I was going through the checklist for what I should write in this blog post, I felt like the majority of the “golden nuggets” i’m about to depart can be applied to most customer facing roles. Ha, so much for being unique.

Anyhow, I do think it’s critical for SaaS companies, now more than ever to nail Customer Success. Ask any exec in the SaaS world and they will tell you the same exact thing, that it’s much more difficult to go out and get a new customer than it is to retain one.

The markets are more competitive than ever before, there is a lot of noise, more distractions than ever before, to stay relevant and constantly grab the attention of prospects is just a darn tough job.

Making sure that the well does not dry up is a challenge, so it’s important to ensure while you are out there hunting for new sources of food, the current one does not go awry.

Enter Customer Success. Hiring a Customer Success Manager (CSM) is crucial for ensuring customer satisfaction, retention, and growth of your current customer base. Without a healthy state of your current revenue, you will not be able to maximize the impact that your TOFU (Top of the funnel activities) will have to your bottomline. Which is why hiring for this role is crucial for success of your business.

Also, getting Customer Success right does not stop at hiring, this is an ongoing battle that involves getting the right tool stack in place, how to segment your customers, ICP (Ideal Customer Profile), if you haven’t gotten these things right yet, or still don’t have a good enough grasp of these concepts, I highly recommend you tackle them before you go anywhere near the hiring front.

You don’t want the new hires to feel the environment is chaotic and lacks direction. That quickly can turn from sexy and suave to downright PITA. So yea, figure your ‘crap’ out first and then go about hiring. The disadvantage of getting these things right after hiring is, that you are now spending the team’s time adjusting and perfecting things as oppose having all the playbooks in place and letting your new hires hit the ground running.

So, take your time, get these things right. Like my boy Rui says, this is a marathon, not a sprint.

Once you have all the playbooks in place and you know exactly what you need to do. You are ready to hire members of your customer success team, here is what to look out for.

These points don’t just apply to new teams but also teams that are perhaps looking to expand their function and are seeing growth. Regardless, let’s get into the meat and bones.

What is a Customer Success Manager?

The word manager in the role does not mean that they will be managing people. Quite the opposite, a CSMs job is to manage a book of business that consists of customers to help and maximize the value of a product or service. This is a role that is pretty common place now in the world of SaaS.

A CSMs job quite literally is to act as a bridge between, sales, customer support and the product team. I know quite often folks don’t see the difference between customer support and customer success.

We already got a customer support team, we don’t need to tack another one on… right, but you do. Here’s why:

Customer success managers are proactive, their goal is to ensure customers achieve their goals and derive maximum value from the product.

They need in-depth knowledge of the product’s features to troubleshoot issues and effectively promote the product’s benefits, thereby increasing adoption and long-term retention. Support does not do that. Support’s job is to reactively handle all support queries coming in, but that requires a customer to raise their hand with a Q to begin with.

Here is a quick comparison between customer success and customer service:

Customer Success	Customer Service
Proactive	Reactive
Focuses on customer’s goals	Focuses on the issue at hand/resolution
Drives customer value from the product	Drives customer satisfaction
Long-term perspective	Short-term perspective
Revenue-generating	Cost-center
Involves cross-team effort (sales, support, product)	Mostly owned by a single function

As you can see both roles have the same goal, which is customer happiness. The way they go about doing this is extremely different. One is very reactive whereas the other is very proactive. Albeit both roles are crucial to the success of your business, both are entirely different functions.

CSM is also interchangeable with account managers. It really just depends on the industry in which you operate.

With that out of the way, let’s talk skills and what you need to put look out for.

Your Ideal Customer Profile

Hear me out. Are your customers Enterprise? SMBs? Mid-market orgs? This is the basis for what type of CSM you need to go ahead and hire and onboard.

If your customers are mostly SMBs with small number of users, and you end up hiring an Enterprise CSM, this will back fire on you quite quickly.

Think about it, one is used to managing a large number of customers in their book and the other probably had max 3 account in their book. While both are strategic in their approach, how they go about achieving that is very different. You can of course retrain the rep, however training will require time and effort and there are things that the rep won’t be able to see coming when it comes to customers due to their lack of experience.

If your ICP is focused on healthcare, hiring CSMs with experience in that sector ensures they understand industry regulations and challenges. CSMs familiar with the specific ways your ICP uses your product can provide more tailored and effective support.

A deep understanding of the space in which you operate, and if they have prior experience that matches what your product offers, that’s a win-win.

If you mis-hire here, you’re not only setting that rep up for failure, but also setting the stage for a very expensive lesson coming your way. This is why its important to have a good understanding of the basics of the industry in which you operate along with your customers, so you can then go ahead and fill in the role that would suit that group of customers accordingly.

Passion for customers

Look, I don’t claim to be an expert in all things customer success. I’m at the very best a novice who is learning on the job in terms of what it takes build and scale a CS team. There are a lot of things that I can share that I try and look for in people when hiring them for my teams.

The critical thing after three years of running this team is that, whatever level of seniority you end up hiring for, this person will have to wear many hats to get going. The smaller your company is, the more true the statement becomes.

You will find success if you focus on hiring someone that has a passion for customers. Their main job will be to work with customers and make them successful. There will be a ton of ups and downs, billing issues, rude clients, bugs, losing a renewal, churn, add in another 100+ examples here.

All those conversations will have their ups and downs, so the passion in short is a must-have.

How do you gauge that?

You look for cues, their mentality you will find they mostly put the customer first and encourage their peers to do the same. The passion will be evident, if you for example ask them how they’ve worked with their book of business in the past during the interview.

Passion for feedback

Alright, so today is the day that I use passion to just about describe everything and anything, ha. Jokes apart, feedback is important, it sucks, but it helps us grow. The person(s) you end up hiring need to have a passion for both giving and receiving feedback.

Whether you like it or not, there will be a need for both, more so than you think. Always make it really clear before the process goes further, so the person knows what to expect and whether or not, if they can thrive in this type of environment.

Most folks will tell you they want feedback until you actually give it to them. Ask for past stories of times giving and receiving feedback went well, or not so well, to ascertain their appetite.

This of course plays as much a role in receiving feedback as it does in giving it. If the rep is not able to receive feedback well, chances are they will also struggle to share the information with the other departments, for things that are detrimental to the customer.

Being a voice of the customer is not easy. You have to deal with a lot of things coming at you and that too fast. Passion for feedback will always help the person you hire to be able to digest and distill the feedback in the company internally without shying away from it.

Onboarding experience

Discount this at your own peril. I have heard this one so many times before, “oh that person is very well spoken”, right they may very well be well spoken, and might be great at selling themselves but that does not mean that they will make a great CSM.

One of the most critical component of the customer success job is the ability to onboard customers. If you think of being a CSM in a nutshell, it’s all about making sure that the customers are successfully launching and getting value from using the product that you offer.

Eventually you will hire a person that will be dedicated for onboarding but for the time being (again, limited resources), this person you hire for now is likely responsible for the onboarding function.

This is where the previous onboarding experience can be critical and can come in really handy. Here is a tip: Ask the person you are interviewing to onboard you to a tool of their choice during an interview to gauge their level of comfort with onboarding.

Clear Communication Style

Both verbal and written. CSMs job is to talk to customers, day in and day out. Through emails, capturing feedback on calls, Zoom meetings, etc. They need to be able to communicate well not only with the customer but internally as well.

Documenting processes as they go along. You definitely want this person communicating with yourself and other teams regularly too.

Role plays and homework assignments in the interview process can help you identify these strengths.

Not Hustlers

This is not the role for folks that want to crush their target no matter what. Shoving product down customer’s throat is really not the key here. The goal of a CSM, any CSM is to ensure that the customers are happy with the product that they are using.

Voicing concerns internally, making sure that the customers are happy and all their product needs are met.

Not an easy job if you are looking to transact on the relationship with the customer, eh? Plus, customers can sense it from a mile away if you are trying to hustle them, or trying to make a buck out of the relationship, that will simply not work in most cases. While I see the appeal in wanting to kill two birds with one stone, that approach very seldom works for customer success.

Industry Knowledge

Last but not least. While this is not a crucial one, it is important and can certainly make things easier for you if you are just starting out with creating a new customer success team.

You first customer success hire will likely be a consultant to many of your customers. If they already understand the lingo and the space, it could be a real advantage for the customers as well as you.

It means less time to train, and they can onboard themselves fast as well. Again, you know your best business best, if this isn’t critical, it’s not a deal-breaker.

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Look, hiring for customer success just like any other role is not easy. It took me hundreds of interviews before I found the right people, who were the right fit for the team. Needless to say it took some time to get all the right pieces in the right place.

Whoever ends up in this role will have a front-row seat for what your customers are saying and needing. be sure to seek their input and give them a seat at your internal tables too.

Their insight will prove valuable for improving the product and service, in turn letting them drive more customers towards success. The cyclical nature of this internal relationship will pave the path for you to retain and grow more of your customers.

Be sure to carve the path out for this person’s growth too. You’ll want to keep them and their knowledge of your customers around as long as you can.

Happy hunting!