By Ejieme Eromosele
Recently a CSM approached me on how to prepare and position herself for a Senior CSM role. She’d already gotten an internal promotion but wanted to align her experience and solidify her position as a more experienced and seasoned CSM, as she searched for a new role.
Her question was a good one - how do I reflect my progression as a CSM in my resume and in my interviews?
Customer Success teams, roles and responsibilities and career laddering vary greatly by company. So it can be difficult to provide a blanket set of requirements and definitions of what a Senior CSM looks like from one company to the next. However, there are a few CSM activities and competencies that are pretty universally agreed upon - growing adoption, improving customer health, supporting retention and fostering advocacy. From this lens we can apply focus to where you should be highlighting why you’re ready for that next level or how you’ve already been operating in a senior CSM capacity.
There are 2 areas to focus on when positioning yourself as a Senior CSM:
Show progression in growing impact
Understand and catalog “how” you do it
Promotions and title changes typically mean that you have increased responsibility and increased impact. The best way to position yourself as a Senior CSM is to quantify how you grew your impact as a CSM over time, against a set of core Customer Success outcomes.
A. Customer list - has your customer list grown or has the revenue in your customer book grown over time? This shows that you can be trusted to handle more responsibility and more revenue.
B. Type of customers - have you gotten more “strategic” or enterprise customers added to your customer list? This can demonstrate your ability to handle more “valuable” or complex customers.
C. Health scores - have you moved more of your accounts from red to yellow or yellow to green? This shows that you understand the dynamics of your health score and the specific tactics it takes to get customers on a healthy track.
D. Retention rates - have you increased retention rates? This demonstrates your ability to tie your CSM activity to a critical business outcome for your company.
E. Fostering customer advocacy - were you able to get your customers to do a case study or to be a reference? There are many different types of customer advocacy and showing that you can get your customers excited to share your mutual success with others can be a huge vote of confidence in your abilities as a CSM.
F. Supporting or owning sales - If you don’t own renewals or expansions, have you demonstrated supporting the sellers by identifying more opportunities? Or have you grown your own pipeline or bookings revenue?
From this list, you can see there are many different ways to quantify the impact of your work and to show progression over time. Depending on the team and CSM responsibilities (i.e., not owning the renewal), not all of these outcomes will be relevant. The key is understanding the role you are applying to and quantifying your growth journey against specific outcomes.
The next step is equally important: the how. Luck is a part of our professional success and we all get lucky sometimes. However, to position yourself to take on more responsibility, revenue, and risk for a business, it’s important to demonstrate your abilities beyond being lucky. What steps did you take to use, transform, or create a new way of working to achieve positive outcomes?
Let’s use 2 examples in the above outcomes to show how the “how” can help position you as a Senior CSM.
Gaining more strategic or enterprise customers - Let’s say you get to inherit 2 new enterprise customers, on top of a largely mid-market book of business. You notice that these customers require weekly meetings as opposed to the monthly meetings you’re used to having with the rest of your customers. You quickly realize that you need to update your process, by keeping a running agenda and note-taking more details to account for the new sense of urgency from your new customers. You alter your engagement style to best meet the needs of this new segment of customer, both meeting their expectations and delivering value more often.
Fostering customer advocacy - One of your customers is exceeding their goals and raving about the benefits of your product and team. Marketing overhears and asks if the customer could be willing to do a case study and testimonial. You see how valuable this type of advocacy is to the business, so much that you then develop a case study playbook that documents the steps to make these happen, from how to ask a customer for a case study to the steps required to ask for and get a case study approved and delivered.
Now that you have some specific takeaways it’s important to be self-aware in the process. Even if you’re not ready for the move to Senior, you can start mapping out the outcomes you want to improve and the strategies you want to employ to get there. Remember that sometimes a rejection for that next level or promotion is not a ‘No’, it’s really a ‘not right now’.
The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers online training for both Leaders and CSMs, as well as consulting services. Please visit TheSuccessLeague.io for information on our full offerings.
Ejieme Eromosele - Ejieme is a career customer advocate and advises companies on customer-led growth. As VP of Customer Success & Account Management at Quiq, she helps the world’s best brands grow awareness, increase sales and lower customer support costs through conversational AI and messaging. Prior to Quiq, she was Managing Director of Customer Experience at The New York Times and spent over 8 years in management consulting at PwC and Accenture. She has a BA in Economics and an MBA from NYU.