Stephanie Berner · A customer success masterclass | How to build and scale a CS org | Stephanie Berner (LinkedIn) · Feb 1, 2024 · at 20:45
Stephanie Berner, customer success executive at LinkedIn, reflects on the hiring profiles of elite customer success managers.
0:00 / 0:23exact quote · 23.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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, sometimes they have a commercial mindset, and sometimes they actually don't like talking about the numbers with customers because they feel like it's a sort of the Fox Guardian the Hen House moment.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Stephanie Berner
Berner: NPS and CSAT are easily gamed and less actionable early on
“In later stages, you can start to look at other metrics like NPS, CSAT, time to launch, and your implementation. Those can be great metrics. Those sometimes can be, you know, easily gamed, so they don't necessarily provide the right insight for leadership or e…”
Berner: Simple renewals belong in CS, expansion renewals belong in Sales
“If renewals are primarily just that, a renewal conversation, where there's a quick, you know, exchange of papers, a quick conversation, if there's a change in price, but there isn't a detailed negotiation or any complexity with that transaction, that renewal p…”
Berner: CS Reporting Directly to CEO Keeps Leadership Close to Customer Experience
“I am a big fan of, say, the CS organization reporting right into the CEO, because in those cases, the CEO is really close to the customer experience, no matter what phase the business is in, super early or operating at scale.”
Berner: CS Reporting to Product Creates Unnatural Organizational Alignment
“From my perspective, I think that's challenging because customer success is core to the go-to-market motion and aligning CS at minimum to the revenue team and putting it in line with marketing creates a flywheel for your go-to-market team in a way that I think…”
Berner: Tying CS comp to renewal quotas neglects product adoption
“The thing that I think companies get tripped up by is when you put a significant amount of comp against a renewals or expansion quota, that is going to drive behavior. And if you want your teams only focused on getting the renewal across the line, that is wher…”
Berner: Dedicated implementation specialists outperform generalist CSMs on onboarding
“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 …”