Now that we’re in the season of New Year’s Resolutions, you might be pondering a few questions:
“Am I doing my job well?”
“How do I compare to others in the industry?”
“Am I spending my time in the right way?”
These are questions that even the best of us wonder about from time to time. You might have achieved your targets in 2015, but are there things you could be doing better this coming year?
At Gainsight, we’ve started to create detailed job descriptions for roles that are already filled within our company. This helps to align expectations on the requirements for the role between the person in that role and their manager.
Even if you created a job description when recruiting, most likely it’s not detailed enough for a team member to refer to day-to-day to gauge whether they’re fulfilling all of their responsibilities.
Creating a list of responsibilities is especially critical in Customer Success, since as we all know, this team can be pulled into many different activities. You’ll want to specify which ones are valuable.
Here’s the job description that I created for the Director of one of our high-touch teams.
Director of Customer Success
Responsibilities
Define and optimize customer journey
Define the vision of a Red Carpet experience
Standardize the template for a Success Plan for customers in your segment
Define and oversee lifecycle processes/touch points, including exec sponsor program, EBR process, “listening” points (e.g. on usage, NPS), and others
Create standard presentation materials for lifecycle plays
Personally manage escalations from your direct reports, and follow a methodical escalation process to execs
Identify opportunities for continuous improvement
Drive true value for customers
Be an expert on best practices in change management
Promote the Challenger approach amongst your team members
Find ways for CSMs to deeply understand our customers’ objectives and become a trusted right-hand advisor
Determine how to define, drive, and demonstrate the value (ROI) delivered
Lead cross-functionally to drive customer success
Clarify ownership for each part of the journey
Gather feedback from other departments, including Renewals & Expansion, Sales, Services, Support, Product, and others, to
improve the customer experience
Advocate for changes in other departments’ ways of working (including our onboarding process) and collaborate with them to implement those
Drive company-wide definition of ideal customer
Create company-wide customer feedback loop
Help foster company-wide culture of Customer Success
Drive alignment with Renewals & Expansion and Sales
Align with R&E on renewal and up-sell strategy and focus on selling with a retention focus
Give feedback to Sales and Marketing on prospecting approach
Ensure smart hand-off
Define CSM involvement during sales cycle
Be the best user of Gainsight in the world
Promote adoption of key processes in Gainsight, including Success Plan process, Habits process, License Deployment process, Risk process
Ensure Gainsight is our company’s single source of truth for customer health
Create dashboards to measure customer success
Develop ideas for how high-touch teams can use Gainsight, and share during our monthly Product-CSM syncs
Own key metrics for your team
Gross dollar renewal rate
Up-sell dollars
Habits / product adoption metrics
Deployment
NPS
Sales of Premier Support & Success
Employee NPS / team member satisfaction
Own the financial model for your team, including projections of costs and new hires, and forecasts of renewal and upsell rates
Support core metrics for our company and our CSM team as a whole
Same metrics above
New ARR
Recruit, mentor, groom and inspire a world-class team
Build a pipeline of great candidates
Establish a rigorous interview process
Set expectations on performance and give feedback
Manage out underperformers
Set up training and mentoring to grow team
Create culture of massive customer delight
Communicate and incent to drive performance (in line with incentive structure for the rest of the CSM team)
Propose improvements to your team’s organizational structure
Define segmentation of your customer portfolio as appropriate
Define different levels within the team
Be informed of market compensation
Achieve operational excellence
Continuously communicate metrics to team
Report on metrics each week to Allison
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You can send questions or feedback to Allison at apickens@gainsight.com. Follow her blog posts on Twitter at @PickensAllison.
To learn about additional processes you can set up for your CSM team and other departments, visit our Business Processes page on our Support website.