Hiring a Technical CSM

This week we're joined by guest blogger, Nicole Jackson, with a perspective on how to hire a fantastic technical CSM. Enjoy!

By Nicole Jackson

Customer Success folks come from a wide variety of backgrounds. Assessing the laundry list of qualitative skills necessary can be time-consuming. Now add a requirement that the CSM must be very technical, maybe even have some programming experience. It might feel like you’re searching for a needle in a haystack.

As a hiring manager, you might not even personally have the technical skills that you’re looking for! It can feel daunting. Fortunately, there are a few things we can do to make this a positive, streamlined, and repeatable process.
 

Setting Yourself Up for Success

Take time to think about what the right fit looks like for your team. What would ensure that person will also be a good fit one year down the road? How about two years? How quickly your team must scale should influence how adaptable this person should be.

Think about your must-haves and your nice-to-haves. Decide beforehand what’s negotiable and what’s not so you can write an inclusive job description, attract a diverse candidate pool, and eliminate some potentially biased decisions down the road.

Browsing other job descriptions can help you get started. Titles vary, so try searching for combinations of these: Support Engineer, Technical Customer Success Manager, Technical Support Specialist, and Technical Support Manager.

Find inspiration and consider posting your available positions here:

• Support Driven Community

• Gainsight’s Customer Success Career Hub

• We Work Remotely

Get a second opinion. For example, if this role is expected to fill a knowledge gap between current CSMs and the engineering team, involve the engineering team lead. Ask them which skills or experience would demonstrate a candidate’s ability to fill that role. Is it something that can be highlighted in a work sample?

Remember, the right language is key. Swapping out just a couple of words can make a huge difference. Don’t be afraid to have other teammates review the job description for inclusivity, accuracy, and tone. The best descriptions will come from a collaborative effort and represent the team.
 

Evaluating Experience and Technical Chops

The Screening

A cover letter and phone screens are relatively standard so be sure not to skip these filtering methods. Adding a few open-ended questions to the application, to be answered in the cover letter, can serve as the first step in the qualification process. You may (or may not!) be surprised by how many applicants don’t follow instructions.

The Work Sample

After a successful phone screen, have candidates follow up with a work sample. Make it a simplified version of a task they’ll be expected to perform in their day-to-day. Will they be supporting an API? Have them make a few requests. Will they be onboarding new customers? Have them sign up for a trial account and perform a few integration tasks.

Before sending out your first work sample requests, make sure you’ve prepared a structured grading rubric so that all candidates can be measured using the same metrics and scale. Break down the work sample into a list of actions or requirements that you expect completed. Grade each candidate using true or false to indicate whether they met the expectations or not. You could also score them numerically, just be sure to assign expectations to each value before you start scoring.

After grading, ask a teammate to review the same work sample. Your scores should be very close. If they are not, continue to iterate on the rubric.

To aid the reduction of unconscious bias, obfuscate candidates’ names. You can do this by having an impartial employee anonymize the work by copying responses into a new location, assigning it a number, and storing a key of candidate names and numbers in a separate and secure location.

The Structured Group Interview

If you are going to implement one new hiring process, let it be a structured group interview. This is another crucial step in helping eliminate bias. Similar to the work sample, prepare a list of questions across numerous disciplines. Again, use a numerical grading approach that is tied to predefined expectations. Ask all interviewers to take detailed notes during their interview and grade answers during or immediately after the interview. Invite a diverse group of peers to participate in the interviewing. Here’s an example:

Follow the group interview with a brief meeting to discuss internally how the interview went and talk through any concerns. By now, you and your team should have a good indication of whether or not you are willing to move forward and will have scores to backup your decision.

Additions like a work sample and structured group interview can prove invaluable not only for a technical hire, but also for non-technical hires. Hiring is a time-consuming process so try iterating on this approach over time. Train yourself to look at current processes and responsibilities through a hiring eye at all times, take great notes, and you’ll save yourself a lot of time on the next hire. Happy hiring!
 

Want to learn more about building your team? The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers online training and workshops designed for success leaders. Topics include Hiring Top Performers and Onboarding new CSMs. For more information on these and our other classes and workshops, please visit TheSuccessleague.io
 

Nicole Jackson - Customer Success has been at the heart of Nicole’s entire career, but driving customer happiness and operational change at her first SaaS company back in 2013 paved the way for her transition into both a more technical and strategic realm. Nicole’s focus is on elevating customers, partners and teams in all life cycle phases through operational success. She holds a BS from the University of Massachusetts and recently graduated a full stack web development bootcamp at the University of North Carolina. As a dedicated animal advocate, Nicole is also passionate about combining her business and technology experience to innovate and advance solutions for animal rescue.

Building a Customer Success Talent Engine

By Lauren Costella

In January 2018, McKinsey came out with a fantastic article about the Customer Success 2.0 Growth Engine! If you haven’t checked it out, I highly recommend it. Many of us in the CS space have already been working to move our organizations from the 1.0 model of simply preventing churn to driving growth, and this article was a great reminder of why this is so important for impacting our companies. The article mentions five elements to a 2.0 Growth Engine:

1. A unified go-to-market strategy

2. Sustainable funding model supported by premium offers

3. Customer success talent engine

4. Advanced analytics to predict customer behaviors and target customer segments

5. Customer success philosophy embedded across the organization

All of them are really big and really tough nuggets to crack. I’ve been working through each one myself at Medrio, but one element in particular caught my eye and is very much worth discussing: A Customer Success Talent Engine. In summary, the article describes a “CS Talent Engine” as having clarity on responsibilities, capabilities, and characteristics of top talent; a learning journey for building those capabilities within the team; and a clear career path to keep the talent you have engaged and in place.

Before I jump into the details on how I went about incorporating these practices into Medrio (more intuitively than anything else, since the article came out this year), perhaps I should talk about the pain of what it’s like to not have a Talent Engine in place. Long story short, I learned the hard way, and hopefully my experience helps you take action now versus later. (I faced other challenges as a new VP, and I talked about them in my last blog with the Success League)!

In 2017, my team grew from 10 people to over 25 people globally. These changes included:

• Building a brand new organization with our CS Department from the ground up without clearly defined roles

• Replacing a completely turned over support team

• Being able to adapt to general internal employee turn over/growth into new positions

This is a tremendous amount of change for a relatively short period. And, if your team is anything like mine, it felt like chaos for the veterans and overwhelming for the newbies, and in a fast-growing company, no room to slow down. We had to continue to hit our numbers.

Needless to say, the point about having a Customer Success Talent Engine resonated well with me, and it just so happened to align perfectly with a great song by Spark called “Talent is an Asset” which makes it a perfect add to the CS Playlist for discussion! So without further ado, here’s a few tactical suggestions on how to start building your engine.
 

Clarity on Roles and Responsibilities  

This is SUPER critical for success. As I mentioned above, we didn’t have clarity on the role of the CSM starting out. So, CSMs were positioned by AM team members as personalized “technical gurus” for our customers. This caused issues with multiple teams but it was most painful with our AM team because it positioned our CSMs away from being “proactive” and driving toward specific customer outcomes and put them in just a “support 2.0” bucket. As we tried to move away from the technical positioning, our AM teams felt like CSMs were doing too much of “their” job.

What I did:

• Spoke with my fellow executives about what we wanted from AM and CSMs

• With a defined state and buy-in from the executive team, I hired an outside consultant to help work with our AM and CSM teams in order to get them on the same page

• Through joint AM-CSM workshops, the two teams emerged with agreed upon job descriptions, joint accountability on defined metrics of success, and a suggested structure to support it

Results:

• It’s been really successful! Our AM/CSM teams are now podded together by geography, which align to the new business generation side of the house.

• It was highly effective because our CSM and AM teams defined the roles, responsibilities, and metrics, so there’s a buy-in from both sides.

Today, CSMs are the Relationship and Value Navigators and the AM’s are the Commercial Experts, which is what we all wanted! And the two teams are achieving their joint goals (and our business results as a company)! Not only that, but my job description for CSMs has improved tremendously, allowing me to source great new candidates, which leads me to my next topic…
 

Internal Learning Journey

This was especially important for us to define for all of my teams. I mentioned that our Support team ended up turning over completely, and then grew from 3 team members to 12…globally! But every team has experienced turnover and growth. And again, if your teams are like mine, right when you believe you have everyone in place, your VP of Product comes along and steals your talented team members…just kidding, no really that happened (I’m not bitter). Joking aside, when this happens you realize quickly that you need a way to on board new people FAST.

What I did:

• Identified a tool we could use for both creating customer eLearning training and repurpose for INTERNAL training (two birds with one stone)

• Created Management by Objectives (MBO) projects for every team where they had to build out training slides on their jobs (what they do every day), what tools they use, how were they measured, any soft skills needed, etc.

• Added in quiz questions

• Put together product training (then repurposed for customers)

• Put all of these trainings into Litmos

• Hired the Success League to run training sessions that we couldn’t or didn’t want to build

• Created a process to keep it updated on a semi-annual basis

Results:

• Version 1 of Medrio CS University was launched in September 2017 (4 months after starting)

• The point of this project was to provide a way to onboard internal employees locally and globally in a consistent, cost-effective way. We can’t always do meetings at 3 or 4 AM! And we can’t fly all employees to the US.

• Is it perfect? No, but let me tell you, it’s a great start! I’ve been through the entire training, and what’s awesome, so has my team (regardless of their role). The ability to get exposure into other areas has been a fantastic bonus, which promotes the spirit of providing a clear career path for the team.
   

Career Paths

This topic is one that is near and dear to my heart. And honestly, I’m still developing this one. But I have a few things in the works, just no results quite yet, but I’ll share the plans in any case.

What I’m doing:

• Taking Senior CSRs (Customer Support Representatives) and aligning them to my AM/CSM pods to help proactively manage low touch accounts

  • This is great for customers who may not otherwise has any high touch engagement and allow our CSRs some exposure into working with customers in a proactive vs. reactive way

• Having Senior CSRs run our kick-off and onboarding processes with some of our key accounts and some light training

  • This allows our CSRs to learn more about training and some of the technical services our accounts need. It gives them exposure into the paid training our professional services team provides and how to engage with customers.

Results:

• I’ll have to follow up!

My biggest takeaway in the Talent Engine conversation: simply start! Whatever you tackle first, the impact is huge. As our musical muse Spark says, “Talent is an Asset” and none of us can afford to waste it! So get cracking!  

Are you looking to build your own CS talent engine? The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that can guide you in your quest. We offer a complete CS Leadership Training Program as well as individualized consulting designed for success leaders. For more information on our classes, workshops, and consulting, please visit TheSuccessLeague.io

Lauren Costella - Lauren is a change agent, communicator, leader and passionate champion for Customer Success in business, since a great customer experience drives retention, growth and brand advocacy. Her expertise centers on building early signs for risk and growth, defining cross-department success plays, team enablement, operations and process, and selecting and implementing CS software. When she’s not working as the VP of Customer Success for Medrio, you can find her serving as an advisor and blogger for the Success League, an active board member for the Customer Success Network, and blogging generally about her CS experiences 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 with running and surfing in the Bay Area.

3 Approaches for Your Customer Success Enablement Program

By Kristen Hayer

Employee training is often an afterthought in customer success, with many organizations taking a “throw them in the pool and see if they swim” approach to CSM onboarding. Fortunately for those companies who do invest in education, studies show that employee training results in engagement, retention, loyalty and ultimately, revenue.

If you decide it’s time to build out your CSM onboarding or ongoing education program, there are proven methodologies that drive stronger knowledge retention and long-term skill development. Here are three approaches to consider as you design your customer success enablement program.
 

Address different learning styles

Different people learn in different ways. You may have noticed that some of your team members need to see something or write it down in order to remember it (visual), while others respond best to a discussion (auditory) or hands-on project (kinesthetic). Groups will typically include a mix of these different learning styles.

With your own team, you have the ability to tailor learning experiences to individuals. While onboarding content should be consistent, providing multiple options for learning that content can help new employees get up to speed faster. As team members move beyond onboarding, look for indications of learning style preference and provide opportunities for each person to grow in a way that works well for them.
 

Train in bite-sized chunks

Ever been to a seminar where they tried to cover 8-10 topics over the course of a day? How much did you remember afterward? Most people will have forgotten 70% of what they learned within 24 hours. How do you fix this? Teach individual topics in bite-sized chunks, an approach often called micro-learning.

For your team, this might look like a book club where you cover a chapter a week and really focus on that content. It could look like a class on a specific topic with follow up exercises to solidify learning. Sometimes, workshops or seminars make sense from a team-building standpoint. Make the most of those by focusing on a few topics and going deep. For onboarding, break up training into modules and give new employees time to absorb the information in between.
 

Teach skills through moments

A solid base of customer success skills across your team is what you’re shooting for when you build a CS enablement program. Skills are most easily learned when they are presented in line with how they will be used day-to-day. Most people have heard about “teachable moments” in parenting or “teaching through storytelling” in school. These practices align with the idea that people learn best when they can relate the skills they need to how those skills can be used in real life.

For your customer success training program, consider key moments in your customer’s lifecycle or the activities your CSM will be responsible for. Teach core skills like goal-setting, discussing business outcomes, engaging executives, and balancing time through the lens of these daily interactions. This provides skills together with application, and makes the learning more practical.

Keeping these best practices in mind as you build out your CS enablement program will help you drive long-term skill development across your team. The more you can address a mixture of learning styles, right-size your content, and find teachable moments, the more engaged and productive your team will be. It’s worth the investment.

Want to learn more about building and developing your team? The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers online training and workshops designed for success leaders. Topics include Hiring Top Performers and Onboarding new CSMs.  For more information on these and our other classes and workshops, please visit TheSuccessLeague.io

Kristen Hayer - Kristen believes that customer success is the key to driving revenue, client retention and exceptional customer experiences. Her areas of expertise include developing success goals and metrics, designing the optimal customer journey, selecting technology, training teams, and building playbooks. Prior to founding The Success League, Kristen built and led several award-winning customer success teams. Over the past 20 years she has been a success, sales, and marketing executive, primarily working with growth-stage tech companies. Kristen has her BA from Seattle Pacific University and her MBA from the University of Washington.

Customer Success Compensation: Excellent Execution

By Kristen Hayer

Last week I wrote an article about the 5 Key Decisions you need to make in order to build an effective customer success compensation plan. This week I’m going to focus on how to get your comp plan ready and roll it out successfully. Execution can make the difference between a plan that drives high performance, and (as this Forbes article highlights) a plan that gets you into serious financial or legal trouble. Here are 5 steps you should take to make sure your plan drives the desired results.

Step 1: Model Performance Expectations

When you built the plan, you established the expectations for a typical performer. On average, your team members should hit their goals and achieve 100% of their variable compensation. As a test, build a model of what both a low and high performer would earn under your current plan. Ask yourself if there is enough of a difference between the 3 levels of performance. Will your top performers feel like the reward justifies the extra work they put in? Will the low performers step it up or move on? If not, you may need to revisit your plan before you roll it out.

Step 2: Consider Negative Side Effects

People can be very creative, and some members of your team may look for loopholes in your plan. Generally, a few simple ground rules can help you avoid this problem, so think about the ways that someone could game the system. Aside from this obviously negative side effect, there can be another, subtle problem - a shift in focus. If your team has a compensation plan which rewards a single goal that can cause your team to neglect other, important aspects of the job. Make sure your compensation program is balanced to avoid this problem.

Step 3: Document Clearly

Write up the plan details and rules in simple, clear language. It shouldn’t take a lawyer to interpret a compensation plan. That said, you do need to consider things like what happens if an employee leaves the company, what happens if a deal falls through, and what happens if the CSM moves to another territory. Most HR departments have a compensation plan template, and most of them are too complicated. However, they can serve as a good starting point, and can help ensure that you cover all key points.

Step 4: Get Necessary Approvals

Depending on the size and maturity of your company, you’ll have different hoops to jump through to get your plan approved. Start with your boss. In small organizations, that may be enough. In larger companies your plan will probably need to go through the HR, finance and possibly legal teams. If you do need your legal team’s approval, push back on any jargon and ask them to use simple language. If they insist on legalese, be sure to have them explain any clauses you don't understand. Don’t communicate anything to your team without full approval.

Step 5: Communicate (Almost) Excessively

When you’re ready to go over your new compensation plan with your team, expect to feel like that’s all you ever talk about for a while. You should roll out the program to the team in a meeting, where you’ll cover general details like how the plan works, what it rewards, how you’ll measure results, and when the team will be paid. Then go over plans individually with each team member to review any details that are specific to them, as well as answer questions that they might have. Once team members have had a chance to review their new plans, expect a lot more questions over the next few weeks. You should also start to review performance against plans in weekly one-on-one meetings once the program goes live.

These 5 steps should help you avoid the potential downside of variable compensation, and ensure that your team embraces their new plan. If this is your team’s first experience with variable comp, thoroughly planning the roll out will help alleviate any fears they might have. If your team has been on a variable plan before, they will appreciate having a simple plan that clearly explains how to earn money. Best of luck as you plan for 2018!

Need ideas for your compensation plan? The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers an online course on Developing Compensation Plans. Our next classes are offered on October 10 and November 17, 2017. For more information on this class, as well as other courses in our CS Leadership Program, please visit TheSuccessLeague.io