I've spent around ten years working for SaaS companies, mostly as a manager, and I've had the chance to build several CSM teams from scratch. On the whole, I think I did the job well. But I also made plenty of mistakes. Here are 10 lessons from my own journey, from CSM to CEO, to help you outperform in your role.
Don't assume you know how much communication is expected of you
There are two kinds of people: those who do, and those who talk about it. In management roles at large organisations, the second group can do very well, sometimes better than the first. In a small company, that simply isn't an option. When you take on a management role in a fast-growing business, you have to deliver and make sure people know you've delivered.
Customers are the lifeblood of the company, and your leadership team needs your feedback. That much is certain. The real question is how much feedback they expect, and you need to agree on this from day one. Depending on your personality AND that of your leaders, the set-up will vary. At one end of the spectrum, you get a great deal of autonomy and very little reporting. At the other, leadership wants to stay close to the ground with very frequent updates.
Either way, if you start working in a way your leadership doesn't expect, it will go badly. And no, you can't work it out on your own (I thought I could). So raise it as early as possible, or test an approach and quickly check whether it works for them. If you're being given more autonomy than you're comfortable with or, on the other hand, you refuse to be micromanaged, say so. Just reach an agreement quickly!
Trust yourself
You may be very good at your job and still not feel entitled to talk to decision-makers. At least not enough to start the conversation or suggest lunch. This is especially true if you step into management early in your career. It's time to let that go! It's now part of your role, and yes, you have every right to be there.
Whether you're facing a CEO, an HR Director or a CMO, they know less than you do about your area. They don't yet know everything you'll help them achieve or where you can take them. They don't have your customers' feedback. They don't necessarily see the project, or the way their team works, the way you do. They have things to learn from you. You are the expert in your field.
Keep a few customers yourself
You've joined a startup to build and structure a team. Almost everything is still to be done, and you're standing at the foot of the mountain. At this point, it can seem perfectly logical to stop managing customers directly. After all, you need to hire, define processes, rethink ways of working, coach the team, hire some more and report upwards. And your ego probably won't argue otherwise!
All of this is true, but don't do it too early. If you're joining a young company, there are several advantages to keeping a few accounts yourself. It keeps you an expert on your product, which gives you more credibility with your PMs and POs. It also helps you better understand your team's day-to-day work and the challenges they face.
The classic approach is for the manager to take on 2 or 3 key accounts. I'm not convinced that's right, and if I had to do it again, I think I'd take ordinary accounts instead (but very active ones). For at least three reasons:
- Key accounts are, by nature, very time-consuming, and you don't want to be swallowed up by operational work (managing a team is a full-time job in itself).
- Key accounts often have specific needs. Whether you like it or not, you'll probably fight harder for your own customers, which isn't healthy, either for the product roadmap or for your team.
- Finally, it will be simpler and smoother to hand them over to a CSM when the time comes.
Hire when the opportunity arises
Recruitment is, and will remain, a tricky subject. Few companies plan ahead, and very often a role is only opened once the need is already there. A hire usually takes 5 to 6 months to become effective. In the meantime, the team overheats and customer follow-up can slip. On top of that, the pressure may tempt you to lower the bar on the profiles you hire, which will prove a poor choice in the long run.
Most SaaS businesses are backed by investors, so if you can afford it, hire when the opportunity arises. You've opened one role and two candidates impress you? Push to hire both now. You're growing anyway, and you'll need to hire again in a few months. Save yourself the time and say yes to both!
Don't hire to replace yourself
It's a logical mistake, but a mistake all the same. It typically happens when you're promoted to lead a team you already belong to. You need to let go of your accounts, or at least most of them, so the team needs an extra person. You hire, and the newcomer arrives with no customers whilst everyone else already has a full portfolio. It can seem logical to hand most of your book of business to the new arrival. Don't!
Why? You know your accounts inside out, so you'll naturally stay personally involved. In your eyes, your new CSM will do everything less well than you, and that's normal! It's probably even true for many months. So there's no point placing that bias on a single person. Otherwise, you'll create an imbalance within the team and risk being unfair to your CSMs.
That's why I think it's essential to spread your portfolio as evenly as possible across the team. It may be less comfortable (and even that's debatable), but in the end it's fairer for everyone. Reallocating accounts can be a breath of fresh air for CSMs, who'll be glad to pick up some strategic accounts and/or let go of those they feel they've exhausted. It can also give the customer a fresh perspective.
Encourage knowledge-sharing within the team
At first, you hold a weekly team meeting with everyone together. Then the team grows, the format stops working, and you start setting up one-to-ones. You're right to do so! Over time, though, this can create distance between team members, each caught up in their own day-to-day and not taking enough time to talk to one another. This is especially true for fully or partly remote teams. Knowledge starts to become uneven, depending on CSMs' affinities and the specifics of their portfolios. That's why you need to think about other, more unifying formats.
These formats create moments of sharing within the team. Lessons-learnt sessions, co-development groups... it's up to you to find the format that suits you! A CSM might present an unusual use case handled with a customer, show how they used a new product feature, ask for advice on solving a problem, raise a need, and so on. It helps the team step back, work together and learn from each other's experience... and ultimately become more motivated and effective.
Make the Success team visible beyond CS
The CSM should be the voice of the customer internally. But you still have to be heard! To do that, you need to firmly establish the Customer Success department within the company. I'm not talking here about building a customer-centric organisation, which is a vast topic and the responsibility of senior leadership. I mean all the practical steps you can take to give Customer Success real weight in the business.
The first step, if you want people to take an interest in you, is to take an interest in them. Try to free up time to attend the rituals run by the Product team, such as sprint reviews or demos. At the same time, set up your own rituals open to everyone, in agreement with your line manager. Assume that nobody understands your job or the challenges you face every day. Customer stories, feedback on a product feature, team KPIs... there are plenty of opportunities to give Customer Success visibility across the company.
If every team member keeps their head down and only looks up when they need something, you'll quickly stop being heard. The more connections you build between teams, the more people know and understand one another, and the healthier your organisation will be!
Don't wait until the last minute to put tools in place
It's a bit like recruitment: we often leave it too late. At first, you start gathering KPIs in a spreadsheet. Then your needs grow and leadership wants more reporting, so you keep adding information to your file. Before long, the file has grown out of control. Yet it's still filled in by hand from different sources: your application's back office, your CRM, your billing tool.
What you save on tooling, you lose ten times over in time spent filling in files by hand. And despite your efforts, you're always a step behind, because you can't constantly check every customer across every tool. That puts your account management at risk, right up to the churn you never saw coming.
Choosing a tool will eventually become unavoidable, because the situation won't be sustainable for long. If you've waited too long, the transition can be painful: too much data to migrate, too many systems to bring together, a team that's already large and change management that's much harder going. So plan ahead! And word has it there are now some very good CS tools for growing teams.
Never impose anything. Ever.
Sometimes, to save time, or even to save other people time, you make a decision on the team's behalf. To move faster. Yet the time you save there, you'll lose later through the team's resistance. A tool, a process, a new presentation format... it's all the same! Listen, propose, suggest, encourage, but don't impose. Even the best decision won't land if it looks like you're acting alone. Make sure you have buy-in, or gather what you need to win the team's support. You'll wear yourself out far less!
Open up to the community
We're lucky to work in a community that's generally open to discussion and sharing, so make the most of it! Whether it's organisational, HR or other questions, others have faced the same challenges as you and will probably be happy to share their experience (difficulties, pitfalls to avoid, benchmarks they've run...). CSMs are social animals, so take advantage! Chances are it will save you time. And who knows, you might even meet some great people!
Staying curious is also key to progressing. When I started, hardly anyone in France knew what Customer Success was. There were no communities, no podcasts, perhaps a few US blogs, and that was it. Now you've got no excuse! Between specialist podcasts, blogs, Slack communities and LinkedIn groups, there's plenty to choose from. It will give you lots of new ideas to put in place for your team!
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