By Evan Rich
Having been the first Customer Success boots on the ground, I often get asked by leaders what they should look for when hiring their first CSM. Companies often identify the need for a CSM after they start seeing onboarding or retention issues. Moreover, the absence of a customer specialist forces account executives and solutions engineers to dedicate significant time to servicing post-sales accounts. Each day the CSM seat remains unfilled is another day the sales team is unable to dedicate its full focus toward customer acquisition. This is deeply problematic for any business in its early days. The CSM can’t arrive soon enough. But leaders must resist the temptation to hire the first person that checks a few boxes in hopes that they will make the problem disappear. Much like Liam Neeson’s character in the film Taken, there is someone out there with a very particular set of skills who is uniquely suited to fill this critical role.
Here are the attributes I look for when making this all-important hire:
Be Flexible
The job of “first CSM” can be overwhelming as there simply is not enough time in the week to reach every customer with the desired set of account activities. Mature CS organizations will typically distribute accounts based on a revenue or customer count threshold to ensure CSMs can properly allocate time for completing all those activities across their accounts. This rigid approach is not viable in the early days of a company. Your first CSM hire will need to own every single account, whether there are 10 or 50 of them, and it won’t be obvious that you need to hire a second CSM until they become overwhelmed by the demands of existing customers. During the interview process, I ask candidates to tell me about a time when they had competing customer priorities and to walk me through their thought process for deciding how best to allocate their time. Their answer should demonstrate that this is a muscle they are exercising regularly. They should be comfortable with being uncomfortable. There will be dozens of prioritization decisions each week, and some days it might make sense to prioritize based on revenue while others will lean toward urgency of the customer's needs. The bottom line is that the CSM must be flexible as opposed to strictly adhering to a predetermined set of activities. It will take time to cultivate instinctively knowing what to prioritize, but flexibility is an essential prerequisite to early success.
Be Organized
The picture painted above probably makes this sound somewhat chaotic, and, well, it is. The first CSM hire is essentially being asked to organize that chaos. In absorbing the entire customer base, the CSM will need to orchestrate several hand-offs with the account executives engaged from the pre-sales process. This can be especially tricky if account executives have been functioning without any post-sales specialists for an extended period of time. Some salespeople may be very protective of their customers and hesitant to let a new hire step in, while others might perhaps be too eager to offload their accounts. It takes a special type of person to handle both scenarios with aplomb all while making sure the customer experiences a seamless transition. There is nothing more frustrating for a customer than having to repeat information they’ve already shared. Starting with these internal handoffs, the CSM will be responsible for organizing information collected throughout the customer journey and tracking it in a single source of truth (whether that is a CRM or CS-specific tooling). It is important for all CSMs to be organized, but the bar is even higher for the first hire given how foundational the role is to establishing best practices and promoting data cleanliness.
Be Ambitious
Playbooks and best practices are essential to the Customer Success Manager role. But what do you do as the first CSM hire when those documents don’t exist? While it may be difficult to find a CSM who has built a playbook from scratch, it should not be a challenge to find one who has worked with playbooks and has strong opinions about them. The ideal hire is eager to weigh in and become a partner in building out your playbook. I will tell candidates during the interview process that this is not a typical CSM job. We expect them to do much more than execute on their customer activities. We need them to contribute to the evolution of our process in order to build for scale. This is why in the early days, we incorporated a mock onboarding exercise into our interview process. Our onboarding deck and project tracking templates were actually inspired by materials that our first two CSM hires presented while interviewing with us.
Be Proactive
I often say that Customer Success is all about being proactive, which pairs well with the more reactive responsibilities of Customer Support. Customer Success is also unique in that it sits at the center of many organizations, forming the connective tissue between go-to-market and product. If you can find someone who is flexible, organized and ambitious to be the first CSM hire, then that individual will almost certainly maintain a proactive mindset when engaging with key stakeholders across the business and customers alike. Instead of being reactive, they will regularly be thinking about how they can solve problems that customers haven’t even realized exist and then take action on their ideas with minimal oversight. As I wrote in my last piece for The Success League, this proactive mindset led us to develop a system for overage alerts, which has turned a frustrating customer experience into a far more positive one.
Though this piece is focused on the “first” hire, I would extend this line of thinking to recruiting for any early Customer Success roles. Despite only launching one CS team in my career, I’ve had the privilege of hiring more than a few CSMs who possessed the capabilities and mindset required to be successful as a “first” hire. When you are operating in an early stage environment where management oversight must be minimal, hiring CSMs with these skills will allow your leaders to scale and redirect focus toward building things that will impact the broader organization. There may only be one Liam Neeson, but there are many talented CSMs out there who possess this very particular set of skills.
The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers a Certified CS Leadership program which features classes such as Hiring Top Performers and Planning a Team Structure. Visit TheSucceessLeague.io for more information on these and our other offerings.
Evan Rich - Evan formed the Customer Success team at NS1, an infrastructure technology company that is changing how internet applications are delivered. As VP of Global Services, he is responsible for account management, support and professional services. Evan holds a BS from Cornell University and an MBA from Columbia University. He resides in New York City.