Customer success managers, who once functioned as reactive troubleshooters and retention experts, have transformed into proactive partners situated at the intersection of product, sales and consultancy.
Harnessing a unique understanding of the customer’s aspirations and product capabilities, CSMs have a holistic, data-driven vantage point through which to approach relationships and ensure success.
These intertwined perspectives are the basis for crafting strategies that go beyond meeting expectations, enabling them to identify and capitalize on opportunities for growth, improvement and cross-functional collaboration.
But the journey to becoming an effective CSM is not entirely clear-cut. Hard skills like research wherewithal, strategic thinking and data analytics must merge with soft skills like empathy, transparent communication and active listening.
By balancing the technical with the personal, CSMs can become instrumental to their company’s business objectives and product development — as well as their client’s success and continued loyalty.
At FOURKITES, Fyllo, and Provi, CSMs are proving that their interdisciplinary skill sets and passion for building mutually beneficial partnerships are irreplaceable.
Over 1,200 customers rely on FOURKITES to enhance and gain real-time visibility into their global supply chains.
What steps do you take to better understand the needs, goals and expectations of your customers?
Our focus is to always have value-based conversations with customers and to deliver outcomes accordingly. This is easier said than done and requires consulting with our customers and asking the right questions to truly understand how we can help them solve meaningful problems.
CSMs should always start by understanding why the customer purchased the tool. The goal here is to have the customer discuss their pain points, not in relation to your offering, but with their business goals and operations. Try to learn what hard metrics or KPIs they’re tracking — these can be used later on when creating benchmarks and a customer journey.
The goal here is to have the customer discuss their pain points, not in relation to your offering, but with their business goals and operations.”
Based on the business goals, the CSMs are responsible for being strategic consultants and developing workflows and processes to show how the customer can utilize the application to accomplish the objectives. Once the customer journey is crafted, there will need to be training for each user group, an understanding of the reporting necessary for the customer to hold their teams accountable, baseline metrics and agreement on governance for success. Make sure there are set meetings to review the progress of these goals with the customer’s leadership team.
What training is in place to help CSMs in your organization become experts on your products and industry? What impact has that had on the relationships CSMs have with their clients?
At FourKites, we put a lot of emphasis on continued education and training on both our product and the industry. It starts when an individual joins the team and completes the FourKites Academy, which is also available for our customers. This gets them comfortable with the FourKites platform, calls out best practices and gives them a baseline understanding in a gamified way.
For continued education, we have a 101 to 601 training program for each module within our platform. These become more and more in-depth and different teams can choose the level of detail they need. We push our CSMs to understand both the platform and the industry as best as possible and mandate specific training on a quarterly basis to keep up with changes or industry shifts. We also dedicate an hour a week to various topics, from industry, product and SaaS, to help create a well-rounded training program that accommodates various learning styles and needs.
For industry knowledge, we push out specific LinkedIn Learning sessions, have Slack channels for discussing industry events and regularly have internal industry experts share insights with teams or the entire company.
What soft skills have you found to be particularly important when it comes to consulting your clients? How have you strengthened those skills over time?
The number one soft skill that I work on with myself and my team is interpersonal communication — more specifically, utilizing the “Power of Why”. While we all should understand how to be professional, work well with others and build relationships with our clients, to truly accomplish our goals, we need to understand why.
This starts by asking, “Why did you buy the tool?” to help understand the high-level goals. Effective communication and asking the right questions at the beginning can alleviate future issues in your day-to-day role. Friction also occurs when customers don’t understand your tool and use different vocabulary — this can cause confusion, delays in resolution, incorrect responses and frustration. All of which can be avoided if we better understand what they are asking.
When we ask one or two more “whys,” we can reduce the back-and-forth communication, ensure correct responses the first time and get back to driving goals forward. This not only eliminates customer frustration but frees up time and creates a much better customer experience.
Provi is a platform that connects those in the alcohol beverage industry and consolidates ordering across retailers’ portfolios.
What steps do you take to better understand the needs, goals and expectations of your customers?
Before reaching out to a buyer, my first step is understanding how they currently use Provi. I browse information from our CRM tool, HubSpot, to see if they use the product to the fullest.
To establish a foundation for the relationship, I confirm the information we already have on file and dive into anecdotal questions about how and when our product is used. I also ask questions about how things could improve, how much they spend, their busy cycles and their menu.
Before speaking with the buyer, I also peruse their social media accounts to understand how they currently market and brand themselves. This information is critical to brainstorm follow-up questions and shows I came to the meeting prepared and with an understanding of their current position in the marketplace.
I close the conversation by confirming their contact details, including when and how they want to be contacted. Fitting into their schedule is crucial; I also leverage text, email, phone and in-person site visits as these allow me to understand how the buyer operates.
What training is in place to help CSMs in your organization become experts on your products and industry? What impact has that had on the relationships CSMs have with their clients?
Fortunately, I have a team with a background in the beverage alcohol and hospitality industry. This allows me to supplement their first-hand knowledge with what Provi offers. I also utilize our publications SevenFifty Daily and Beverage Media, allowing me to be up-to-date on industry trends and emerging products.
For those with a limited background, lean on your team for knowledge sharing. Provi has a wealth of experience, and I learned the basics and who to tap for more industry information. This helped me build relationships within my team and company while also expanding my industry knowledge.
I also recommend adapting research to the type of account you are talking to. Provi services many bars and restaurants, and how you conduct your research must fall into certain buckets. What is prevalent with fine dining accounts is the wine scene, whereas sports bars will differ and have no interest in chardonnay. Know your audience and where to pull the information from. Also, always be an expert on trends; understanding the subject matter is imperative to success in this industry.
The most important soft skill in my role is empathy. Empathy drives and leads all other soft skills.”
What soft skills have you found to be particularly important when it comes to consulting your clients? How have you strengthened those skills over time?
The most important soft skill in my role is empathy. I put myself in our customers’ shoes by being a human being first and a hospitality professional second. Empathy drives and leads all other soft skills. Empathy also runs the gamut of when and how to contact the buyer. This soft skill allows you to be in a mindset where you are focused on creating a world for them that is easy. Other important soft skills include attention to detail and being clear and intentional with communication.
As a CSM team, we have read books and literature on empathy and discussed these materials. We also took discovery insights to the next level by using personality profiling to understand key personality traits.
Fyllo, one of Built In’s Best Places to Work in 2023, offers marketing and advertising solutions that provide companies with the tools, data and integrations needed to scale and grow efficiently.
What steps do you take to better understand the needs, goals and expectations of your customers?
It’s a multitude of components and it varies by client. But typically, a few questions and steps would include:
What is your campaign about? Is there specific messaging that would impact targeting recommendations? What DSP and channels are you running on? What type of inventory — display, video, native and so on — will the campaign run against? What type of targeting have they done in the past and what kind of targeting — audience versus contextual — are they looking for here? What are the explicit targets of the campaign? Who are the ideal customers? What are the types of lifestyle characteristics your customer has?
Sometimes clients don’t give us much information about a product or a brand. In cases like this, it can certainly help to research that specific unknown in more detail. This research often lends itself to unique segment recommendations for the client that might not have been immediately intuitive.
Prior to providing formal recommendations, it’s important to test your intuitions by building things in the platform. This is important to gauge the quality and scale of what is available. In addition, sometimes building a semantic topic will display additional information that inspires another unique segment recommendation.
What training is in place to help CSMs in your organization become experts on your products and industry? What impact has that had on the relationships CSMs have with their clients?
CSMs will likely go through multiple training sessions, largely focusing on the platform itself, the nuances, and how to optimally leverage it to build the most robust segments for clients. Other training sessions might include leveraging external platforms: Xandr Curate, LiveRamp and so on. We have multiple internal sessions every week which provide the environment for us to brainstorm, ask questions, bring ideas to the table and share knowledge on how to best approach any difficult requests we may have received.
I also host weekly office hours which are available to CS and other teams in the organization that may be using or need assistance with the Semasio platform. These sessions can be geared towards UI-specific questions, or they could be to knowledge share and brainstorm how to best service a client with the tools and platform that we have at our disposal.
Ultimately, what drives and grows relationships beyond all else is transparency, being experts in the field and performance. I believe our training sessions and internal syncs very much help in cultivating the expertise required to speak confidently to clients, not only about our products and services but also about how to best leverage data in general for their campaigns. The more we know about our tools and platforms, the better performance will tend to be.
What soft skills have you found to be particularly important when it comes to consulting your clients? How have you strengthened those skills over time?
The most important soft skills when it comes to consulting clients and cultivating those relationships have been honesty and transparency — we do not want to over-promise or underdeliver. If there are hurdles with tasks, it’s important to communicate those to the client to develop a sense of trust and reliability.
Additionally, confidence is vital. This boils down to how one holds and presents themselves. Speaking with confidence helps to build that sense of trust and reliability.
Story-telling ability is crucial. Marketing and advertising is an industry of storytelling. There is the consumer journey, which tells a story. There is quantitative data on performance from campaigns, and clients often want to hear why and how X impacted Y. Being able to be creative and connect the dots between what seem like disparate points is critical to being a good CSM.
Being able to be creative and connect the dots between what seem like disparate points is critical to being a good CSM.”
Finally, prioritization is important in an industry that’s always fluctuating. Changes are being made internally and externally, and there are seasonal trends and impromptu opportunities. A CSM needs to understand the changes and what’s going to drive the most revenue now to prioritize their workload appropriately.
My journey with Semasio — now Fyllo — has been over five years. As I interfaced with a wider array of teams, dove deeper into the technical nuances of the platform, and became more involved in the commercial and business thinking applied to clients, this impacted and broadened my skills.
