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The Customer Success Job Market Is Taking Off

Why is the Customer Success job market growing so rapidly?

Let's turn to Ruben Rabago, who leads Gainsight's CSM education and certification efforts, Pulse+, for answers. Rabago is responsible for creating programs to educate all these newcomers to the CS field—so he's got his finger on the pulse of the job market.

As we discussed in the previous chapter, Rabago observes that “CSM is infiltrating every industry, not just high-tech. In general, companies are realizing, ‘Holy smokes, if I can implement a Customer Success practice, I will totally transform my business.’ That opens up a huge job market.”

How huge is it? As of November 2019, close to 70,000 Customer Success Manager jobs were listed on careers site LinkedIn. Since 2015, CSM positions at a global scale have grown at a rate of 176% year over year (see Figure 3.1). And although CSM positions are most abundant in the United States, jobs are trending upward worldwide, with Europe leading the way in increased CSM roles (nearly 235% year over year, 2015–18). Tech companies might have the largest number of people employed in Customer Success positions, but the industries adding CSM jobs at the fastest rate are agriculture, real estate, and media and communications—none of which are traditional Silicon Valley industries.

Figure 3.1

Another sign of the field's rapid rise is the growth in Gainsight's Pulse conference, which brings together Customer Success people from around the world every spring. The first Pulse conference in 2013 had just 300 people in attendance. In 2019, that same conference attracted more than 5,000 attendees, growing by more than 15 times in 6 years.

Recruiting for CS executives has also taken off. Alexis Hennessy, a principal at search firm Heidrick & Struggles, concentrates heavily on Customer Success.

The number of CS recruiting searches that we've seen in the last five years has skyrocketed. The first post-sales executive search that we did was in 2009. Around 2016 we hit 100 searches. Today we're probably close to 150. Most of the time, our client is recruiting for an entirely new role. If they're replacing someone, it usually means they're upleveling the role. They're growing and so they need someone who's had bigger scale or can own more functions. Or they may be about to go through a major transformation and need someone with relevant experience.

Rich Decembrele, managing director at staffing and recruiting firm Kindred Partners, has observed a similar trend: “We have seen an incredible uptick in the number of CS searches in the market.” He observed that five years ago “it was a toss-up if you had a CS leader in your company or not.” By contrast, today it's “abnormal” to see a company without one.

The intense growth in the CS job market means that hiring managers need to be savvy in recruiting and retaining team members, and candidates can be more ambitious. Next up, we discuss more deeply the implications for each side of the market.

The Demand Side: What Should Hiring Managers Expect?

Decembrele from Kindred Partners sees Customer Success becoming increasingly elevated by companies. “There's always been some sort of post-sales function inside of software companies, whether it was support, professional services, or account management. But it wasn't always top of mind at the exec and board level.” But now “boards are calling us about CS specifically.”

As companies seek to hire CSMs across the three profiles above, they invariably encounter obstacles. One challenge is that often companies are under significant pressure to hire quickly because the CSMs are needed for “plugging the leaky bucket”—preventing customers from churning. Sometimes they need to hire fast because they lost one of their CSMs (perhaps due to the hot job market for CSM), and that former CSMs' clients need help, right now. The risk of hiring the wrong person due to hasty recruiting is a real one.

A second challenge is the newness of the Customer Success profession means that companies sometimes have to recruit people who do not have Customer Success backgrounds, although the market has matured enough that this isn't as big of a problem as it used to be. “We are definitely getting better quality candidates, and we're getting candidates who understand the role a lot more,” says Stephanie Berner, global head of Customer Success at LinkedIn. “Five years ago, most candidates were just looking for an entry point into tech, and they came from all kinds of backgrounds. Today, we're getting people who want to have a career in Customer Success, which is great.”

Even with the rise of qualified applicants, the sheer number of jobs available makes hiring the right person a challenge. To help address these urgent, specific hiring needs, many existing recruiting agencies have developed Customer Success practices, and new firms have emerged as well. One of those newer firms, Twin Oaks Recruiting in Atlanta, was founded by recruiting veteran Marianne Faloni in 2018 and was created to serve her tech clients in the Sales and Marketing verticals in the United States, with laser-focus on recruiting best practices. She quickly realized the need to expand into the Customer Success space as her clients repeatedly asked her to fill roles for this important organizational function. “The job market is continuing to expand by leaps and bounds, especially in the Customer Success area. As more companies look to strategically align Sales and Marketing, they are also including Customer Success in that equation to cultivate the ultimate organizational powerhouse.”

This demand for CS professionals has made it harder for some companies to keep their employees. LinkedIn's Berner agrees. “We have to work harder to retain CSMs. It's so easy to jump companies for a bigger salary or maybe a fuller lunch bar here in the San Francisco Bay Area! But we're doing a better job of investing in people so they have a reason to stay and a reason to believe in a career trajectory in CS. LinkedIn and some of our peer companies are investing in programs and training curriculums to help build skills for Customer Success roles and beyond. It will help us retain the best talent.” As Berner says, professional development has become incredibly important in this field, so we've dedicated a whole chapter on that topic later in the book.

Companies are also concerned with the retention of their CCOs. Hennessy from Heidrick and Struggles observes that turnover among CS executives is high. “They're so highly sought after. Very few of them bring experience in cloud technology and in managing a team of a couple hundred people globally, across all of the functions within the post-sales organization. People who do have that experience have many opportunities in front of them.”

The Supply Side: What Should Candidates Expect?

The supply of CS professionals has grown quickly, but it hasn't kept pace with demand, so the job market still favors the applicant. Hennessy from Heidrick and Struggles says, “In general, it's a candidate's market. There are so many high-quality opportunities out there, and candidates really have their choice in terms of where they want to go next and what they want to do.” The hot job market means that candidates not only have better luck finding great jobs; they also can have justifiably high expectations for their subsequent career growth. According to LinkedIn, the CSM role has the highest career advancement score possible, meaning that it ranks highest in terms of how quickly people advance once they're in a CS role.

Decembrele from Kindred Partners concurs. “CS has finally found its voice. This is a testament to the quality of the candidates, which is up markedly from five to seven years ago.” Rich is seeing up-and-coming execs coming into CS from other backgrounds like business school and management consulting. “Five years ago, they would have gone into marketing—now, some are going into CS.”

Rabago says that's because CSMs become more intimate with the customer base and the product or service than any other job function does. “As a CSM I have to become a product expert in order to translate how my product will bring value to you, the customer. And I have to become an expert in your business in order to know how to position my product.” This means that CSMs can be strong candidates for roles in other functions within a company that demand knowledge of the product and clients; for example, Marketing or Product Management roles. Going into Customer Success can be a great foundation for the rest of your career.

The shortage of prior Customer Success experience has inspired people in other professions to enter the field. Even executives are moving into CS from other parts of the business. “I've seen a lot of executives move from other functions into a newly created Customer Success function within their company,” says Hennessy, the executive recruiter. “Usually they're coming from support or services, but I'm also seeing people come over from product, marketing, operations, and other areas.” As Berner from LinkedIn noted, CSM candidates increasingly have several years of CS experience already under their belts, but recruiters are staying open-minded about folks from other fields in order to bring qualified candidates into the market. Candidates are coming from areas such as:

• Sales: Salespeople who want to own a number but also want to drive value for clients more directly.
• Account managers: They're accustomed to managing existing client relationships and also have experienced challenges meeting their quota when the right things weren't done early in the account—which they can now take responsibility for as CSMs.
• Sales development representatives: Faloni from Twin Oaks Recruiting observes, “Some of the candidates entering the Customer Success function are Sales/Business Development reps who have realized they enjoy some aspects of Sales but not others. They see this new, shiny piece of the organization that's exciting and has endless possibilities to impact the customers and the business, and they want to get involved and make a sizable impact.”
• Project managers: They know how to run structured engagements to reach a result, but like that the CSM role gives them the opportunity to build long-term relationships with clients.
• Support representatives: They have seen over and over again what happens when a client is neglected. Their technical and problem-solving skills make them attractive as CSM candidates, and they like the idea that they can proactively help their clients rather than merely react to crises.
• Operations managers: They have experience running internal cross-functional initiatives, which translates well to “herding cats” at the client and mobilizing internal resources to support them.
• Management consultants: Consultants from firms such as Accenture, Bain, BCG, Deloitte, McKinsey, and PwC have managed strategic, long-term engagements with some of the same clients that they may be working with in a CSM role.
• MBAs: They're often eager to join tech companies and have the multidisciplinary background that helps them think creatively about strategies in working with a client.
• Recent college grads (including those right out of college): They often are drawn to rotational programs where they can get exposure to different departments—including CS, Services, Support, and others—to help inform their choice of a permanent home.
• Clients: Finally, what better for a role to “walk in the client's shoes” than hiring people who have literally worn those shoes? Particularly for their larger customers, many vendors have started hiring people from their clients to become CSMs. For example, an HR software company could hire an HR manager at a client to be a Customer Success Manager. They'd have to train the person on the vendor's processes but know they'd hit the ground running immediately in terms of having empathy for the client.

The entry of people with varied backgrounds into the CSM role has coincided with the rise of programs to train people in the profession. Rabago provides several universities with curriculum guidance to add CSM to their business programs, although degree-granting programs are years away. Gainsight's Pulse+ program has grown into the world's largest education and certification program for Customer Success professionals, educating more than 10,000 of them so far.

What Is a Customer Success Manager, Exactly?

What do we mean when we say “Customer Success Manager”? It's a valid question, since the CSM role comes in all shapes and sizes. We tend to see three types of CSMs:

1. CSM for Value Gaps: This type of CSM is necessary when a product is in its early stages. There is a significant “gap” between the value that the client gets out of the box and the value that clients are expecting. The CSM is there to plug that gap, by proposing creating workarounds and other solutions for clients, to help them achieve their goals in using the product's features. Typically, this type of CSM is very technical, coming from more product-oriented roles such as Support or Services.
2. CSM for Value Delivery: Once a product and its associated paid services reach a certain critical level of maturity, a CSM can free up their time to focus more on guiding clients through the journey of achieving value. This CSM typically has strong communication skills, executive presence, and the business judgment that helps them serve as a strategic advisor to clients.
3. CSM for Value Expansion: Some products are so well-designed (or have associated services that are so well executed) that they can automate much of the process of value delivery. In that case, a CSM can free up their time to expand the relationship with the client, by expanding the deployment to more people at the client (including more business units) or by selling additional products. This type of CSM often has a sales or account management background. The CSM and Account Management roles may even be blended into one role in this scenario.

Roles along the CSM career ladder, however, aren't the only ones that have become more prominent as a result of the CS movement.

The Rise of Customer Success Operations

As CSMs have grown in number, operations roles to support them are also on the rise. By analogy, Sales Operations became a standard role for supporting Sales teams by enabling account executives with content and other training, defining territories and compensation structures, and running reports and conducting analyses for Sales leaders. Customer Success organizations need to perform similar functions, and as a result they have been hiring Customer Success Operations Managers. Figure 3.2 shows how their responsibilities compare with Sales Operations roles.

A few years ago, CS Operations roles were few and far between, and companies had trouble funding them. But today, they're standard for CS teams that have more than five or ten CSMs.

Summary

Customer Success is one of the fastest-growing jobs in the world. It's an employee's market, and the opportunities to grow careers and accelerate one's advancement within the company are unprecedented. The job creation pace will continue as more and more industries outside Silicon Valley add CSM teams.

In the next several chapters, we'll explore how companies justify the investments in Customer Success that have propelled this boom in the field. Companies are seeking four pillars of their return on investment:

1. Reduce churn
2. Drive growth
3. Exceed client expectations
4. Increase enterprise valuation

Next up, we'll explore how fear of churn—the silent killer of companies—motivates those firms to focus on Customer Success.

	Sales Operations	Customer Success Operations
People
Team Structure	Segment the market, manage account executives' territories, and forecast hiring needs.	Segment existing customers, assign them to CSMs, redistribute workload as needed, and forecast hiring needs.
Compensation	Determine commission structure and quotas.	Determine the metrics on which bonuses are based and define targets.
Enablement	Provide materials and data that help account executives work more effectively.	Provide materials and data that help CSMs work more effectively.
Process
Customer Engagement	Determine the steps in the sales process to optimize conversion of pipeline to closed deals.	Determine the customer journey, including touchpoints and methodology.
One-to-Many Communications	Coordinate with Marketing on email nurture activities for prospective customers.	Run one-to-many emails and in-app communications.
Cross-functional Coordination	Coordinate cross-functional processes that help meet sales targets and deliver on prospects' needs.	Coordinate cross-functional processes (with Product, Engineering, Support, Services, Marketing, and Sales) that help meet renewal and upsell targets and deliver on customers' needs.
Technology
Systems	Implement and manage software that facilitates Sales Ops activities.	Implement and manage software that facilitates CSM Ops activities.
Reporting	Report regularly on past results and sales forecasts.	Report regularly on past results and forecasts for retention and expansion.
Prioritization	Identify top accounts and give executives visibility into deals that are at risk.	Identify top accounts for upsell and detect at-risk renewals.
Analysis	Track leading indicators of sales and analyze them to understand what's going well and what's not.	Track leading indicators of renewals and upsell and analyze them to understand what's going well and what's not.

Figure 3.2