What Exactly Is a Strategic Customer Success Manager?

Chapter 1 from my soon-to-be-launched book, The Strategic Customer Success Manager.

I’ve been very busy getting ready for the official launch of my upcoming book. I wanted to share an excerpt from the book below, as well as provide a few resources. The book has been extremely well received and I’ve included an early review below from Michael J. Boyd at the end.

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If you’ve ever been a customer success manager, you remember when you lost your first significant customer. You felt horrible. My first major client loss is etched in my mind like a late-night infomercial on repeat. I had just started my CSM career at Eloqua and worked with small- to medium-sized businesses. This particular client was using Eloqua’s marketing automation platform to launch email campaigns to their prospects. My main point of contact was a friendly Texan who always responded with a “Well, thank you kindly” in her strong Southern accent when I offered assistance. Unfortunately, this seemingly gentle person was about to rip my heart out—she would become my first churned customer.

Writing about this years later, I realize I should have seen it coming. Underneath my client’s polite exterior, there was a hint of anxiety that made me uneasy. It was clear that she was overwhelmed by the complexity of our product and didn’t seem to enjoy what she was doing. Was I up for the challenge? Of course! I believed that I could make anyone successful. I was very naive in my younger CSM days.

I did everything in my power to encourage her to use our product. I painstakingly built her email templates so she didn’t have to, uploaded her list of email recipients to ensure that we maximized her reach, and even executed the email campaign on her behalf to ensure there were no snafus. As you can probably guess, none of this mattered. Even after all this effort and my willingness to donate my left kidney to this client, she told us that our platform was too complex for what they needed and that they weren’t renewing. I was crushed and felt betrayed. It was like my best friend had just stabbed me in the back.

I then compounded the problem by blaming everyone else. I blamed our product for its excessive complexity. I blamed the client’s unwillingness to learn how to use our product. I blamed the sales team for overselling. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was part of the problem. I needed to take a different approach to decrease the chances of this happening again.

I used to think my job as a CSM was to be helpful—like those concierge people at those fancy schmancy hotels that always offer timely and spot-on advice. But helping your clients and making them happy will only take you so far. You must elevate your CSM game and establish a more profound connection with your clients. Being a strategic customer success manager is all about focusing on your client’s business, not just your product. It’s about building relationships with the right stakeholders in your client’s organization and aligning with their business goals rather than solely prioritizing product adoption. It’s more than being customer-centric—it’s about building trust and delivering value for your clients and your company.

To begin this journey, let’s look at some definitions used throughout this book. We’ll start by defining the most nebulous term in our industry: customer success.

The foundation of customer success

Over the past twenty-plus years, working with hundreds of clients, building several high-performing customer success teams, and collaborating with numerous leaders in the CS field, I’ve concluded that customer success has two foundational elements: trust and value.

Yes, customer success is about customer retention, revenue growth, and achieving business outcomes, but those are just outputs of customer success, not the foundational elements. Therefore, I define customer success as a balance between the inherent trust your customers have in you and the value they realize.

Customer Success = Trust + Value

When customers trust you, they are more open to listening to you and working with you to achieve value from your product. When customers have found value in your product and your company, they will develop a higher degree of trust in you. On the flip side, when you erode that trust, your customers will be less inclined to see the value you offer and may churn.

The idea of customer success goes well beyond a group of people in your company; it’s a philosophy that your organization must embody. That said, I firmly believe in the need for a customer success department, as CS should play a central role in fostering a customer-centric culture. It should also be the voice of reason within an organization to prevent actions that can compromise your customer’s trust.

The good news is that you can contribute to the change necessary to create an environment where customers come first. You can influence your company’s culture and set the standard. This is customer-led growth, a core component of being a strategic CSM.

What is a strategic customer success manager?

The most important objectives of a CSM, according to Gainsight, are the following, listed in order of priority:

• Higher retention rates

• Driving revenue growth

• Improved product adoption⁸

Customer success managers tackle these objectives differently from company to company, depending on their role, their company’s product offerings, and the structure and processes of the CS team. For example, some CSMs are directly involved in renewal negotiations, while in other organizations, this task may be reserved for renewal specialists or the sales team. Some CSMs handle onboarding new clients, while at other organizations, they’re solely focused on product adoption and achieving value once the initial onboarding phase has concluded.

While customer retention, revenue growth, and product adoption are critical to the CSM role, CSMs don’t own the relationship with the customer. I’m in agreement with the Disney philosophy that “No one owns the customer, but someone always owns the moment.”⁹ You need to leverage your entire company to drive value for customers. You can’t do it alone. I’ll expand on this later, as it’s a central tenet of being a strategic CSM. Given that the responsibilities of CSMs differ by organization and their success hinges on support from other teams, how can you drive meaningful results? At the heart of this lies building trust and delivering value.

As a CSM, you have a general guideline for your day-to-day responsibilities, but much of your role comes down to thinking on your feet and adapting to the circumstances that present themselves. That’s why in chapter 3 I’ll discuss certain skills and behaviors that CSMs need to hone.

The issue is that even when you’re building trust and delivering value with a high level of precision, you may still experience surprise customer churn. Companies are seeing a higher amount of churn in general in the post-COVID economic downturn.¹⁰ The old CSM playbook isn’t good enough anymore. CSMs and CS leaders need to take a different approach if they want to maintain or improve their renewal rates and potentially uncover revenue opportunities. Enter the strategic customer success manager.

Breaking down what it means to be a strategic customer success manager

A strategic customer success manager (SCSM) builds on the core aspects of a CSM but takes the role to another level. Let’s start by defining what we mean by strategic. Richard Rumelt is an expert in this space and defines strategy as follows: “A good strategy is a set of actions that is credible, coherent and focused on overcoming the biggest hurdle(s) in achieving a particular objective.”¹¹ Let’s break this definition down to understand how it perfectly applies to the role of the SCSM:

• Focused on overcoming the biggest hurdle(s): An SCSM must first uncover the customer’s biggest challenges. Once you understand these, you can work with your customers to formalize a solution. It’s one of the reasons I recommend using the 3C framework (company, customers, and challenges) discussed in chapter 2, so you come to meetings prepared with foundational knowledge of your customer.

• Achieving a particular objective: SCSMs go beyond helping their customers with product adoption. They focus on defining and achieving their customers’ business outcomes. Business outcomes are high-level objectives that indicate whether your customers have achieved value from your product.

• A set of credible and coherent actions: SCSMs don’t take a scattered approach to helping their customers achieve their outcomes. They work with their clients to create detailed joint customer success plans (see chapter 16) to organize a set of actions into a concrete path forward.

Putting that together we have: Strategic CSMs focus on their clients’ business rather than just their organization’s products. They go beyond product adoption to uncover and help deliver their customers’ business outcomes, and they then turn these outcomes into concrete actions and use a joint success plan to measure their client’s progress. By following this approach, strategic CSMs provide more value for their customers and deepen the level of trust with them. But wait—there’s more.

Being a strategic CSM is not just about customers

Customers come first for a strategic CSM, but aligning with other functions within your company is key to driving greater overall impact as a strategic CSM. SCSMs understand that they can’t go it alone and that their success depends on their relationships with their colleagues in sales, product, engineering, and marketing, as well as their colleagues in customer success and support.

So they also need to build trust with their teammates. SCSMs can be catalysts for change within their respective companies to ensure the customer is represented. Therefore, as a strategic CSM, you must strike a balance between being customer-centric and company-centric.

To achieve this, SCSMs:

• Immerse themselves across their organization to spread the wealth of their customer knowledge. For instance, they share customer stories with their sales and marketing teams and assist their product and engineering teams by bringing forward common customer feature requests and issues.

• Don’t see these other departments as obstacles but as allies in achieving their customers’ business outcomes. They cultivate collaboration, replacing the us-versus-them mindset with teamwork. They assume the best of others and demonstrate extreme empathy for their peers. When internal problems surface, they strive to pinpoint and resolve the root issue.

• Recognize that they have the power to transform their company’s culture into one that is more customer-centric. They believe that they can also break down barriers between departments. We’ll delve into this area further in chapter 11.

Being an SCSM also means getting rid of bad habits

Successful strategic CSMs recognize that it isn’t just about doing more; it’s about doing what matters and cutting out the rest. It means reducing or eliminating certain activities and behaviors, including the following:

Providing direct troubleshooting and other forms of product support—SCSMs shouldn’t be triaging or addressing product issues. While the customer may appreciate the CSM’s direct assistance, it lowers the perception of the CSM in the eyes of the client. They see you only as a product expert, not someone who can help them drive their business forward. Performing product support also distracts the CSM from uncovering customer challenges and delivering business outcomes. I’ve seen very few CSMs who can straddle the worlds of product support and maintaining relationships with senior customer stakeholders. Leave support to the support team. You should only have to assist the support team with client escalations, and when context is needed to resolve issues.

Doing the work for the client—It’s tempting to complete tasks directly for your customers, but this should be the exception, not the rule. CSMs should only be completing product configurations or other services for their clients if they are early-stage start-ups. You only have a limited number of hours in your day, and you should be focused on strategic conversations and executing success plans—not turning knobs and other tasks that professional services, a partner, or the customer can perform. SCSMs recognize when they are performing too many tasks and either delegate them or recommend product changes to reduce the tasks that fall on CS.

Accepting the status quo—SCSMs don’t just accept things as they are. They question why their clients have been implemented or configured in a certain way. They challenge their customers when they decide to go down a path the product wasn’t designed for. They proactively look for issues rather than sidestepping or ignoring them.

Becoming a strategic CSM leads to a complete transformation of your mindset. You need to distance yourself from these four roles: the firefighter, waiter, fixer, and entertainer.

• The firefighter: You shouldn’t constantly need a firehose to put out fires raised by your customers as part of your role. You should have other resources such as a support team you can leverage to douse these flames. You’ll need to strap on your helmet and run into a fire or two from time to time, but it should be more about managing the client relationship than directly troubleshooting product issues.

• The waiter: Your job isn’t always to please the customer and give them whatever they’ve asked for. Providing them with an exceptional experience is important, but your main purpose as an SCSM is to ensure that your clients achieve value. This may require that you push back on their requests. For instance, you may need to decrease the meeting cadence with some customers so you can spend your time where it will have the greatest impact.

• The fixer: As mentioned, it’s very tempting to do the work for your clients because you know what’s required to drive value. It’s okay to do this occasionally, but your focus should be on teaching your customers how to fish rather than fishing on their behalf. Then your customers will take greater ownership of your product and will be better off in the long run.

• The entertainer: You aren’t there to make your customers happy or feel warm and fuzzy. You can have the most wonderful and intimate relationship with your clients and then have them give you a churn notice a week later—I’ve seen it too many times. You’re there to ask difficult and uncomfortable questions to ensure your customers are on the right path to achieving their business outcomes. If you’re too cordial, you may not have the chutzpah to probe deeper into your clients’ usage drop-off or recent meeting absences. Customer success isn’t about making your customers happy—it’s about helping them achieve the success they envisioned when they purchased your product.

You can put this on a sticky note on your computer to remind yourself: “You are not a firefighter, a waiter, a fixer, or an entertainer. You are a strategic CSM.” Do whatever it takes so you don’t embody these roles.

Strategic CSM defined

So, let’s put this all together. Strategic CSMs aim higher by going beyond the standard tactical CSM duties. Your role as an SCSM is to address your clients’ overarching needs and objectives. You focus on their long-term success rather than short-term gains. You see the CSM–customer relationship as a game of chess rather than checkers, as you’re focused on the bigger picture and thinking three moves ahead.

Being a strategic CSM is not just about securing the upcoming renewal but creating customers for life. You’re not just a product expert but someone who can improve your customers’ overall business and even assist them in advancing their careers. Furthermore, as a strategic CSM, you represent the customer’s perspective within your company and actively advocate for improvements to the overall customer experience.

Therefore, a strategic CSM is someone who builds trust and creates value for their customers and their own organization.

Putting this into practice

Take a moment to go through these questions and write down your answers:

• Name a company that you trust and find value from. What value do they provide you? Why do you trust them?

• Write down an example of a trusted relationship you built with a customer. Why did they trust you?

• Write down an example where the trust between you and your customer was broken. Outline what happened and what the result was.

• Write down an example of how you provided value to a customer. How did the customer react?

• Provide details on how you’ve provided value to other departments as a CSM.

Summary and key takeaways

The core responsibilities of CSMs include retaining customers, uncovering growth opportunities, increasing product adoption, monitoring customer health, handling escalations, and identifying advocates. An SCSM goes beyond that to:

• Focus on their clients’ businesses rather than just their products.

• Be company-centric and not just customer-centric, acting as a catalyst for cultural transformation within organizations.

• Limit or avoid distracting habits such as direct troubleshooting or performing product tasks for their clients. They don’t accept the status quo.

• Forgo the roles of firefighter, waiter, fixer, and entertainer, as these lower their impact.

• Build trust and create value for their customers and their organization.

Remember, customer success is all about trust and value.

Book testimonial from an early reviewer, Michael J. Boyd

One of my challenges as a CS leader is how to help my teams grow into the expert sherpa, guiding the customer safely along an unknown path to their ultimate destination. The Strategic Customer Success Manager reveals the way - helping them unlock the high-value strategic advisor within them for the rest of their careers.

What sets this book apart, earning a place in my go-to, reference library?

Chad has put the fundamentals — building a genuine foundation of trust through active listening and candid conversations, while always prioritizing customer outcomes - all in an easy-to-consume guide. It's filled with practical frameworks to help any CSM break free from tactical firefighting and start thinking strategically about customer growth. The added checklists, references and expert tips make it easy to get started. Many of them (I just LOVE the Hero Exercise!) will set you apart and let you bring your customer to the next level.

Michael J. Boyd, CITP
3x VP of Customer Success and Value Champion
Principal Advisor, ModernEdge Advisors