Traits of Successful CSMs
Yesterday I had a candidate ask ...
"Brian, what do the best CSMs all have in common?"
It's a great question and one that prompted me to reflect on our very best CSMs we've had the opportunity to hire over the years. As I replayed our highest performing CSMs and their backgrounds, I realized that our best customer success managers had less to do with their resume and more to do with specific traits.
The most successful CSMs we've hired came from varied backgrounds. Some were promoted from our wonderful support organization, others came from a sales background, some were consultants, others have been tried and true account managers for years before customer success management was a department.
However when I reflected on these individuals, I realized that they carried four specific traits that made them wildly successful in working with our Customers:
Empathy: Can this person put themselves in their Customer's shoes to truly understand their pain points & motivations?
Product and Domain Knowledge: Is this person well-versed on data and analytics?
Action Orientated Project Manager: Will this person juggle multiple priorities while driving action?
Commercially minded: Does this person know how to prioritize their efforts for what’s best for the business?
Let's dig into each of these traits below:
Empathy
An enormous part of customer success, no matter the industry, is about connecting with Customers, their business, and their needs. In short, it's practicing empathy.
As a major fan of Brene Brown's work on vulnerability she describes how practicing empathy does in fact build connection.
In a nutshell, here are empathy’s defining characteristics according to Brené Brown:
Recognizing emotion in the other person
Being able to communicate that emotion
Recognizing another person’s perspective
Not passing judgement
That’s where empathy comes in -- connecting on a deeper level, by understanding and acknowledging a Customer’s feelings. If customer success is about listening to Customers and understanding their wants and needs, their product challenges, bugs, and feature requests... it makes sense that practicing empathy should be considered a key skill for CSMs in the field.
Product & Domain Experience
The concept of 'Strategic Advisor' should ideally be incorporated into the Customer Success Vision for any customer success department. However building Strategic Advisor status takes trust being built with Customers. And building trust requires strong and repeated demonstration of domain knowledge to our champions.
We look for people who are great team players, with high social skills and demonstrate that they are focused on Customers, their team, and our business – not just themselves. We look for candidates that have a strong background in the domain area of our SaaS platform.
This is key because a CSM is effectively the quarterback for Customer relationships, so our champions need to trust that they'll run the right plays both in their interactions with the Customer and with other departments internally.
Effective Project Manager (with a bias to action)
If trust has been built, Customers see their CSM as the central point of contact with their vendor. As such, CSMs are the natural first stop for any project a Customer wants to discuss -- and these projects range drastically in scope.
In a single day a CSM might be approached about changing invoicing terms, facilitating a cloud migration, or brainstorming a brand new departmental use-case. Since CSMs work on a variety of projects it’s nearly impossible (if not impractical) for them to individually complete each task. As a result, CSMs regularly interface with a variety of internal and external teams.
Our best CSMs are highly capable project managers with a bias to action.
That means being able to identify Customer needs or issues, translating them into actionable tasks, and shepherding those tasks through to completion.
"Commercially aware"
The Cambridge Business English Dictionary defines commercial awareness as…
"the knowledge of how businesses make money, what Customers want, and what problems there are in a particular area of business”
In other words, commercial awareness is an understanding of what your company needs to do to be profitable, be successful, and serve its Customers well. In the context of customer success at Looker, CSMs need to be commercially aware as Customer Success is accountable to a wide variety of financial SaaS metrics highly influenced by CSM's actions.
Gross Retention Rate, Dollar Based Net Retention, Logo Churn, Dollar Churn are a few that immediately come to mind.
So while Customer Success Managers aren't negotiating and closing deals (we thank our amazing Sales and Renewals teams for that!) CSMs need to know that every action taken in the field needs to tie back to the revenue metrics Customer Success is responsible for, and ultimately influences the growth rate for Looker.
These 4 characteristics have all been present and shared in common amongst our most successful CSMs we’ve had the opportunity to hire throughout the last half decade. I’m excited to see how this list of traits evolves in the next five years.
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