The new age of Customer Success
Are big changes coming to the customer success industry?
“Amp it Up” by Frank Slootman is a book written by the CEO of Snowflake, where Frank led the company to the largest software IPO in history. In the book, there is a chapter on Customer Success and Frank says the first thing he does when he joins any company is to eliminate the customer success department. Frank says “Customer success is everyone's job” and creating a function that owns customer success leads the rest of the company to brush the responsibility off to the side.
When I first joined my current company, we were at single-digit millions of revenue and I was tasked with leading our Customer Success function. Very early on, I made the choice (even before reading Frank’s book) to not create a Customer Success Manager (CSM) role. For context, I am not a traditional Customer Success leader (most of my experience comes from presales), and perhaps that was what was required for a CS leader to make the decision to not have CSMs. Most of my experience came from working alongside CSMs and there were several inefficiencies that I recognized from companies I worked at before:
CSMs were not self-sufficient - Most of them were not technical, so they constantly needed to pull in other teams for help in order to unblock themselves.
Solutions Architects (SAs) were not customer centric - Most SAs I interfaced with wanted to solve technical problems, intead of developing customer relationships. You just can’t hire someone in post-sales that isn’t customer-obsessed.
People add more complexity - When a company becomes a customer, they are introduced to a new team (typically a CSM and SA). Now they need to interface with the Account Executive, Sales Engineer, CSM, SA and the support team - internally and externally there’s a lot of room for finger-pointing and miscommunication.
Luckily at our company, we had a product and engineering team that was already customer-centric. Our engineering team not only cared about shipping new features, but they really focused on the “self-serviceability” of our product. Self-serviceability in this context doesn’t mean “no-sales”, it means the ability for a customer to understand and use the product on their own without help. Due to this, many of our faster moving customers were able to use the product on their own with no assistance which allowed our CS organization to focus more on the largest and most strategic customers. I truly think this is one of the most important requirements for any successful company, and if you find yourself having to use people in order to make your customers successful, it may be a symptom of a lack of customer empathy from your product.
How we operate at our company. Our north star:
When I was at Salesforce, there was a time when the employees at Salesforce once wished: “One day people will say ‘No one gets fired for buying Salesforce’ like they say about IBM”. The day eventually came when indeed, customers and prospects started saying it. We live under this philosophy as a Customer Success organization: our goal is to one day have people say “No one gets fired for buying Hightouch”.
Many people may read the line “No one gets fired…” to mean you’ve become big enough to be the safe choice, but I understand it a little differently. What I see is that the trust of the company has become so large that the decision for choosing this company comes from that trust alone. During my time at Salesforce, it was around the same time when companies started going “all-in” on Salesforce products. People weren’t just buying Salesforce for CRM, they were also buying Salesforce to power every aspect of their business including their Customer Service, Marketing, and Community platforms. That’s when I realized the true test of trust comes when companies are willing to depend on more of your products (or in some cases even ask you to build things for them).
Trust can only be built with value
When we think about what value means for a customer - at its simplest form, its about helping customers achieve their company goals. As a person in Customer Success, how can you deliver value if you’re not an expert in your own product? The customer will understand their own business the most, and what the customer really needs from you, as a vendor, is someone who understands what they don’t know yet: your product and industry knowledge. It’s hard to gain trust unless you can:
Understand all of the customer’s problems at multiple levels of discovery: From how problems impact the business to what bottlenecks create those problems.
Find ways to unblock the problem with your product or guide them in the right direction
The challenge with most Customer Success Managers is that when it comes to products that are technical (and what company isn’t technical these days), many don’t become experts which limits the value they can deliver to a customer because they choose not to become technical themselves. To me, this is a mistake.
And to clarify, you don’t need to know how to code to be “technical”. The definition of technical here is someone who’s a student: you can read and pick up concepts fast, put pieces together, and engross yourself in the industry. If you want to become technical, start by becoming an expert in the product of the company you work for (use the product!), and then grow into understanding how it fits into the larger ecosystem. Always ask yourself questions like - Where can this product go from here? What tangential problems do my customers face that make sense for us to solve?
So what do we do without CSMs?
At our company, rather than CSMs and SAs, we have a role that focuses purely on our most strategic customers that we call Technical Architects (TA). Our TAs are people who:
Are sales driven (or in other words, highly motivated and have a drive)
Are technical (they can solution, onboard, and solve problems)
Are great at champion building (like an Account Executive)
Are strategic (see where a customer will be years down the road)
There’s a lot there, and yes, these people are “unicorns”. But the value this team brings to our company and our customers is indisputable. And our company isn’t the only company doing this: There are companies like Sourcegraph and Snowflake who didn’t have CSM orgs long before us. And companies like Retool and Hashicorp have recently disbanded their CSM function with similar goals.
One last thing:
Every company is different, and in some companies, the CSM role is crucial. In fact, some of the best people I’ve worked with in my lifetime have been CSMs. So if this article made you think, then take a pause and go back to the basics: Is my company doing what makes the customer successful? Or are we more worried about following a SaaS playbook? Remember:
Customer success is an everyone problem
Deliver value, and deliver it fast
Special thanks to Alvin Tai and Reid Sata for reviewing my writing.