AMA: Confluent Director, Customer Success EMEA, Conor Holmes on Developing Your Customer Success Career

I wouldn't present metrics to ask for a raise. Firstly, I would understand how my company typically provides salary increases and align with that process. In the interim, I would look for opportunities to drive impact for the business and look for growth opportunities, for example, * Take on a new project and quantify the impact of that project * Make a substantial contribution to a company initiative * Review the company OKR's and figure out how you can create results against them If you feel you are underpaid compared to market rates for some reason, use the review process to make your concerns heard, perhaps using benchmark data to highlight that you should be paid more. Yet that's the kind of thing you should naturally do before taking on a new role. My perspective would be that you either try to get promoted with a pay raise or look for a role elsewhere that will pay you more. Here's some excellent advice on how to get a raise without asking for one: https://tinyurl.com/bddbyuwb

It's still a misunderstood function, and there are many different ways to deploy customer success, leaving a consistently referenceable best practice methodology challenging. From my perspective, CS should not be seen as a cost centre but as a function that can drive retention and growth and impact a business's bottom line. It's crucial that CS leaders are data-orientated and that they can use metrics to demonstrate why companies should deploy CSMs, scale resources, and other relevant roles that support customers in the context of a budget setting and annual planning framework.

I see several trends happening; * Business models will continue to evolve to be more customer-centric based on usage. This means that landing the customer will be aligned to a specific skill set, but there will be more overlap across AEs and CSMs to lead the customer from the initial landing to growing them into larger customers. I see that either CSMs or AEs will lead the relationship in the future, not both and that their KPIs will be more aligned towards customer retention and expansion. * CSMs will carry more extensive portfolios. In B2B tech, there has been a trend towards larger CSM books of business as customer data platforms improve, with health and signal capturing improving in the medium term. This suggests that CSMs will be better equipped to manage more customers due to having a better understanding of what's happening (from a signal/warning system) across their customer portfolios, allowing them to operate at a higher volume. * AI supporting portfolio management at scale - we have already seen several companies begin to automate away support queries via AI. This will spill over to CSMs quickly for more of the transactional part of the CSM role, allowing CSMs to have larger books of business due to AI being able to drive intelligent sequences to keep customers engaged whilst CSMs can focus on on the higher impact, more creative problems of how to make their customers thrive at a more strategic level.

The attributes/skills of the most successful CSMs that I have seen are as follows; * Customer Empathy: They genuinely understand how to internally represent the customer's challenges and what the organisation needs to do to ensure customer projects are successful over the long term. * Clear and concise communication - they can distil complex problems into easily consumable summaries. * Timely and detailed follow-up - surprising, but this is something I see often lacking! * Analysis and recommendations - make informed recommendations both internally and to customers about how they can improve. * Managing up - can help both the individual and customer because you are looping in more senior layers of your organisation into initiatives, problems and solutions. However, be careful to pick and choose wisely what situations you bring your management team into because if you saturate that avenue, future asks will be less impactful or ignored. * Create content - successful CSMs create content to make it easier for customers to use your product or service. This could be anything from a how-to email to a detailed account-based marketing plan. The most successful CSMs that I have seen have the following: Other tactical skills include; 1. In-depth knowledge of the product 2. Strong communication skills 3. Data Analysis and problem-solving abilities 4. Project Management skills

I answered a similar question for new grads looking to get into a CSM role, the same advice applies. 1. Learn about the role. I have included some links below that can help with this. 2. Network (don't be afraid, I've found the majority of people are more than willing to offer guidance and advice) 3. Ask for a mentor 4. Look for internships https://www.csinfocus.com/community https://www.customersuccess.community/feed https://gaingrowretain.com/ https://hub.practicalcsm.com/ https://catalyst.io/community/community-home https://community.gainsight.com/ https://userpilot.com/blog/customer-success-courses/

Levelling up will also mean ensuring you consistently deliver excellent work against your core competencies in your role. If you are unsure whether you are doing this, ask your colleagues and manager for feedback. Make sure you put in regular reviews to discuss this if the company doesn't have a cadence. My main suggestion to level up is to focus on developing business acumen. Understanding how the business works will help you tie your day-to-day activities to outcomes and impact on the business. On top of the above, where I have seen CSM's levelling up is; * Cross-functional engagement against a customer problem - Identify opportunities to drive a significantly positive impact for customers and ask if you can lead or bring together a team to help drive that initiative. It's rare that outsized impact will be driven by a CSM alone and will probably require support from other functions. * Ask for opportunities - Levelling up is about demonstrating that you can act at the next level or above. Your manager needs to be aware that that's your ambition, so make sure you work with them to drive a plan.

This depends on the type of product your company sells. However, I would say it's essential that CSMs deeply understand the product and its benefits. I would ensure I know the technical and value-proof points for a customer using your product across the life cycle. * Onboarding - what technical and commercial proof points can I look at to understand if a customer has successfully been onboarded? * Nurture - in the stages post onboarding, what do technical gates and commercial success metrics look like for customers who have successfully deployed your product? * Expansion opportunities—What are the technical and commercial prompts for potential expansion? For example, more usage and testing of the x or y feature could allow customers to take advantage of additional platform benefits. * Risk mitigation—Focusing on the customer's long-term goals, I would understand the technical aspects that represent they are getting value in combination with spending/usage and the signals that point to a lack of or decline in value realisation.