The skills you need to go from Customer Support to Customer Success

If you are a high performing member of a Support Team at a SaaS company, then you are more than capable of becoming a great Customer Success Manager. I made the transition from Support to Success, and in my career I’ve helped many people do the same — including my team of CSMs and Account Managers, who were all promoted from Support. My coaching has almost exclusively revolved around developing the skills in my team that I share in this article.

The biggest opportunity for people moving from Customer Support/Service to Customer Success Manager is the transition from servant to trusted advisor. In Support, you’re trained to react to what’s in front of you, to be quick, to find solutions independently. As a CSM, you need to be proactive, to head off issues before they arise, to build partnership with your customer and other teams that can help you solve problems.

Developing these skills is one part of the equation — the other parts, demonstrating them to hiring managers and executing them to successful outcomes, are going to be outside the scope of this article, but something I will address in the near future!

The essential skills of a Customer Success Manager (CSM)

Longer Term Strategic Thinking

When you become a Customer Success Manager, no longer is your job just the ticket in front on you. A ticket may take just a few minutes on the front end and maybe as much as a few weeks if it requires dev support. One customer in your book of business now represents a year or even more, depending on your contracts, and you’re doing much more than solving a simple problem.

A CSM’s job at a minimum is to keep the customer a customer — and bonus if they are convinced to spend even more money.

This is not something accomplished in the day to day — and it can make troubleshooting even the weirdest bugs look easy.

You need to be able to game out different scenarios and think several moves ahead, to understand the ripple effects of every action you take with a customer.

But strategic thinking isn’t just about negotiations or the relationship with the customer. You also need to think and talk about your product strategically. Your customer conversations should be focused on strategy, on maximizing their value, not on how-tos and fixes.

How to develop this skill:

You might think I’m joking, but my best recommendation is to play strategy games. Specifically the kind of games that force you to think several moves ahead, and encourage you to think about not just the game mechanics, but about your opponents’ gameplay.

Chess, Risk, and Poker are all good examples and you can play all online for free, against real people or computers.

Use Case Expert > Product Expert

As a CSM, your success is no longer measured on how quickly you can troubleshoot an issue, or knowing how to fix something obscure. In some cases, incredibly deep knowledge of the product can actually hinder your ability to see it the way your customer does.

You should instead become an expert in how users use the product. You should understand what kind of behavior and usage drives value for both the customer and the company.

How to develop this skill:

Study up on the Jobs to Be Done Framework and understand: what jobs are your customers hiring your product for? What are the alternatives, and what are they gaining with your product? What are they losing out on?

I also like to look at software case studies — there are so many out there, and likely some at your company that you can read up on. Understand the typical structure of a case study: it doesn’t focus on the ins and outs of features, but instead the outcomes that the feature enables. This is how you need to be looking at customers: what outcomes do they need, what outcomes they achieved?

Executive Presence

You see this all over CSM job postings, but what exactly does it mean?

In many cases as a CSM, your primary point of contact, or one of them, is at the executive level. Director, VP, Csuite. This person needs to feel comfortable with you and your abilities to solve their problems.

Executive presence includes confidence, expertise, and power. It is about positioning yourself as a trusted advisor and an expert on their needs. You will regularly be making suggestions and recommendations, and executive presence helps answer the question: “well why should they listen to you?”

This doesn’t mean acting like an executive, but it does mean that you can’t let them walk all over you, so you need to be able to communicate and hold firm boundaries. Wherever possible practice setting expectations and not caving — easier said than done from a support professional, I know!

It is also about how you present yourself. Your appearance, the way you speak, your video background — this all factors into Executive Presence.

How to develop this skill:

Find opportunities to give presentations, lead meetings, just otherwise get comfortable speaking to people, especially people in positions above you.

Practice speaking more slowly and thoughtfully — you’re aiming for a calm, commanding confidence. Remove hedging language like “I think” or “maybe” and focus on speaking more decisively.

Figure out your quirk — we all have something that could read as “unprofessional,” to the wrong person, whether it’s a lot of filler words, swearing too much, not speaking up in meetings, speaking over other people, etc.

Studying and influencing behavior

A large part of CSMing is the practice of studying customers to determine what behaviors drive desired outcomes, and then influencing your customers toward those outcomes.

As a problem solver, you probably don’t realize how much of this you’ve been doing through your career. As you develop your Customer Support style, you are testing things, taking inputs and constantly making adjustments to improve your success rate without putting much thought into it.

Well, you’re going to do the same thing as a CSM. You’re probably going to start with how you are trained, what the rest of your team advise to you do, and then develop your own style. It’s just the outcome is different and more personal. Now you’ll be focused on driving outcomes that directly affect your money.

How to develop this skill:

You are already exercising this muscle in your day to day job in support, so now I’m going to suggest you bring more intentionality to it.

In support, you are likely exposed to hundreds of customers every day. When you are able, take a little bit more time with some customers and try to build a profile of what you think makes the most successful, long-term customers. Your company may already have a definition of this, but the point of this exercise is for you to find markers on your own.

Once you have a good idea, you can start to think about how you encourage other customers’ behavior toward the same successful behaviors. If there’s opportunity to practice in a ticket, by all means do it!

Acting as the connector, not the doer

This is the hardest shift you will make from Support to Success, because the incentives are completely different.

In Support, you are incentivized to solve your problems yourself. It’s better for everyone when you can take and completely close a ticket without help from another teammate, manager or development. And the work of support never ends — even if the queue gets down to zero, it’s a temporary status. You’re only as good as your last ticket.

In Success, you are incentivized to delegate and partner. Your time has real revenue attached to it now and you will never have a book size where you have time to do everything yourself. Handling a function that should be handled by Support or Product becomes an opportunity cost.

As a CSM, you have to delegate to make sure that the right person is handling a task. There’s a reason a lot of companies create separate onboarding teams, education teams, renewals teams — it’s because they want CSMs hyperfocused, and they understand that revenue grows when they are.

How to develop this skill:

Support doesn’t give you a lot of opportunity to set and hold firm boundaries, but this isn’t necessarily a skill that companies will hire for — it’s absolutely something that can be taught.

As is life, there are always opportunities to set and hold firm boundaries. You may not be able to practice with customers, but you can practice it in your personal life, with your boss (carefully!), etc.

Practical Exercises to develop these skills

In your day to day in Customer Support, you have so much exposure to customers that you can use as an opportunity for your own development.

These are intended to be just for you and does not need to be anything you share with your coworkers, manager or customer — just to get you thinking like a CSM would.

If it spurs change or can be used as a tool to help you get promoted, all the better — but that doesn’t need to be the intention.

Develop a Successful Customer Profile

You likely have some intuition about this already after being exposed to so many customers, but here are some prompts to think about:

What does “Success” mean?

Success as defined by the company usually means they pay a lot of money, for a long time. But Success as defined by the customer is usually based on outcomes. What kind of outcomes does a customer need to achieve to pay a lot of money for a long time?

What kind of data can you use to support your profile?

Trust your gut but prove it right. Dig a little bit and see if you can find data to support your definition. Numbers like:

• average ROI — for every dollar your customer spends with you, how much are they making back?

• typical growth — how does a customer grow their key metrics over their lifetime? What are normal results, and what are incredible results? What are abnormal — and can you find out what they’re doing wrong?

What does an unsuccessful customer look like?

I know you know this one without much thought, because generally one of the biggest red flags for an unsuccessful customer is the way they use (or abuse!) support. What other red flags might indicate a customer will not be successful with your product?

Practice doing Customer Assessments

The next time you have time — and a ticket that makes sense — take some time to assess the customer using the prompts below.

How long have the been a customer?

Are they taking full advantage of the product or are there opportunities to increase their engagement or adoption? If there are opportunities, draft a message designed to encourage them to try something new.

What are they really asking?

Generally support tickets represent what a customer wants, but not always what they need. Is there something written between the lines of the ticket?

What are their results?

What sort of outcomes has your products helped them achieve? What could they do better?

Are they here to stay?

Based on everything you know right now, will this customer still be a customer a year from now? Why or why not?

Where to go from here

If you are currently working in Support at a SaaS company with a Customer Success organization, then in addition to building these skills you should be laying the ground work for a promotion. Utilize every resource, like a supportive supervisor, helpful Success leader, current CSMs, helpful HR, to set yourself up for success in that role. The easiest way to become a Customer Success Manager is to already be one!

And the important thing to know is that you do not need to have all these skills fully developed to become a Customer Success Manager. What you need is an understanding of what is expected of you, and a demonstration that you are capable of continuing to grow these skills.

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