On this month’s episode of The Customer Success Channel Podcast, brought to you by Planhat, I chatted with Ray Rauch, VP of Customer Success at Concord, an all-in-one contract management platform that helps increase revenue and achieve flawless compliance with features that drive business results.
Today on the podcast we will be speaking all about the evolution of the customer success manager. Customer success has now been a discipline for over 10 years. What started out as proactive account management has now become a team that includes customer marketing, account executives for renewals, and product managers that work directly with customer success to deliver a customer-first product roadmap. We can probably now say that after 10-year customer success has become the heart of most SaaS organizations and the role of the CSM is more important than ever before.
Silicon Valley has long been considered the birthplace of CS. Ray’s experience of this came from his background in corporate development, with Silicon Valley as a natural place to find great companies to purchase. It was a one of a kind in a genesis but now there are Silicon Valley look-alikes all over the world, from the Silicon Roundabout in London, Tel Aviv in Israel, Singapore, Berlin and France. The advantages of being in San Francisco meant there was a great talent pool of innovators but as the pandemic hit, a lot of companies started hiring wherever they could find talent, which opened up the market and opened up possibilities to bring in people all over the world.
Having been in the industry for 20 years, Ray has been in CS since the beginning. In his very first job, the role was called CRM but since Salesforce created a category called CRM, it meant shifting and renaming the team. This was back in 2004, when they were one of the first to call the team CS, they may or maynot have been the inventors but they were definitely very early adopters.
In our discussion Ray helps answer some of the tricky questions when it comes to sthe evolution of the CSM:
- Should a CSM be more commercial mindset, support driven or product focused?
- Where is CSM evolving into? Will it be more aligned with product or back to the roots of sales/support?
- If a company is just starting with CS, what qualities should their first CSM hire have?
Some key takeaways from this discussion:
- It is important to work tightly with the sales organization to understand the customer but when you take the commercial aspect away then it allows the CSM to be the trusted advisor and the customer knows that their CS team truly has their best interest at heart.
- Achieve killer NRR from focusing on their customers and focusing on their value.
Make sure you listen to the full episode and let me know your thoughts in the comments!