Hiring Great Success Engineers

By Shaun VanWeelden

Success Engineers come in all shapes, sizes, and skill levels, as do the requirements for your specific organization. Despite these sometimes large differences, the Success Engineering role has been quickly gaining traction within SaaS companies looking to bridge the gap between Customer Success and Engineering

In this article, I’ll be covering the Who, What, When, Where, and Why of hiring Success Engineers.

The Why

As Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle suggests, always start with “Why”. As you start to scale your CS organization, it’s common for the CSMs to start spending a lot of their valuable time simply trying to make customers successful from a technical perspective instead of focusing on the strategic value-adding conversations they really like to have.

This often takes the form of CSMs tracking down engineers or the product team to get their customer reported bug looked into, their question about an edge-case answered, or to have help on a call setting up 1 of your 10 integrations. This back- and-forth can quickly create unhelpful tension between CS and other departments as everyone’s trying to do their job.

At Engagio, we’ve found Success Engineers to be a crucial bridge between CX and Engineering that allows everyone to focus on what they do best. Below, I’ll go into detail about what a Success Engineer does and how to hire someone like this if these pain points resonate with you.

The What

Simply put, I consider a “Success Engineer” to be an engineer dedicated to supporting the Customer Success team. I prefer this definition because it could, and arguably should, encompass many different responsibilities.

Having a Success Engineer focus on becoming the go-to product expert, being the bridge between the CS team and the Engineering team, and building out tooling and infrastructure to scale CS efforts allows Customer Success Managers and others to focus more on providing strategic value and ensuring renewals happen. There are many similar “flavors” of technical people helping customers, such as:

• Technical Support Engineer – Managing the support queue escalations

• Technical Account Manager – Ensuring technical success from a strategic POV

• Solutions Engineer or Architect – Helping customers build out solutions on top of your product or platform.

• Implementation Specialist – Helping Customers get up and running initially, onboarding

• Technical Services – Delivering the technical side of professional services

While these are all relevant specializations, I believe the “Success Engineer” role serves as a nice hybrid of all of these roles that can scale well until the CS team is around 30-50 people, at which point, breaking out into the above specializations likely would make sense.

The Who

Success Engineers at the highest level are people who want to use both the technical and social “soft” sides of their brain every day. They have a technical background, but get immense satisfaction from helping others and seeing others succeed.

Wait, you mean those people actually exist?! Yes, they do. While the stereotypes that technical people don’t have the soft skills needed to interface directly with customers are all around us, I’ve learned there’s a real subset of people who excel at doing both and truly enjoy it.

I’ve found the background of Success Engineers varies immensely. Often times, people have tried out both technical roles and non-technical roles at different parts of their life, and now seek a role that leverages both skillsets. There is definitely not a cookie-cutter approach to the background strong candidates have.

While there isn’t a “one size fits all” approach, I and other Success Engineering leaders, frequently find coding bootcamp graduates and those who studied sciences like physics, chemistry, or things like human computer interaction to more frequently have this hybrid engineering + people mindset. When I evaluate Success Engineering candidates, I look for the following qualities:

• They quickly become “Power Users” of every product they touch. They enjoy digging into the details of how things work and are resourceful about finding out how to push products to do more. They are naturally “product- savvy” and have good intuition about how SaaS apps work. Being a true product expert of our application is the base on which everything else is built.

• They are technically capable enough to meaningfully debug product issues.

For us, this means they are comfortable writing SQL queries across our database and reviewing our application codebase to figure out the expected behavior. Being able to code enough to unblock oneself is highly valued.

• They get true joy out of helping others find success. For most people in Customer Success, this is a common trait and I think for Success Engineers, it absolutely needs to be there as well. I value empathy, kindness, and positivity very, very highly as well.

• Their communication skills and “presence” are also very strong. They can communicate over email and on a live call with authority and empathy. It’s important that they are confident in themselves and their knowledge because often times the customer is not sure what is going on themselves. They will need to become a very literal trusted advisor to the CSMs and the customers who are running into issues and having tough questions.

The When

Now that we have a better understanding of what a Success Engineer does, let’s discuss when you might need to hire a Success Engineer and when you probably don’t.

A Success Engineer could be a good fit for you right now if:

• CSMs need to go directly to the Engineering team for help on technical questions or issues

• Your product has very technical “in the weeds” integrations that require lots of debugging or deep technical domain expertise that’s hard to find in CSMs

• Your CSMs need to focus more on the relationship building and renewals as opposed to debugging, answering or triaging technical questions

A Success Engineer may not be a good fit right now if:

• Your application is less technical in nature. For example, most B2C apps and companies would not need a Success Engineer

• You have more than 50 people on the CX team already (this role is likely too much of a hybrid and you should specialize)

• To be successful in a CSM role at your company requires the technical skills and deep product understanding already. You already have a team of engineering-minded folks working as CSMs

The Where

Where does a “Success Engineer” ultimately report to and who should be hiring this person? It’s a really common question and I think you can make very fair arguments for the CS team, Engineering team, and a Support team if you have one. To decide for myself, I thought about the value a Success Engineer adds to each team and whose goals a Success Engineer’s goals match most closely with.

I consider a Success Engineer’s primary charter to be “Remove any technical roadblocks that get in the way of the Customer Success team delivering value, wherever those roadblocks may lie and regardless of the form they take.” While half of my time may be spent sitting with our engineering team debugging product questions or digging through our codebase to clarify how an edge-case works, all of that work is done in the interest of helping the Customer Success focus on what they do best. While time is split between teams and the responsibilities can overlap other departments, if you agree with the charter above, I believe the Customer Success team is the clear choice to own the hiring and enablement of Success Engineers.

It’s worth noting that as a Success Engineering team at Engagio, we fully participate in many of the engineering meetings such as the daily standups, sprint planning sessions, engineering updates, and more. At Engagio, we are considered full members of both teams and I have regular 1:1s with both our VP of Engineering and VP of Customer Experience, but ultimately, we are CX first.

If you’re exploring what a Success Engineering role could look like or how to hire, hopefully this helps a lot! I love talking about strategies, metrics, and more so if that’s something you’re into as well, please get in touch. My email is shaun.t.vanweelden [at] gmail.com

Need more help figuring out how to hire rock star CSMs? The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers a complete CS Leadership program which includes such classes as Hiring Top Performers and Planning a Team Structure. For more information on this program and our other classes and workshops, please visit TheSuccessLeague.io

Shaun VanWeelden - Shaun VanWeelden is the Senior Manager of Success Engineering at Engagio, a B2B SaaS Startup in the Marketing Technology space. He has been working as a Success Engineer and hiring Success Engineers over the last two plus years. He has spoken at Customer Success conferences around the nation about Success Engineering and loves to connect with other savvy and aspiring CS leaders.

Variable Compensation for Customer Success Managers

By Ashley Hall

From day one of my customer success career, variable compensation has been a component of my total comp package: benefits, paid time off, salary, and variable. These have become the building blocks of any modern SaaS compensation plan. That being said, years ago my first variable package was terrifying! “Can I do it? How will I ever be able to hit that number? What happens if I don’t hit that number?” These questions are just the tip of the nerves iceberg when becoming accustomed to having a variable component of your compensation.

If variable compensation is new to you, or if you’re feeling stressed by your goals, read on!

First things first, let's get acquainted with the language. Variable compensation is defined as a portion of compensation that is determined by employee performance. Variable compensation is in addition to your base salary, which is the standard pay that you receive regardless of performance. While variable compensation may not be across all success roles, it is becoming more and more common so that your manager can drive the behavior which best supports the company goals. You might also hear variable comp called commission or a bonus. These two kinds of plans have different structures, but both are considered variable compensation. Note: If you’re a CS manager looking for ideas on how to design a variable compensation plan, check out this article by Kristen Hayer.

Now that you know what variable compensation is, here are some tips to help you make the most of it:

Understand your plan. In order for you to be as strategic as possible, it is important you have full comprehension of your variable. Don’t hesitate to ask lots of questions and revisit your goals frequently during the month or quarter. If something isn’t crystal clear, be sure to communicate that to your manager. It doesn’t help anyone when you underperform because you don’t understand the goals ahead of you. Additionally, most variables are comprised of a number of goals, so that you are motivated to support the company goals at large. If there are a number of levers in your variable, know that your plan should never be so complex that you cannot understand it or explain it to others.

Pace yourself. It’s important that your variable should be set to achievable goals. Hitting 100% should not be out of the question yet still challenging. Be sure to work directly with your manager to strategize on exactly how you will hit the goal. In order to not be overwhelmed by your goals, it can help to break them down into small chunks. Think days, weeks, or months at a time. Over time you will gain a better understanding of seasonality and what you are capable of under pressure. Having a clear pacing plan will empower you to always know where you stand, and when you need to punch the gas or scale back and prep for next month or quarter.

Develop a compensation calculator. Your end results and payout should not be a mystery to you. If your manager doesn’t provide one for you, build out a compensation calculator in excel or sheets where you can input your performance and calculate the outcome of all your hard work. Tying your variable compensation achievements to tangible financial goals, like paying off a debt or saving for a vacation can also be very motivating.

Owning a revenue number that is tied to your compensation can be scary at first, but it’s an incredible way to drive your personal success and prove your value to your company quarter over quarter.

Need help with goal setting and compensation planning? The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers both training and coaching for customer success leaders. Visit our Leadership page for more information on our programs.

Ashley Hall - Ashley loves to lead account management and success teams; from training newbies to building processes out of chaos to working directly with customers. She is passionate about helping customers achieve goals. With an eye on the future she is a powerhouse in building scaleable frameworks that support and drive growth. Ashley is one of the founding advisors to The Success League, and serves as a regular instructor for the company's CSM Training Program. She also serves as a customer success manager for ProsperWorks, and brings her work experiences to her articles and classes. Ashley holds a BA from the University of Colorado, Boulder and enjoys living in San Francisco while traveling all over the world.

The Importance of Internal Onboarding

By Lauren Costella

A plethora doesn’t even begin to describe the number of articles, podcasts, meet up topics, blogs, presentations, and more that have focused on the importance of onboarding for customers. The sophistication on the topic, within just the past few years, is incredibly impressive: specialized onboarding for various customer segments, dedicated internal teams for onboarding, and specialized roles. I’m blown away by what folks are doing to create value and an amazing experience for customers. And rightly so! The value driven in that first engagement is invaluable and sets the tone for the entire relationship with your company. Customers are the lifeline of your company.

But is it only customers whose onboarding experience we need to consider?

Our own internal team members are also lifeline of our companies, and one thing I don’t read to the same degree in the CS space is the importance of internal training for our CS teams, especially as it relates to their specific roles. The best companies train their people! And they train them well for the job they’re hired to do. How well do you onboard your internal team members? Is it as tailored as your customer onboarding? Is each CSM, Support Rep, Implementation Manager, Project Manager, etc. onboarded in a way which allows her to know exactly what success looks like in the first day, week, month, and year?

Internal training is a complex topic, but for Customer Success, I think it’s one of the single most important focuses for a leader in this space. Without great team training, you can kiss an incredible customer experience, and the subsequent renewals and growth you’re expected to drive, goodbye. Your internal people are the secret sauce in driving customer value, and if you don’t set them up for success, how can you expect them to deliver for customers?

So where do we even begin to tackle this issue? Where do we start? Well allow me to offer three tips to consider as you think about your own internal onboarding.

1. Roles and Goals

Before you train, you have to know what success looks like for each role within your team, and it has to be quantifiable and measurable. For example, success for a Customer Support Representative (CSR) at Medrio is answering admin tickets within 3 weeks. You can expect to take about 300 tickets per month by the time you’re fully ramped (usually within the first 3 months), and you’re expected to maintain a 90% CSAT for tickets. This should be in your “scorecard” for the job. Don’t have a scorecard yet? Check out the last blog I wrote on hiring great people.

If you have this as your benchmark for success, you can start thinking through what it means to make sure that person is successful when he/or she starts. And training must be holistic. It can’t just be about our software used to answer tickets, log calls, or document projects. It MUST be about who our customers are, what they care about, and why our product matters and is valuable to them.

For Medrio, our Customer Success team needs to understand our core customers in clinical trials, they need to understand what industry terms are common and why, and then need to be able to apply that knowledge in order to help various types of trials in which customers are using our products.

Consider, too, a mix of hard and soft skills. If your job role describes the need to be a great listener, do you train your team on what that means? While you may think this is “intuitive” to all people in the space, I can absolutely vouch that it isn’t.

2. Repeatable and Scalable

Training delivery for your internal teams is absolutely critical. I’ve experienced a wide variety of training programs in my time in nonprofit, federal government, startups and established for profit companies. Everything from no training, to week long boot camps, to full on interactive online courses, all methods have their pros and cons for setting up. Identify what you can do today and start making moves. As you do this, my biggest piece of advice is to consider making your program repeatable and scalable. For example, if you run an in-person boot camp, and your team has plans of expanding globally, how will that boot camp be delivered? And at what cost? For example, do you plan to fly your international team members on site? Have you budgeted for that? Do you always have a trainer available? Think through your needs now and into the future.

Here at Medrio, my first initiative with the team was to get eLearning set up. We had already created an eLearning for our customers within the product, but we wanted to repurpose the product training internally as part of onboarding. We thought eLearning was a great delivery mechanism because we had remote employees and it was important for our remote team to have more training to access outside of the office. We ended up creating a quarter long priority for a small team to tackle, and let me tell you, they did fantastic! We have a full overview of our department, an overview of each team and each role that exists within those teams. There’s also a schedule and a plan for each role, which allows each person to monitor their progress with our week over week plan. The best part - this was created for new team members by current team members.

We also complement our training with resources outside of our team – for example, we use modules from lifesciences.com and our team uses the Success League online learning program. This saves us critical time from creating material that’s needed but more general in nature vs. specific Medrio training. And finally, the team also created a process to keep our training updated, which leads me to my next point.

3. Change and Iterate

One thing that’s REALLY, REALLY hard to do and easy to forget is remembering that anything you create will quickly become outdated. Does this mean you need to be redoing all of your training every day? Not necessarily, but what is absolutely critical is that you set up a business process to identify outdated material and have a process in place to keep it updated. We have set up a process where we relook at all of our training material every six months. If something is absolutely critical to change (i.e. we’ve changed a system or business process) we’ll make that education change right away, but we use our every six months timing as a growth project for teammates, who want to take on some extra responsibility. It’s a great way to allow for creativity, new ways of thinking, and complete ownership.

Our team’s onboarding isn’t perfect; however, we have most certainly iterated since Medrio University 1.0, and with the right business processes in place, we can keep improving over time. What we know for sure is, internal onboarding is just as critical as our external efforts. A poorly trained internal team can’t deliver excellence and value for external customers, and it’s a huge cost to the company if we lose great people to something that’s completely in our control to own and make better!

Need help with onboarding in your organization? The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers training and coaching for customer success leaders. Please see our Leadership page for more information on our programs.

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.

5 Reasons Why a CSM Should be an Early Hire for Startups

By Jeremy Gillespie

With the speed at which early stage startups move, and continual demand on limited resources, hiring for Customer Success is often pushed down the list of priorities. While it’s easy to make the case for why Sales, Marketing, and Product are the priority, hiring your first CSM is one of the most impactful hires early-stage startups can make. 

The common case for an early CSM is simple: retention. Retention is the lifeblood of your organization. After all, it’s far easier to earn predictable, recurring revenue from existing customers than it is to find new customers. By prioritizing an early CSM hire, retention will follow. But, there are 4 additional (and equally important) reasons to prioritize your first CS hire:

Ensure Customers Are Successful

The primary role of a CSM is to work with the customer to achieve their goals. Customers who achieve the outcomes they expected from your solution will not only renew, they will be advocates for your company in the marketplace.

As an alternative to hiring a CSM, many startups saddle the sales team with maintaining existing customer accounts and this can be a big mis-step. Looking after existing customers will never be the primary focus for the sales team and this can leave you exposed to unsuccessful and disappointed customers.

Support Product Validation

CSMs build incredibly strong relationships with customers – especially in the early days when things aren’t always smooth. With this rapport and trust they can uncover how the customer really feels about the product.

The level of transparency that comes out of these customer relationships allows you to build probing questions into your CSM touch points to determine where the product meets (or doesn’t meet) their expectations. This information is crucial to stay ahead of issues and keep your finger on the pulse of your customers.

Help Define The Product Roadmap

Should you add a new feature, change the user interface, or improve the existing product? Since your CSMs are able to understand how customers feel about the product, they can support the development of your product roadmap. 

Use your early CSM hire to gather feedback from customers to inform your product strategy. While your customers may not drive innovation, they can provide a wealth of insights, and you can leverage their experience with your product to drive improvements to your solution and a stronger product-market fit.

Work Cross-functionally

More than any other role across a company, the CSM works with every single department -- from marketing to sales to product to services to finance. This perfectly positions them to create a cross-functional, seamless customer experience.

Since each department impacts your customer in some form or fashion, and the CSM sits between them and the customer, your CSM can work across departments to make the customer successful. Be sure your first CS hire is someone who can document the optimal customer experience so you can replicate it as you scale.

These are 5 reasons you should prioritize an early CSM hire for your startup. You’ll inevitably face new challenges as you acquire more customers as your company scales, but with the right foundations you will be starting your Customer Success journey on the right foot.

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

Jeremy Gillespie - Jeremy is a growth marketing expert who loves using complex data to build creative retention solutions. By leveraging data and technology, he excels at creating innovative retention and expansion marketing programs for businesses of all shapes and sizes. Jeremy is a founding advisor to The Success League, and is also the founder of Built to Scale, a Bay Area consulting firm focused on helping businesses build scalable customer acquisition and retention programs. He holds a BA from the University of Pittsburgh and MBA from Point Park University. He's a proud former Pittsburgher, currently living in San Francisco.