So you have found yourself being asked to step up and be the new Customer Success Manager. It happens more than you realize. I know a few early-career CSMs and they were tapped on the shoulder to take this new CSM role (What the hell is this?) as they had demonstrated great skills in interacting with customers. Typically these new CSMs come from the following backgrounds, Technical support, Customer Care, Sales Engineering, and Account Management.

If you are that person, the first question that is often asked is “what do I do now?”.

We will get to this in a bit but before we do, there may be some readers that want to understand the desired skill set of a CSM.

I am going to give you a view of the skills the CSM needs from the perspective of the different functions that work with the Customer Success team. This includes Marketing, Value Engineering, Sales Engineering, Support, CSMs (already active in the job) Sales Managers, VP of CS, and of course Sales.

Before I get down to sharing the list, I was asked the other day during a mentoring session, what is the number one skill of a CSM. My answer is “Empathy” - no question! I didn’t even have to take a breath and think about it.

The list…

Skill 1: Empathy

Empathy is the ability to recognize, understand, and share the thoughts and feelings of another person. To have the ability to put the other person’s needs and wants before your own. Developing empathy is crucial for establishing relationships. It involves experiencing another person’s point of view, rather than just one’s own, and enables helping behaviors that come from within, rather than being forced.

In a business context. When we are in a client meeting and listening to the customer’s perspective we need to hold the mindset of how can we help this individual and business move forward in the context of our products and solutions.

When we are responding to the client's request where are we on the empathy line. Are we answering from a position of self-interest or are we being client-focused? Often it's a mix of the two and this mix depends upon the topic we are discussing. e.g. if it s a product support discussion then we need to be high on the level of client focus.

Having this personal awareness during our client meetings is an important skill to acquire. Also, when we are acting in a self interested way this can often come across during a meeting, so be careful, maintain your integrity and your professional presence.

Skill 2: Executive Presence
A definition from betterup.com is as follows.

“In essence, executive presence is the level of your ability to lead a group. This is measured by their likelihood to follow you and your direction, and how you're viewed across the team. “

I believe that this quote gives the essence of Executive presence. In our day to day as customer success managers I believe it means the following:

Able to clearly communicate with executives in a language they understand
Demonstrate the ability to create outcomes by guiding vendor and client teams that have a positive impact on the owning customer executive
Able to present content, themes, ideas confidently to the executive on the customer side about your product and service.

In summary, this skill is about packaging up content in a way that is relevant and interesting to the executive in a clear concise manner and then being able to communicate it effectively and in a short amount of time.

SKill 3: Listening

LIstening or more importantly Active listening features highly on the skills of a Customer Success Manager.

The HBR identifies three components of active listening and I believe these are on the money.

Cognitive: Paying attention to all the information, both explicit and implicit, that you are receiving from the other person, comprehending, and integrating that information
Emotional: Staying calm and compassionate during the conversation, including managing any emotional reactions (annoyance, boredom) you might experience
Behavioral: Conveying interest and comprehension verbally and nonverbally

If you have ever been in a customer meeting with your colleagues you may have noticed that in a group there are people who listen, people who talk, and people that do a bit of both. The key to listening is, first of all, to be focused, stay in the moment, and direct your attention towards the customer. Be attentive, using small gestures and sounds to signify agreement e.g. nod the head, making the “umm” sound, saying “yes” signifies your engagement and your interest.

Ask open-ended questions such as;

How might you address that concern? or What sort of benefits will that approach deliver for you and your business?

Ask probing questions to get more detail,

Could you please add more colour to your point about how the solution being too hard to implement?.

Paraphrase and clarify points such as

I am hearing that you have had some challenges implementing the solution and you are looking for some guidance on how to improve this, is that right?

…and then wait for the response.

During the discussion with the customer intentionally ask yourself the question

What is the customer feeling about this meeting right now or the situation they are discussing?

This knowledge can help you “pitch” your questions so they land well for the customer. It is more difficult to do this well when there is heightened emotion about the current situation so it’s a good question to ask yourself during those client meetings.

Try out some of these examples during your next customer call and see how you get on.

Skill 4: Collaborative

A high-level definition

“To work with your teammates, to share common goals, and work towards those goals. Having the ability to build teams and lead those teams to deliver an outcome. “

We all know that some of our peers are more collaborative than others. Perhaps you are one of those people that hold your skills and experience back through lack of confidence or fear that your hard-won knowledge once shared will no longer be your knowledge. For some collaboration means telling people what to do and the recipient of the “order” is perceived as collaborative when they do as they are told. Perhaps you overshare - if you have some knowledge or content you are always looking for an opportunity to tell people about your knowledge.

When we think of collaboration it means different things to different people. The knack is to understand your style and perspective of collaboration, this self-awareness is useful. When we are dealing with the customer as CSMs our role is to connect with them and mirror the way they want to collaborate.

Asking your client how they would like to consume information is a way to start. As a CSM you may have a regular session with the customer, you can suggest to them that you will send a slide deck before each session and you can both discuss the points as needed. As you perform work for the customer you may produce assets, seek guidance on how the customer would like to receive this content, email, file sharing, or use a platform like Microsoft Teams. It’s worth having the following question up your sleeve and deploying it at the appropriate time when you agree with the client on the next step of a task or assignment.

How would you like me to communicate that information to you?

The answers I have received are:

Can you please build a briefing pack for me? I will review the pack and come back to you with any questio

If you can share it with me via O365 I will look at it when I have time

Let’s schedule a session for next Tuesday and we can run through the content then as I want to bring in some other team members

Skill 5: Deep Knowledge

Deep knowledge acknowledges that the CSM will have deep knowledge of some aspects of your service or product. In the customer success role, it’s about having a good understanding of the structures, tasks, and actions needed to be able to implement and use a product but also to scale the use across multiple business units within an organization. Combining this with the ways the project should be structured, the resourcing requirements, and the relationships needed, it’s helpful for the customer. This is where it is useful for the customer success manager to have a mentor or coach.

There will be a topic or body of knowledge that the CSM needs to be an expert. It's going to be the same content as a Sales Engineer, Services person, or business consultant but it might be a “lite” version of the skills from one or all of these functions.

For this skill, whatever the topic is, the CSM needs to have the opportunity to continually grow and develop that skill because it will help to accelerate the customer to value.

Skill 6: Account Management

Gartner defines account management as the practice of providing customers with service, support, and improvement opportunities to increase their consumption of a product or service and maximize retention, cross-sell and upsell opportunities within the customer base.

A great definition that speaks to the Sales “Farmer” and to the customer success manager.

Let’s try an unpack this definition by applying a CS lens. Customer success sits at the top of the triangle in terms of representing your organization and coordinating Services and support. When clients are looking for these services they often reach out to the CSM first to discuss the best option. Once those teams are engaged the CSM takes more of a support role by getting out of the way of the skilled resources and just making sure the customer is happy and receiving the right level of value and service. - very similar to a maître d' in a restaurant.

A CSM works at its best when they have a clear Lifecycle Journey map. This describes the phases of the client’s journey in relation to their journey using your products and services. As the CSM aligns with the client and executes the journey map, an opportunity arises to help the customer adopt your solution and growth the footprint of your solution. This isn’t about pushing your product into your customer’s environment but about showing the client the value of your solution and the opportunities to realize value.

Skill 7: Passion

Passion to be successful.

This is the place to start. As CSMs we need to hold onto our passion to be valuable partners with our customers. We are passionate about delivering value that has a meaningful impact on the customer’s business. Getting up in the morning and being enthusiastic about the day and how we can add value.

Keeping your energy up is way easier when we communicate and interact with our colleagues. Creating or joining communities of practice helps us to feed off the success of our peers while also learning from them.

It’s easy to start the CSM role with passion but it’s a lot harder to maintain that level of enthusiasm over a long period of time.

Having a passion to be successful is also a passion to achieve your MBOs (Management Business Objectives) or KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). To align to the goals of the organisation and your individual measures. The killer of “passion for success” is where we don’t know what success is for us or our organisation.

I will leave it there for the moment, but I will publish part 2 soon. :o)

Skills of a Customer Success Manager Part 1.