On this month’s episode of The Customer Success Channel Podcast, brought to you by Planhat, I chatted with Adrian Beck, Director of Customer Success at Tanium. Adrian has had a unique experience when it comes to scaling his customer success team globally. They started off with a team of 15 people and grew to over 70 people in 7 different countries in just 3 years.
A challenge for any Customer Success leader is to recruit strong CS team members. Not only is the CS industry a fast-growing one, but it is still a fairly new profession and the pool of experienced CSMs gets smaller and smaller. Another factor that makes recruiting tricky in customer success is there are many different types of customer success management, from high touch to tech touch. A CSM dealing with high tough enterprise customers will have a very different skill set to a CSM that has a pooled or tech touch approach to customer success. Thirdly, succeeding in customer success requires a broad set of skills. To summarize, it is hard to succeed in the customer success profession. Which makes it even trickier to recruit a killer CSM.
Adrian was Tanium‘s first CSM. Tanium is a fast-growing endpoint communications platform. As the first CSM he joined the company right as they started to heavily invest in Customer Success. The company was growing in order to support their complex customer delivery models. Today he leads Tanium’s Customer Success efforts outside of North America.
Adrian has worked over the last year to build out a detailed ultra-high-touch Customer Success methodology, building repeatable processes, templates, and documents for efficiency and creating internal feedback loops to ensure Tanium’s executive team saw progress. Once he got the basic customer success flywheel spinning he introduced more advance concepts such as customer health scores, customer risk models, and much much more.
In our discussion Adrian helps answer some of the tricky questions when it comes to scaling customer success quickly:
- So moving on to scaling CS, when should a SaaS or Tech company start hiring more CSMs?
- What are some of the basic metrics that you need to track to understand when you need to hire more CSMs?
- When you are interviewing candidates, what are the top skills/qualities you are looking for?
Some key takeaways from this discussion:
- Hire your team remotely, there is talent outside of the big tech cities.
- When hiring over 50 CSMs in one year you need to operate at scale and maintain a very rigorous hiring cycle that follows protocol
- Customer Success role applications need to be precise and punch. Make sure your CV stands out
Make sure you listen to the full episode and let me know your thoughts in the comments!