Should you have a Customer Success org?
A new year, a new post for my blog!
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Similar to my previous post Practical Advice for CS — Not Clickbait Thought Leadership, this post is my response to even more insane chatter I’ve seen going on with LinkedIn posts.
The question at hand: Should you even have CS?
The responses I’ve seen on LinkedIn have been extremely one-dimensional in thinking, and often lack any critical thought or care for nuance about this kind of question.
It’s a lot of people proclaiming “CS is dead!” “It’s just a cost center!” or “I’ve seen this cycle — someone comes in and kills the org, then renewals suffer, they get fired and then the new guy asks ‘Where is CS??’”
So much drama. So many bros in their feels on this.
OK so this is a legitimate question though — when does it make sense to have an entire team dedicated to the post-sales customer experience (separate from Support). Again, like most things on my blog, we’re going to take a deeper look at this question.
Because I’ll admit, it doesn’t actually make sense in all cases to have a full Customer Success organization.
Before diving into it, one thing I’d like to point out is that CS can have an extremely broad definition of what it includes. I’ve spoken with A LOT of CS and GTM leaders, and one things I’ve noticed is that everyone assumes every team is run the exact same way and has the exact same roles. Hate to break it to you, but I have yet to find a CS org that has the same roles or structure.
Some teams have Renewals Managers. Some have CS Managers. Some have Account Managers. Some have Solution Architects. Some have Technical Account Managers. Some have CS Engineers. Some have Support. Some have dedicated Onboarding Teams. And the list goes on and on.
Functionally what that really boils down to is 1) Someone responsible for relationships / commercial 2) Someone who is technical and 3) Some roles have been broken out into portions of the customer experience.
Titles don’t really mean much to me — if you haven’t noticed — I’m not a huge fan of following strict playbooks. I prefer to think about things from first principals.
So, on to the question at hand. Do you need a CS team?
For me, I like to think about this in 2 dimensions.
- Do you have heavy or light implementation / support requirements? How difficult is your product to use and technically get set up?
- How much revenue potential is in upsell / cross- sells deals? Are you selling into large enterprise deals where you need to break into other BUs? Are you able to drive significant increases in usage? Or is your business more focused on customer acquisition?
Here’s a classic consulting 2X2 to help explain my point, and outline where I think alternatives could sit (again, depends on your business):
Let’s get into these, starting with Quadrant 1.
Quadrant 1: High Upsell / Cross-sell and Heavy Implementation / Support
Answer: Yes, you should have Customer Success
Why: This is the type of business where you are selling something very complicated. It might be very technically complicated, or it might require a lot of participation or buy in from a lot of team members on the client side. Either way, implementation can easily go sideways and you’ll benefit from having a domain-expert CS person on hand to help side-step issues and maintain momentum from when the deal closes. Additionally, these tend to have higher potential upsell where you need to navigate a larger org and build relationships with other executives and stakeholders to evangelize the product and value you’re delivering. This should be a no brainer that yeah, you need CS.
Quadrant 2: High Upsell / Cross-sell and Low Implementation / Support
Answer: Maybe, but maybe have AEs do it
Why: This is really a spectrum and depends on your AEs. Your product is easy to implement and customers are quickly getting value from it. Awesome. Are you selling into large enterprise accounts though or do you need to uncover more use cases to drive cross-sell? Do you want your AEs doing that? Or would you rather have someone like an AE-light who can also help a bit with use cases and is compensated differently? It depends on the nature of your client base but you could potentially just let AEs be responsible for the post-sale relationship management. On the technical side, you have light implementation and probably have highly repeatable questions coming in — a dedicated Support org probably makes more sense here rather than hiring a bunch of TAMs and Solution Architects. But again, these things are a spectrum, so know your business and your product.
Quadrant 3: Low Upsell / Cross-Sell Potential and Low Implementation / Support
Answer: No, you don’t need CS
Why: This is where you should have way more PLG, and a really good Support team. Build out support that reports either into Product or Eng, and let the customers just have at it. Your product is simple, people can discover more use cases, and it’s easy to adopt. I don’t really know why some of these kinds of companies have CS. Everything is self-explanatory for a user. My guess is if you’re having issues with growth or churn, you might actually have a pricing problem or a product problem. If you build a CS team in this scenario, they’re not going to have much to do and very quickly end up with a non-value-add account babysitter. Let the AE handle the renewals (if you actually need a sales team…. which I will also really question in this scenario… because why can’t people just transact online?), have great support, and have great telemetry to monitor product usage.
Quadrant 4: Low Upsell / Cross-Sell Potential and High Implementation / Support
Answer: Probably need CS, or Partner-channel model.
Why: There’s not a ton of additional revenue to capture post-sales, but your product has a very high implementation hurdle. However, once you’re in, you’re in, and customers probably won’t go to the trouble to rip you out. And when I say heavy implementation, I mean it takes dev resources on the customer side, or it’s like 3 months + to get someone up and running on your product. This is where a lot of companies really underestimate migration costs. Yeah your product is great and new, but the reason enterprise sales are hard is because you have existing infrastructure you can’t easily just shut off. Most people there have no idea what’s connected to what and it can take a long time to migrate. We’re gearing up to migrate to a new support platform internally here and I’m expecting that to even take 2 months — and I have eng folks on my team and we’re not a huge company! If you can get people over this onboaring or migration hurdle, they often don’t have a ton to change or any other major use cases — they maybe add more users or something — but it’s pretty basic management once they’re set up. Here is where you should invest in a great, technical CS team that can be prescriptive and help unblock customers quickly. The rest of the customer journey can be a light touch model where a CSM checks in briefly, or the AE handles the relationship and renewal. Use automation and have product marketing reach out with product updates. Have a good Support team in place to answer the smaller questions that come in once onboarding is done. The other option here is to consider Partners. Partners are great at doing this kind of consulting work and are better at defining scope.
In Conclusion:
This is by no means an in-depth or perfect view on why a company should have a CS org. It’s critical for leaders to think about revenue potential, costs, experience, and purpose and weigh the benefits. Give your CS team a clear mandate that aligns with your product experience.
And for people making wild claims on Linkedin, let’s do better and think a little harder, shall we? People have lost jobs and are struggling to understand where and how they can have an impact. People derive a tremendous amount of pride and sense of purpose from their career.
Everyone has something important to bring to the table — saying entire functions are “dead” or a “waste” is cruel and dismissive to people who have invested their careers in this space, and frankly, makes you look pretty dumb and shortsighted.
In my view, this is more about an executive’s ability to identify skills and properly align them to a business’s need. If you messed that up, that’s actually because you’re not a great leader, not because someone “failed to deliver value”. Yeah, I said it.
