Organisations are broadly aware of how important Customer Success is. According to LinkedIn, it's even the third most in-demand job in France! Yet the Head of Customer Success role isn't always clear. What exactly does it involve? When should you bring one in? Should you promote from within or hire from outside? Benjamin Marchand-Lenoir shares his insights on successfully hiring, and onboarding, your future Head of CS.
What does a Head of Customer Success do?
Although the scope can vary depending on the company's maturity, the products and services it offers and its overall strategy, the Head of Customer Success role has several things in common:
- First, they manage the CSMs. That means hiring them, onboarding them, and making sure they develop and do good work. They run annual reviews and set team and individual objectives with the CSMs, with KPIs agreed with senior management. Alongside this, they may set up or improve processes and tools. In other words, they make sure their team works as effectively as possible, in the best possible conditions.
- They also act as a coach, training their teams in working methods, solutions and so on. On more product-related or technical topics, they may call on other people internally. They also support CSMs on complex cases (a very unhappy customer, the need to explain the product vision and/or medium-term roadmap, help with renewals, upsell or cross-sell for strategic customers, etc.).
- As the person responsible for the company's customer success, they're in constant contact with senior management to report on their team's performance. To this end, they're in charge of building a customer journey that measures customer satisfaction at each key stage. They need to stay very alert to the improvements needed, whether in onboarding, tools, knowledge management or setting and measuring KPIs.
- As the person steering the activity, they need to anticipate the team's workload, drawing in particular on the "hot" sales pipeline, and adjust their hiring and/or training needs accordingly.
- They may also act as CSM for certain key customers. This is actually good practice, especially when they first take up the role. If they're too disconnected from the front line, it will hurt their work by skewing their understanding of the product, processes and so on. Over time, though, their other tasks will take up 100% of their time, and they'll usually need to hand these accounts over entirely to their team.
- They talk frequently with the product team, whether to share high-level customer feedback, get certain features improved or help build the roadmap.
- Because they know the product and its roll-out inside out, they may be called on during the sales process to reassure prospects about the support they'll receive. Depending on the case, they can bring industry expertise or answer certain technical questions.
- Finally, in the most effective organisations, the Head of Customer Success also sits on the leadership team, where they play an active part in the company's development by representing the voice of the customer. In that role, they'll be particularly keen to keep finding ways to improve.
Head of Customer Success vs Team Lead: what's the difference?
As you'll have gathered, the Head of Customer Success is first and foremost a manager and the person who steers the activity. A Team Lead, on the other hand, is more of a "senior" or "expert" profile, without management responsibilities, whose job, besides handling certain strategic accounts, is to share their knowledge with more junior colleagues.
They may help build and sometimes run internal onboarding programmes, or even contribute to training the existing team. They may also be asked by senior management to act as the voice of their customers and share their views on the product roadmap or any other decision affecting the user experience.
Unlike the Head of CS, the Team Lead isn't there to manage the other CSMs in the line-management sense, as there's generally no reporting line between them. They do, however, work closely with the Head of Customer Success, especially in larger teams, helping them coordinate each member's skills development and expertise.
When is the right time to hire your Head of Customer Success?
As soon as you want to industrialise your Customer Success, you need someone dedicated to that mission. The exact timing will usually depend on your company's maturity, how many customers you have and, of course, how many CSMs are in the team:
- With fewer than 2 CSMs, it's generally one of the co-founders or senior managers who "naturally" takes on the Head of CS role, on top of their other responsibilities.
- From 3 CSMs, a Team Lead may naturally emerge.
- Beyond 4 CSMs, when the company is scaling, senior management must get back to its core expertise and hand the reins to someone dedicated to managing and steering customer success. That person will inherit whatever has been tested before them, and their job will be to refine it and, as mentioned above, industrialise it.
Whatever your industry, here are a few questions to ask yourself to work out whether it's time to hire your Head of Customer Success:
- How many customers do you have?
- What does your sales pipeline look like? A large volume of upcoming business is a sign you need to strengthen your structure very quickly.
- How many CSMs have you already hired? How many are you currently recruiting? Have you already appointed a Team Lead? More broadly, what is your team structure, and will it need dedicated management?
- Are processes and tools already in place to monitor customers?
- What's your level of customer satisfaction (NPS, CSAT...) and how is it changing over time? If you can't answer that question, you probably need to bring in an expert!
Internal promotion vs external hire: pros and cons
For the Head of Customer Success role, should you promote someone already in your team or hire someone from outside? There's no one-size-fits-all answer, but both options have pros and cons.
Hiring a Head of Customer Success from outside
If your CS approach is still in its infancy and you lack maturity on the subject, it may be worth hiring someone who already has experience and will join you with their own methods and best practices... and bring a fresh perspective. That will save you time, provided your new hire adapts quickly to your industry and your product.
Ideally, you might even hire someone from the same field as you: they'll already know your customers' challenges and issues, which will further speed up their ramp-up.
Either way, it's always worth looking for someone who has already been through the growth phase you're in now. They can then bring you the best practices they've seen and/or tried.
Promoting a CSM from within
Promoting a CSM has other advantages: they already know your product, your customers, your teams and your company culture, which saves a considerable amount of time. However, they may find it harder to step back from processes, having been immersed in day-to-day operations and having partly made those processes their own. Above all, they've never had to manage people before.
So you need to choose someone who's highly adaptable and, in addition, address their weaknesses through training. Another option is a transition period before they're fully autonomous as Head of CS, during which they're supported by the person who held the role before them.
Either way, if you choose to promote a CSM to Head of CS, their appointment must be seen as legitimate and understood by the rest of the team, to create the right conditions for them to take up the role.
Promoting someone from another department
On paper, it might seem appealing to promote a salesperson or someone from Product to Head of Customer Success, but it generally turns out to be a bad idea. Depending on the case: no real appetite for the product, not enough empathy, no taste for customer relationships... Here again, if someone stands out and shows promising aptitudes, you'll need to address their weaknesses through training and support.
On the other hand, moves from CS into other departments, such as Product, Delivery or Account Management, are more common.
The skills (and mindset) to look for in a Head of Customer Success
Like a CSM, a Head of CS must have very solid experience in managing customer success, which means at least empathy, rigour and project management. They must also have a detailed understanding of the strategies that drive customer satisfaction and loyalty. This set of skills should form the foundation of their expertise.
As mentioned above, they also need management skills to lead and inspire their team, which calls for natural leadership and strong communication. They must be able to work under pressure and with a wide range of people, both internal and external.
Strongly business-driven, they'll need to instil in their team the drive to retain customers and dig into every account to uncover new growth opportunities.
Getting your Head of Customer Success's onboarding right
The aim is for your Head of CS to succeed in their mission, so:
- Give them resources (people and budget)!
- Make sure they're listened to: as the voice of your customers, it's important that they can be heard by your company's leadership, as a full member of the leadership team.
- They need ongoing training themselves, on product developments as well as management techniques and customer retention strategies.
- Give them room to manoeuvre and autonomy, especially if your CS approach has so far been led by one of the co-founders or senior managers. Your Head of CS should certainly draw on what was done before they arrived, but you also need to let them try other ways of working and other processes.
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