By Lauren Costella
With COVID-19 affecting various businesses and industries differently, many individuals are finding themselves needing to change career paths. This means great things for the Customer Success field. There will be an influx of new ways of thinking about the customer experience across various businesses, and it will only enhance our customer focused strategies and programs. However, for people trying to break into tech from other fields (e.g. nonprofit, government, sports, etc.) the struggle to be viewed as a viable candidate for tech based Customer Success roles can be very, very real. Most hiring managers expect CSMs to have experience and a background in technology or at least understand the SaaS space. They look for this on resumes, and throw out candidates that don’t meet those initial screening requirements. And the sad part is, there is fantastic talent that we, as hiring managers, are missing.
While I could write a book on the reasons we should consider talent beyond our sometimes narrow parameters, I’d like to focus this post specifically on how candidates from outside technology and Customer Success can position themselves to “win” a role in Customer Success. What qualifies me to talk about this topic? Well, I’m happy to say, 8 years ago, I did this first hand!
For those of you unfamiliar with my background, my career began in nonprofit. I then transitioned over to work for the federal government. After working at the Pentagon for a few years, I decided I needed a change (a big change), and when I moved out to California to pursue the opposite of bureaucracy: startups! I found myself struggling to “break in” and yet, through tenacious effort, I finally prevailed. I landed a role as a Customer Success Manager for Corporate Accounts at BrightEdge. Now, 8 years later, I find myself in my second executive role as the VP for Customer Success at GoodTime.io! I’ve never been happier!
Given I’m working for a company that focuses all of our energy and effort on connecting brilliant minds, I would love to share with candidates, who are trying to make the “great transition,” how they can think about it, and hopefully, nail the interview to get the job!
Tip #1: Understand Customer Success (and specifically the role you’re going for), the Technology being sold, and it’s business impact
First and foremost, I encourage anyone trying to break into customer success to truly understand the purpose of the industry. You MUST do your research. Customer Success is not “making customers happy” rather, Customer Success is a function that drives growth and revenue for customers and for the company itself. It does this by ensuring customers attain value (ROI) from the technology or products the company is selling. The function works tirelessly to create an incredible customer experience, which in turn, drives trust, loyalty, and repeat business.
You also need to understand the various CS roles and their purpose within the CS organization. A Customer Success Manager, Customer Support Representative, Customer Success Operations, Renewals Manager, and more are all very different roles. You need to understand the differences and how those roles could relate to your experience. Even if you don’t have direct experience in these roles, you should think about how your experience could apply or help!
Before I landed in tech and CS, I had been a “National Volunteer Coordinator” and then a Special Assistant to the Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness for the Department of Defense. It would be a jump for any hiring manager to figure out how my experience in either of those roles, at least on the surface, would qualify me for a Customer Success Manager position. And yet, there were many parallels!
As the National Volunteer Coordinator for Scholarship America, my boss and our department was directly responsible for ensuring we signed up new chapters into our nonprofit organization and that these chapters “renewed” their membership fee to use our 501c3 nonprofit status year over year. This sounds vaguely similar to a SaaS model, doesn’t it? My job specifically was to engage those chapters in their success to raise money at a local level! And I did this by sharing best practices across chapters, creating resources for chapters to raise as much money as possible, and of course, providing programs that recognize the best of the best! This experience, while not in SaaS, is directly applicable to the type of engagement we do in Customer Success each and every day!
Long story long, understand the role you’re applying for, and really think through how your experience relates to it! And be sure you can articulate that experience succinctly.
Tip #2: Build out your resume and interviewing story with the role’s functional accountabilities in mind
I mentioned this before, but it would be a stretch for any hiring manager to take titles like “National Volunteer Coordinator” or “Special Assistant to the Undersecretary of Defense” and figure out how that relates to Customer Success. And quite frankly, the hiring manager shouldn’t have to make that leap. Your role as the candidate is to make that connection for them! A hiring manager has a lot to do and sees a lot of resumes, don’t make it harder for them to choose yours!
Tailor your resume for the role you want. When I was applying for roles, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go into Marketing or Communications (I didn’t know about Customer Success at that time). When my resume wasn’t tailored, I found the jobs companies would reach back to me about were Executive Assistant roles. At the time, I needed a job, so I remember taking the interview for an EA position for Aaron Levie at Box. I thought maybe it would be similar to a Chief of Staff role, that I had been exposed to at the Department of Defense, and I would use that as a jumping point into other positions within the organization.
Throughout the interview process, I realized that the EA position wasn’t the right one for me. Actually Aaron realized it too. We tried finding a spot for me in Product, Customer Success, and Marketing, but at the time, I wasn’t prepared with how to position myself on the fly for those roles within tech. Inevitably, I didn’t end up as a member of the Box team, but I definitely learned a lot. I realized that Customer Success existed, that I needed to understand the company and product better, and that I needed to tailor my answers to questions around the role for which I was interviewing.
With some tweaking and using key words like “problem solving” “communication” and “clients or customers” in my resume, I was able to land an interview at BrightEdge.
Tip #3: Go above and beyond in the Interview (understand the upfront concerns and mitigate them)
When I was offered the opportunity to interview with BrightEdge, I was ecstatic! The only problem was: I didn’t know what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) was; I didn’t know exactly how a CSM role worked; and I didn’t know BrightEdge (their product and how it worked). Those are pretty big hurdles to overcome, and I anticipated that everyone interviewing me would be concerned about my lack of experience in all of those areas.
So, I set out to mitigate those concerns as early as possible within the interviewing process, and show them I was more than capable of taking on the role.
The first thing I did was learn what SEO was and why a customer would care about it. In retrospect, it seems almost silly that I didn’t know that SEO is the operational process of improving a company’s website to earn better organic rankings in Search Engines like Google, but I didn’t. I also needed to understand why that mattered for customers, which was through SEO, and ranking better organically, a company could earn more click throughs to their site, and with more click throughs, more purchases, and with more purchases, more revenue! Simple!
After understanding the goal of Search Engine Optimization and why companies care about it, I then needed to understand how BrightEdge fit into the picture. What was BrightEdge going to help customers do? Through research I learned that BrightEdge made it simple for SEO and digital marketing experts to identify areas of improvement within their website and take action, and through action improve their rankings and business ROI.
With this information in hand, I asked one of my friends if I could use his website in order to put together an SEO analysis. I examined where he was ranking on keywords, and the ROI he would receive by ranking higher for various search terms and even new search terms. I then framed this analysis around how I thought/presumed BrightEdge could help. With this presentation in hand, I went into the interview.
This presentation knocked the interview out of the park for me. Not only did I get the job (pretty much on the spot), but it also earned me my next role! One of the leaders, who interviewed me at BrightEdge, was so blown away, that he hired me onto his team at Searchmetrics!
The point here is that you absolutely can use applied skills and knowledge to mitigate concerns of coming from non-tech into the tech world. It takes effort, research, and time, but it can absolutely be done!
Tip #4: Don’t give up!
It probably goes without saying, but you can’t give up. As you transition from the public sector or “non-tech” roles into tech and within that, Customer Success, you will inevitably get some “no’s” in the process. This is okay! Every no is a chance to grow and learn and iterate. It’s a chance to change your positioning or your messaging to reflect what the hiring manager wants and needs. It’s a chance to change how you articulate your experience to mitigate the concerns a hiring manager will have. And it’s one more step to getting the role you want.
Going for the “Great Transition” of switching from non tech into tech (and specifically into Customer Success) can be daunting. It can almost seem impossible, but I promise you, it isn’t. It can be done! Sometimes it requires a lot more creativity, work, and reflection than a typical job interview, but that’s also half of the fun in trying. Hopefully, these tips inspire you to take the leap and go for it! I personally did and couldn’t be happier!
And for those looking for jobs during this time, I encourage you to join the Customer Success Leadership Network Slack channel. Here you will find over 1500 members of the CS community engaging about customer success, posting information about events, jobs, and more!
Looking to get into Customer Success field or have you just started your CSM journey? The Success League offers a Certified CSM training program that covers core topics, including Career Development for CSMs and Business Strategy for CSMs. For more information on this and our other offerings, please visit our website at TheSuccessLeague.io
Lauren Costella - Lauren is a change agent, communicator, leader and passionate champion for Customer Success. When she’s not working as the VP of Customer Success for GoodTime.io, you can find her serving as an advisor for The Success League, a board member for the Customer Success Network, and blogging on the CS Playlist. Lauren has her MA and BA from Stanford University. She was a former USA National swim team member and enjoys staying active in the Bay Area.