How do you build your first Customer Success team?

Your customer signed eight months ago. Since then, they've dealt with their salesperson, the project manager who ran their roll-out and the support team... Everyone has done their bit. But since onboarding ended, nobody has really looked at how they use your solution or whether they're getting the value they expected. And you may only find out they've disengaged when they send their notice of cancellation. It's probably time to build your first Customer Success team. Here's how to go about it!

In most B2B SaaS companies, Customer Success exists long before the Customer Success team. It's simply spread across several functions, which carry it on top of their main job. That's neither a failure nor an anomaly: it's a logical set-up at a certain stage of growth.

The problem is that this set-up depends on everyone's goodwill, and a customer relationship owned by everyone always ends up being steered by no one. So building your first CS team doesn't mean starting from a blank page. It means taking ownership of a set of practices that already exist, deciding what stays with others and what moves to CS, then hiring the right person to orchestrate and improve it all.

Before the CS team, who does Customer Success in your company?

Before hiring, start by mapping out what already exists. Depending on the company, you'll find several set-ups, often combined.

The founder or CEO: in the youngest companies, it's often a founder who keeps hold of the key accounts. They know the product inside out, they have the credibility to talk to decision-makers, and customers appreciate the closeness. But this model only works as long as the founder has time to spend with customers, which becomes increasingly rare as the company grows.
Sales: a very common set-up: the salesperson remains the point of contact after signature. After all, they know the context, the stakes and the people involved. They're also best placed to spot an upsell opportunity. The trouble is, salespeople are paid to sign new customers. As soon as their pipeline fills up, looking after the customer base takes a back seat, and they only get back in touch as renewal approaches... or when there's a sales opportunity.
The project manager or onboarding specialist: for solutions that need a real roll-out, a project manager or onboarding specialist takes over from Sales. They scope the requirements, configure the solution and train users. They're often the person who knows the customer best by the end of onboarding. The problem is that their job stops at go-live. Then they move on to the next project, and the customer enters a grey area.
Support: support answers incoming questions. In practice, it also handles many questions that are about usage rather than troubleshooting: how to make the most of a feature, how to roll the tool out to another team, which best practices to adopt. That's valuable, but it's reactive by nature. Support only sees the customers who ask questions.
Marketing and Product: Marketing and Product often contribute to support at scale: activation emails, in-app guides, webinars, help centre, product newsletter. These journeys are essential for reaching the whole customer base. But they're usually the same for every customer, regardless of their usage level or goals.

Taken together, these contributors cover a good part of the customer lifecycle. What's missing is continuity: someone who tracks the value the customer gets over time, picks up weak signals between interactions and prepares the renewal months in advance. In short, someone whose job it is!

The signs that the model is reaching its limits

There's no magic threshold in terms of number of customers or ARR. But certain symptoms come up time and again when the organisation starts to creak:

customers "disappear" between the end of onboarding and renewal;
renewal dates are discovered a few weeks beforehand;
salespeople are torn between new business and looking after their customers;
support spends a growing share of its time on usage questions;
nobody can name the ten most at-risk accounts;
churn comes "out of the blue", with no warning signal identified.

If you recognise several of these, it's time to act. And it's best not to wait: between opening the role and the person actually starting, several months often go by, during which the situation keeps getting worse.

Before hiring: define the scope

Hiring without clarifying the role is the surest way to pick the wrong profile. And when Customer Success is already spread across teams, that clarification has an extra dimension: redefining everyone's role.

Why your customers buy (and where they get stuck)

This is probably the most useful exercise: dig into why your customers buy your solution, then identify what stops them achieving the result they expect. Your project managers, support team and salespeople each hold part of the answer. Ask them!

A customer who buys a scheduling tool to reduce overtime doesn't get stuck in the same place as a customer who buys an analytics solution to steer their marketing. In the first case, the challenge is adoption by frontline teams. In the second, it's data quality and the ability to interpret it. The profile you need to hire follows directly from these sticking points.

Education or expansion: which mission comes first?

There are two broad families of CS organisation. In education-focused organisations, typical of complex products, the team spends most of its time helping customers build their skills. In more transactional organisations, typical of models with many plans or options, it focuses on renewal and expansion.

To decide, ask yourself two questions: is it easy for a customer to get value from your product? And what does your business need to succeed: selling more modules, or getting the product adopted by more users? Your first CSM will do a bit of both, but knowing where the centre of gravity lies radically changes your hiring criteria.

High touch or low touch: not the same profiles

Another trade-off to settle early: the level of support.

This choice has a direct impact on hiring, because a low-touch CSM and a high-touch CSM don't do the same job. The first manages a high volume of low-ACV accounts: they think in terms of automated journeys, self-service resources, webinars and community engagement. The second looks after a handful of high-ACV accounts: they're well versed in one-to-one conversations, know how to navigate complex organisations and can talk to users, sponsors and decision-makers alike. Asking one to do the other's job sets them up to struggle.

If your positioning is clear, with contracts of similar value, the decision is simple: hire the profile that matches your model. But if your customer base is mixed, with a few large accounts among a majority of small contracts, you first need to segment your portfolio. In that case, your first CSM should take on the high-ACV accounts, where most of the revenue and risk is concentrated, while the rest of the base continues to rely on the existing journeys.

Redistribute roles

If you don't spell out what changes for Sales, the project manager, support and marketing, everyone will carry on as before, and your new hire will land in a fog.

A few questions to settle:

do Sales keep ownership of renewals and upsell?
does the project manager hand over to the CSM at the end of set-up? If so, how?
does support keep handling usage questions, or refer them to the CSM?
do Marketing and Product keep ownership of the automated journeys, or build them together with CS?

There's no universal answer. There is, however, one bad practice: not asking the question. Formalising who does what, for example with a RACI matrix, avoids grey areas and the friction between teams that often sours the first few months.

The first hire: a builder, not an executor

The most common mistake is looking for someone who has managed large accounts in a highly structured organisation, with well-oiled processes and well-configured tools. The problem is that this kind of profile isn't always comfortable when part of the framework still needs building. Don't underestimate this! An excellent, highly qualified candidate can find themselves completely lost if you don't give them the right processes and templates. Beware of the CEO who indulges themselves by hiring a CSM from a big company. Ego tends to push in that direction.

Your first hire will join an organisation where other teams already look after customers, each with its own habits. They'll need to build credibility with Sales, project managers, support and marketing, without any line authority over them. It's as much a conductor's role as a practitioner's.

The criteria that really matter

Your first CSM will manage a large part of the customer lifecycle, so you need a versatile profile. That's how most teams in France start out, in fact: a Skalin survey shows that 58% of the CSMs surveyed have a versatile profile, combining customer support, technical support and business topics, before the team specialises.

In practice, look for someone who:

has already worked on several stages of the customer lifecycle;
knows how to bring teams on board without having any line authority over them;
is comfortable structuring processes where there are only habits so far;
can hold a conversation with a user as easily as with a senior executive;
understands the business stakes of a renewal or contract expansion.

One last piece of advice: hire someone you could see leading the team one day. Your first CSM will very quickly become one of the leading experts on your customers. If you can't picture them taking on more responsibility, you're already setting up the next external hire... and the frustration that comes with it.

Should you start with a Head of Customer Success?

Hiring a pure manager with nobody to manage doesn't make much sense. At first, it's usually a member of the leadership team who takes on the role while the team has fewer than three CSMs. Hiring a dedicated Head of Customer Success becomes essential beyond four CSMs, when the company enters a growth phase.

In between, the right option is often an experienced CSM who manages a full portfolio at first and will naturally take the lead as the team grows. One point to watch, though: have them report to someone with weight on the leadership team. Without a sponsor, the voice of the customer will struggle to be heard.

Evolving the organisation without breaking everything

Don't try to design the ideal organisation from the outset. One person dedicated full-time to Customer Success will teach you a huge amount about your customers and your real needs. Hire one person, observe, then specialise.

Nor is the idea to bring everything into the CS team. The original contributors keep a role, but it changes:

Sales refocus on new business and step in on expansion opportunities flagged by CS;
the project manager stays in charge of the roll-out and organises a formal handover to the CSM;
support handles incoming requests and flags customers who keep raising tickets to the CSM;
Marketing and Product continue to own the automated journeys, using feedback from CS to tailor them to each segment.

Then teams gradually specialise, at the pace of the needs you observe: a second CSM when the portfolio exceeds what one person can seriously follow, a dedicated onboarding team if roll-out becomes a bottleneck, then an Account Manager. On that last point, it's best to wait until you have 4 or 5 CSMs, or you risk creating a grey area between the two roles.

Beware of one trap, though: just because the Ops function comes late in the org chart doesn't mean operations can wait. Adding CSMs without an operational foundation creates a fragmented team that wastes huge amounts of time on manual tasks. Until you have Ops, your processes and tools have to play that role.

Giving your first team the means to succeed

Hiring the right person isn't enough. Without a minimum framework, even an excellent hire will burn out within a few months.

A formal handover from the very first customer

During the sales cycle and then the roll-out, the customer expressed expectations, constraints and success criteria. If your CSM only discovers all this afterwards, they start on the back foot. A structured Sales-to-Customer Success handover, followed by a clear handoff from the project manager, saves the customer from repeating what they've already explained three times.

A few metrics to put in place

There's no need to build a dashboard with thirty metrics for a fledgling team. A few indicators are enough to steer the work and, above all, to show the value of CS internally:

gross churn rate;
net revenue retention (NRR);
customer retention rate;
average onboarding time.

Set them as soon as your first CSM arrives. They'll form the basis for goals... and for the trade-offs when you need to justify the next hire.

Invest in tools early

This is a direct consequence of Customer Success being spread across teams: customer information is scattered between the Sales CRM, the project management tool, the support platform, the emailing tool and the product back office. Your CSM will spend their days piecing the puzzle together, often in a spreadsheet filled in by hand. What you save on tools, you lose in time spent consolidating data. A Customer Success Platform designed for the mid-market lets you lay the right foundations quickly. The longer you wait, the more painful the transition: more data, more habits, more resistance to change.

Clear expectations, reviewed regularly

Last but not least. Your first team will work in an organisation that's reinventing itself at the same time. What it needs is a degree of flexibility: say clearly what you expect, then, when new information calls the process into question, adjust your expectations and say so quickly. That's not improvising; it's accepting that the framework moves... But you have to say so!

The mistakes that cost dear

To sum up what to avoid:

hiring too late, when churn signals have already piled up;
hiring without redistributing roles, leaving the new hire to negotiate their scope with other teams on their own;
bringing everything into CS and breaking practices that worked;
handing CS whatever other departments no longer want;
launching every initiative at once (onboarding, training, retention, expansion), instead of rolling them out one by one to measure what really works.

These mistakes have one thing in common: they treat Customer Success as an isolated function. Yet CS only works if it connects with every team that touches the customer.

Conclusion

Building your first Customer Success team isn't about creating a function from nothing. It's about taking ownership of a customer relationship that your salespeople, project managers, support team and marketing already carry, each in their own way, and finally giving it an owner.

If you remember one thing: your first CSM doesn't arrive in a vacuum, they arrive in the middle of an organisation that already exists. Clarify what everyone keeps and what changes, hire someone who can orchestrate rather than replace, and give them a complete view of your customers. Specialisation will come later, at the pace of your growth.