The Three Types of Customer Success Manager

Since we’re now officially in 2019 planning season, I’ve been thinking about — among other things — our Customer Success model for next year and talking with friends in my network about that.  Since Customer Success is (sadly, perhaps) still a relatively new discipline in enterprise software companies, I’d say the whole field is evolving quickly, so it’s important to keep up with the changes.

In this post, I won’t approach things from a Customer Success Model perspective and how Customer Success interfaces to Sales (e.g., hunter/farmer, hunter-in-zoo, farmer-with-shotgun, account manager) [1].  Instead, I’m going to look bottom-up at the three basic types of customer success manager (CSM).  While they may share a common job title, CSMs are often cut from very different cloth.  Regardless of which model you implement, I believe you’ll be working with individuals who fall into one of three basic types to staff it.

• Product-oriented
• Process-oriented
• Sales-oriented

In order to characterize the three types clearly and concretely, I’m going to use a template — first, I’ll show how each type introduces themselves to a customer, then I’ll present fragments of typical conversations they like to have with customers.

Note here that I’m talking about people, not roles.  In defining Customer Success Models you map people to roles and roles to duties [3].  In this post I’m really writing about the nature of the CSMs themselves because — all other complexity aside — I think the people pretty naturally drift to one of three types.

The art of setting up the right Customer Success Model is to clearly map out the sales and CSM roles (who does what), define the appropriate frequencies (how often do they do it), and then put the right people in the right roles — both to maximize job satisfaction as well as performance [4] [5].

The Product-Oriented CSM
Introduction: “Hi, I’m Jane, and my job is to ensure you get best use of our products. I’ll be here to keep an eye on your implementation process and to answer any technical questions that go beyond normal technical support. I’ll also perform periodic, proactive ‘health checks’ to ensure that you are using the system properly and making best use of new features.  I’m an expert in our products and previously worked at a consulting shop helping people implement it.  I’m here if you need me.”

Conversations they like to have:

• “How’s that report working that I helped you build?”
• “Yes, there are two ways of solving that problem in the product, let me help you pick the right one.”
• “So you’re having some issues with performance, let me get in a take a look.”

The Process-Oriented CSM
Introduction: “Hi, I’m Joe, and my job is to make sure you are happy with our service and renewing your contract every year.  I’ll drive the renewal process (which, you should note, starts about 4-6 months before the subscription end date), monitor your adoption of the service, ask you to complete our ongoing customer satisfaction surveys, inform you about local user community events, and proactively call you about once a month to check-in.  Should we hit a rough patch, I’ll also serve as your escalation manager and pull together the right resources across the company to get you successfully through it.  I’m a very organized person — I was a project manager in my prior job — and I can manage 10,000 things at once, so don’t hesitate to call — I’m here if you need me.”

Conversations they like to have:

• “Have you guys budgeted for next year’s renewal — and by the way don’t forget to leave room for the annual price increase?”
• “I see you hired a new CFO, do you think that’s going to have an impact on our renewal process and can we setup a time to meet her?”
• “We’re having a training class on new features in the November release and wanted to make sure you knew about it.”
• “You’ve got two tickets stuck in technical support?  Let me swing over there and find out what’s going on.”

The Sales-Oriented CSM
Introduction: “Hi, I’m Kelly, and my job is to make sure your company gets maximum benefit from, and makes maximum use of, our software.  I’ll be managing your account from here forward, taking care of the renewal, and working to find other areas of your company that can benefit from our solutions [6].  Of course, I know you won’t be expanding usage if you’re not successful, so a big part of my job is to keep you happy as well — towards that end I’ll be keeping an eye on your implementation and your ongoing satisfaction surveys, and setting up periodic health checks with our ace technical team.  For routine technical or services questions, you should call those departments, but if you find yourself getting stuck do not hesitate to call me.  And, well, not to get ahead of myself, but I was wondering if you could introduce me to the CFO of the XYZ division, because I’d love to see if we could get in there and help them experience the same benefits that you’re going to be getting.  In my prior job, I worked as as sales development rep (SDR) and was promoted into this position 2 years ago.’

Conversations they like to have:

• “Do you see any reason why you wouldn’t be renewing the subscription in February?”
• “I’d love to come in next week and demonstrate our new Modeling product; I think it could help you with the inventory problem your CFO told me about.”
• “I see you hired a new finance VP; can the three of us get together next week to discuss her goals for the team and our history working with you as a supplier?

Conclusion
I’ve exaggerated the types to make them clear.  What kind of CSM are you?  What other types have you seen? I’d love to hear.

In the end, it’s all about getting the right Sales and Customer Success Models working side by side, with the duties clearly mapped, and with the right people in the right roles.  I think the best way to do that is a mix of top-down planning and bottom-up assessment.  How do we want to break up these duties?  And who do we have on our team.

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Notes

[1] The way to define your Customer Success model is to define which duties (e.g., adoption, upsell, renewal) are mapped to which Customer Success and Sales roles in your company.  I won’t dive into Customer Success models in this post (because I can think of 3-5 pretty quickly) and each of those models will have a different duty mapping; so the post would get long fast.  Instead, I’m focusing on people because in many ways it’s simpler — I think CSMs come with different, built-in orientations and its important that you put the right CSM into the right role.

[2] I *love* characterizing jobs in this way.  It’s so much more concrete than long job descriptions or formal mission statements.  Think:  if a customer asks you what your job is, what do you say?

[3] As well as map duties to frequencies — e.g., a tier-one CSM may perform monthly outreach calls and setup quarterly health checks, whereas a tier-three CSM may perform quarterly outreach calls and setup annual health checks.

[4] You can make a product-oriented CSM responsible for renewals, but they probably won’t like it.  You could even make them responsible for upsell — but you won’t get much.

[5] To keep things simple here, I’m omitting the Customer Success Architect (CSA) role from the discussion.  Many companies, particularly as they grow, break product-oriented CSMs out of the CSM team, and move them into more of an advanced technical support and consulting role (CSA).  While I think this is generally a good idea, once broken out, they are no longer technically CSMs and out of scope for this post.

[6] One of my favorite quotes from a sales VP I know:  “I always put ‘sales’ on my business card — and not account executive or such — because I don’t want anyone to be surprised when I ask for money.”  This introduction preserves that spirit.