On this month’s episode of The Customer Success Channel Podcast, brought to you by Planhat, I chatted with Emily Garza, AVP of Customer Success at Fastly, about CS responsibility for revenue. With extensive experience in direct sales and enablement, Emily brings a holistic view of the customer journey to CS. Emily has built and reshaped multiple functions, allowing her to offer a practitioner’s view on creating an impactful and scalable customer-focused organization. As the AVP of Customer Success at Fastly, Emily supports teams across multiple customer segments to drive customer business value and revenue growth.
Customer success responsibility for revenue is a hot topic and highly debated in the CS world. So, should a CSM hold a revenue target? Should CSMs be compensated like we do in sales? And should we really be charging for CS or should it be baked into the cost of goods sold? One of the most important factors for revenue growth is successful renewals. It is not just an upcoming date that needs to be extended, but a large proportion of overall sales. But, should renewals be owned by CS or the sales team?
In our discussion Emily helps answer some of the tricky questions when it comes to customer success managers handling revenue:
- Should Customer Success handle renewals or should it be sales? How can you be a trusted advisor and then ask for upsells/renewals?
- What are your thoughts on compensation models for Customer Success Managers? What are the dos and don’ts? If CS is responsible for revenue, should they have sales targets?
- Should Customer Success be modeled as a profit center, not a cost center?
Some key takeaways from this discussion:
- We don’t have a CSM to ARR model, but what we’ve done instead is we’ve outlined expected behaviors and actions for each of our segments, and then put together more of an allocated time model
- I love the idea of charging for a CSM, but personally, I think it’s really hard to do that, especially if you have a technical product.
- Looking at it from an annual perspective allows everything to be the right size and really shows the overall direction of the book of business that the CSM drives
Make sure you listen to the full episode and let me know your thoughts in the comments!