By Jan Young
The customer success job market is on fire. Glassdoor has more than 3500 CSM roles listed right now. Companies are looking for CS leaders, and leaders are looking to grow their teams. Last week, Kristen Hayer provided 5 tips for hiring CSMs in a hot job market. But what happens once you’ve found your candidate and made a successful hire?
Much has been written about the important period of Onboarding our customers and the time to first value. Similarly, thoughtful planning and execution of your CSM onboarding can ensure that your new hire is successfully integrated into your company so they can start meaningfully contributing to your team and growing their career with you.
Here are three areas to consider in order to ensure your onboarding is effective:
Company Onboarding
I. History, Mission, and Values
Your new hire has likely done some research on your company during the hiring process, but now you have the opportunity to bring them into the fold by sharing your company history, mission, and values. Ideally, your CEO is providing that message. Industry leading companies incorporate their mission and values throughout the onboarding process and company policies, as well as the employee and customer journeys. If your company isn’t doing this well, work with your Human Resources team to improve it, but don’t wait. Supplement it in your onboarding process, then share with HR what you’re doing so others can learn from you and incorporate best practices.
II. Teams and Resources Overviews
Customer Success teams work cross-functionally and touch or impact every team in the organization, so it’s important to provide an overview of what each team is working on and how they’re organized. Ideally, the leader from each team presents to new hires. If your company isn’t doing this well, build some slides with information about each team and their organizational structure and provide some ways for your new hire to meet the leaders or key points of contact in the groups that you interact with regularly. Be sure to share what you’re doing with your Human Resources team so they can improve their process or share these best practices with other teams.
III. Product Deep Dive
Every new hire (and every CSM) should have a good understanding of your product—how it works, who uses it and for what purpose, key features, and the product roadmap. If your Product leader doesn’t already present this information to new hires, enlist a key point of contact in your Product team so your new hire can start building relationships with this important team from Day One. In turn, you can offer to provide an overview of Customer Success to Product team new hires. (And share with your Human Resources team so they can improve their processes or share with other leaders for best practices.)
Team Onboarding
If it hasn’t already been covered in the sessions above, be sure to share the customer outcomes that your product provides, how the product compares to your competitors in the market, your company’s primary revenue sources, and goals for growth.
I. 30-60-90 Day Plan
Provide a 30-60-90 day plan for your new hire. It gives you the opportunity to think through not just what you want them to know and achieve during this period, it also helps you work through how this will happen. Weekly goals can then be broken down into tasks, and will help guide the CSM so they, and you, know they’re on track.
II. Processes, Playbooks, Tools, Resources
How well are your processes documented? Do you have a central platform for resources and playbooks? Are you working off of Google sheets, or do you have a CS tool? If you’re far behind in this area, a new hire is the opportunity to get the team and the new hire to contribute to the documentation and guides that your CS team needs. If you have everything in place and ready to share with your new hire, don’t turn on the firehose—ensure that they’ll retain the information by spreading out the trainings and giving them a guide to the resources so they can look things up later.
III. Learning Strategies
People learn in lots of different ways, and the more ways you provide information, the more likely they are to retain it. Consider self-guided learning and projects. Break out the information into slides led by team members in individual sessions or have them give tours through your platforms. Have your new hire shadow team members and members of other teams that you work closely with. If your company uses tools like Gong, or you have held webinars, give your new CSM time to review and come back with learnings and questions with a team “buddy”. This is also a time to be kind to your existing CSM team—be sure to spread out the new hire duties amongst them so no one person has the time burden and to give the new CSM the opportunity to meet and bond with more people on the team.
IV. Transitioning Accounts
How many accounts will your CSM new hire be taking on and in what timeline? What resources do you have available for your CSM to get up to speed on the accounts, your objectives, account history and key points of contact? How will your CSM be introduced to your clients to create a successful transition? Be sure to answer these questions as you create an account transition plan for your new CSM to set them up for success!
Individual New Hire Needs
Lastly, consider the individual that you’ve hired: What do they need for a successful onboarding?
I. If your new hire has a background in customer success but not your industry – provide resources on industry conferences, blogs, podcasts, and newsletters. If your new hire has domain and industry expertise, have them share the resources that they refer to so you can add to and update your list.
II. If your new hire has domain and industry expertise but they’re new to customer success—think about customer success training, recommend books, blogs and newsletters, and sponsor them to attend professional webinars and conferences. (Always a great idea for those who have a background in CS as well!)
Onboarding isn’t just a week-long activity and then you’re done. It continues until the new hire is fully integrated into your team and contributing to your customers’ success. It’s also an opportunity to update skills and processes among your team and to encourage life-long learning! Chances are, you are doing some of these things well, but there are probably areas that need to be added or updated. Take the time to ask your team what they wish they’d known, and proactively re-evaluate and improve your onboarding process so you can ensure your CSMs success.
The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers custom CS leadership coaching, including plans for team onboarding and compensation planning. For more information visit our consulting page.
Jan Young - Jan Young is passionate about lifelong learning, demystifying technology, optimizing teams, processes, and systems, and building effective relationships and communities. Her experience has included working in Enterprise companies and Startups of various stages, and she has advised several founders and startups. She serves on the board of Gain, Grow, Retain as co-lead of the Voice of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion council, and is a Founding Community Lead for CS Insider for which she writes and curates a series called “Inclusive Innovation”. She holds a BA from UC Berkeley, and an MBA from Columbia University. In her free time, she enjoys wine tasting, hikes, and Pickleball.