#42: 3 Roles To Scale Your Customer Success Team

You can't scale Customer Success by hiring more CSMs.

The problem is that in most organisations, making the case to hire a CSM is straightforward.

You probably have a ratio baked into your financial planning that goes a little like this: 

For every X Customers -> Add 1 new CSM

 Most of us can also quantify the value of the CSM by looking at the NRR driven per CSM. 

And Finance loves nothing more than a clear ROI for an investment!

But to scale CS, you'll need folks who can drive value for customers through digital interventions and leverage technology and data to further your existing team's capacity.

So what are the most important roles you need to scale CS?

And how can you justify this investment to finance?

 This week's newsletter is here to share 3 roles every CS team needs to truly scale. 

And if you are new to Digital CS you might want to read this article on how to get started.

🤖  #1 - CS Operations Manager

If you haven't invested in a CS Operations Team yet, now is the time!

While in larger businesses a CS Ops team will be made up of many roles, in smaller businesses you could start with one person.

When we think specifically about Scaled CS, what you want from this function is 3-fold:

1. Systems: Management and integration of the key systems that support the CS team
2. Processes: Creation and automation of processes that support the customer journey
3. Data: Intelligence across the entire customer journey (preferably ML-specific experience)

The more complex your organisation, the more these roles will specialise (ie. business analyst, automation manager etc).

Gainsight shared a great guide on when and how to set a CS Ops team.

You can also listen to Brian Savage talking about the role of the Automation Manager in this episode of the This is Growth Podcast. 

How do you make a case for this role? 

Every CFO is pushing for companies to do more with less.  So it's a good time to put anything to do with productivity in front of finance.

Prove ROI by calculating the efficiency gains you expect to make.

For example:

The main goal we have for a CS Ops Manager for the first year is to help implement and roll out a smart system that surfaces risks and opportunities for CSMs. Today, CSMs spend 20 hours a month in their own book of business manually finding these. We have 20 CSMs. 

20 Hours a month x 10 CSMs  = 400 Hours per month.

That work alone represents 2.5 CSMs doing this work full-time.

When you multiply that, by the total cost of employing a CSM monthly, then remove the cost of hiring this resource, you have the minimum productivity gain you've created in dollars.

That's before you even look at the fact that those insights will actually generate money and improve retention and that this CS Ops Manager will be having a bigger impact than this single project.

⚡️ Customer Marketing Manager

As we scale, Customer Success starts to look more like inbound marketing than traditional CS.

Depending on your digital strategy, Customer Marketing Managers can be responsible for different things. But at a high level, this function will own:

1. Content: Valuable content is the bedrock of digital CS. To capture the customer's attention, a marketer will have to create engaging content that's relevant to the customer's use case and personas.
2. Channels: The days of email marketing are numbered. Experience leveraging an omni-channel strategy will be key for successfully reaching customers.
3. Performance: A deep understanding of experimentation processes is a must here. You need to be able to run experiments to understand if the digital interventions are having the desired impact. 

Just like in the previous role, in larger companies, these responsibilities are specialised into roles like Content Marketer, Marketing Automation Manager etc. 

If you are hiring for this role and don't have a marketing background, you might benefit from using these Customer Marketing role templates.

Whether the Customer Marketing Manager sits in the CS team or the marketing team, it's a debate for another day. 

How do you make a case for this role? 

To get funding for this role you can look at 3 different things:

• Cost of Service Improvements: How many customers will you be able to take away from a more expensive, higher-touch model? How much savings it represents over time?
• Efficiency Gains: How many more customers can fit into a CSM's book of business because of some interventions being done digitally? How much capacity did you build?
• Retention Improvements: How many points of GRR or NRR do you expect to create by investing in a Customer Marketing programme?

👩🏻‍🏫 Customer Education

Usage is a critical piece of the value realisation puzzle.

In fact, adoption is a core pillar of the 5 Laws of Customer Success !

Customers that don't know how to use the product, can't get value.

 For that reason, in most organisations, CSMs are still investing a lot of time in training customers on how to use the product.

The good news is that customer education is highly repeatable.

 That means courses, training videos and certifications, work really well and can help you increase your team's capacity.

That will give them the ability to focus on more strategic work with their customers.

A clear education strategy connected to outcomes is key (learn more here).

How do you make a case for this role? 

To get the investment for this role, demonstrate the ROI by:

• Productivity Gains: Calculate the additional productivity that you can drive from your CSMs (Reduce hours spent on training by X per month).
• Retention Improvements: Reinvest those hours on strategic activities that will drive growth and NRR (Y Additional EBRs per month, driving Z extra SQLs).
• Adoption Improvement: Include key usage metrics you are hoping to improve here.

TL’DR

Securing investment for key roles you need to scale your CS org can be difficult as the ROI is uncertain.

Prioritise key roles like CS Operations, Customer Marketing and Customer Education and calculate ROI by showing:

• Productivity Gains
• Cost of Servicing Improvements
• Retention Improvements
• Tangible Adoption Improvements

See you next Friday!