Let's face it, most customers aren't making their way to your Customer Success manager because they've already gotten a ton of value from your product. They're reaching out because they have a problem.
That's Tracy Cote, chief people officer at Zenefits, a cloud-based human resources software company. She's pointing to how difficult the role of CSM can be, because you're often taking care of challenging client situations. Her point of view isn't unusual. Some would go so far as to say that working in CS is the hardest job in the company. In this chapter, we'll explore what causes the CSM job to be hard and then discuss what CS leaders and their HR partners can do about it.
The CSM job can be super-challenging for six common reasons:
If you're not careful, you can end up with a CSM team that's pretty miserable. No one wants a team that's unhappy, but having an unhappy CSM team is arguably worse than having an unhappy team in any other department. That's because when your CSMs are unhappy, that misery spreads to your clients. When we don't attend to our own emotional needs, it's hard to attend to the emotional needs of others, including our clients. In other words, when we don't experience empathy from our work culture, our own supply of empathy for others runs low. Conversely, when our CSMs are happy, they're radiating joy to our clients, who in turn have a better Experience. If we're accountable for generating strong Experiences for our clients, we'll take infectious joy over contagious depression any day!
As Cote points out,
Another reason (if you need any more!) to invest in the happiness of CSMs is employee retention—which seems so obvious, but it needs to be said. When you lose a CSM, their departure may not only be disastrous for the client relationship, but it also increases your people costs, because you need to invest in backfilling that CSM and training their replacement. In other words, unhappy team members affect your P&L. Remember JD Peterson, the chief growth officer at HR software company Culture Amp, the company focused on employee success from Chapter 6? Here's what he says about the impact of unhappy team members on your financials:
Just like happy clients, happy team members can create a “Helix,” a virtuous cycle of improvement where happy team members result in more team members joining, who in turn become happy. Let's explore this analogy between team members and clients in the next section.
In an earlier chapter, we discussed the importance of generating strong Outcomes and Experiences for our clients. The fact that our CSMs' wellbeing so strongly influences the success of our clients means that we have to generate strong Outcomes and Experiences for our CSMs, too. Put differently: CSMs are clients, too. This analogy equating CSMs with clients holds true in many other respects. Certain concepts in Customer Success have direct analogues in the realm of managing team members. Check out these examples from the Table of Customer Success Elements:
These examples illustrate how a CS leader, in partnership with an HR team, can help team members have a great experience and achieve outcomes in their career and life from their job.
From the time Allison was little, her dad shared stories with her brother and her about heroes. There was a story about how the Wright Brothers, two little-known bicycle mechanics who worked tirelessly on their flight experiments for years, were greeted in France by unfamiliar praise from crowds of admirers of their innovation. There was another story about how Roosevelt secretly sent aid to the British before the U.S. entered World War II, even when faced with political opposition to getting involved, because it was the right thing to do. There were other stories that her dad made up at bedtime, sitting in the hallway between her and her brother's respective bedrooms, about heroic kids who saved the day. The stories varied, but a central character recurred: a leader with a vision to humbly serve others—a servant leader.
Nowadays, we don't hear many stories about servant leadership in the media. We could go on about the very different narratives of leadership that are told nowadays—carrying themes like narcissism, greed, materialism, workaholism, sociopathy, and others—but those have been well-documented elsewhere.
We think we need more compelling stories of leadership in our lives. We need to know what to expect from our leaders, and as we grow in our careers, we need to know what to aspire to and how to get there. We need more inspiration in general.
Servant leadership is the idea that leaders serve their teams rather than teams serving their leaders. Leaders don't sit at the top of the pyramid; they invert the pyramid, empowering everyone else. (The concept was created by Robert Greenleaf, who also founded the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership.) Although we're not perfect at Gainsight, we've witnessed and heard many stories of servant leadership among our managers. Among them:
To some, these activities might seem small. But imagine the world we'd live in if every action stemmed from a philosophy of servant leadership.
That's not to say leaders on our team don't make mistakes. We personally have made plenty of them. Sometimes we make mistakes due to our emotional state: We're stressed, threatened, or otherwise in pain. Sometimes we make mistakes because we don't have the right knowledge: It takes experience, creative thinking, and solid judgment to arrive at a win-win-win in any given situation. In either case our intentions aren't bad, but our actions are.
We think most people want to help others. Even if they're not aware of their desire to serve right now, they'll likely discover it later in life. And perhaps some inspiration would help. But an important root of the problem is that even when people want to serve, they don't know how. Servant leadership isn't merely about wanting to help; it's about taking actions that are effective in helping.
We need a playbook for how to be a servant leader in the context of a growing company. You've committed to your investors to achieve high targets; you know that change is a necessary constant; you need to do more with less. All of these factors make it difficult to serve your team.
Although we haven't written the playbook, we'll share eight frameworks that we've found helpful in trying to be servant leaders ourselves:
Peterson from Culture Amp believes in the value of transparency because he sees his most successful clients embracing it. “First and foremost, the best cultures that we see in our clients start with gathering feedback and giving employees a voice. It starts with simply listening. And reciprocally, these cultures are focused on transparency and openness.” Employees are sharing with management and management is sharing with employees.
At Gainsight, Nick has espoused transparency from the beginning. This has showed up in the normal ways: all-hands communications, “Ask Me Anything” Q&A sessions, and the like. But it's also showed up in unconventional ways, like Nick embracing vulnerability and sharing stories about his childhood loneliness, for example. One of Nick's favorite weekly rituals is his Sunday-night email to the company, “Mehtaphysical Musings,” about what's happening in the company that people need to know, tips for teammates, his calendar for the upcoming week, and updates on what's happening for him outside of work with his family and with his second family, the Pittsburgh Steelers!
Allison says,
Given the stresses that CSMs can absorb from their clients and the internal dynamics of your company, CS leaders and their HR partners need to work to reduce stress. “Work–life balance is incredibly important,” Cote says.
At the same time, reducing stress isn't the same as motivating the team. Cote takes inspiration from the book Primed to Perform, by authors Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor.
Much has been written about how people want purpose in their work. They're not always inspired by the numbers, by operational initiatives, or by short-term wins. They want to feel they are contributing to a broader purpose. It's the job of a servant leader to illuminate that purpose.
At Gainsight, we espouse a purpose around how Customer Success is part of a more human approach to business. We describe this with our goal “to be living proof that you can win in business while being human-first.”
Allison finds further meaning in the role of CS in helping humanity navigate technology.
Name a personality framework, Allison has read about it: Myers Briggs, the Enneagram, Five Dynamics. She has found these frameworks invaluable in revealing how to help her team members define their roles in a way that maximizes their energy, how to create teams of people that complement each other so that every activity is performed by someone who is energized by it, and how to quickly get to know candidates she is recruiting. Servant leaders know how to empower every team member—and that means putting them in situations where they are highly energized.
It's hard to serve others when you're not serving yourself. You can recognize a burned-out leader by their emotional volatility, reactive decision-making, reluctance to work through conflict, or inability to feel empathy for others. When leaders burn out, their pain cascades through the entire team.
So it's critical that leaders serve themselves, too. That means figuring out how to optimize your own energy level throughout the week. Over the years Allison has developed a weekly schedule that she is laser-focused on maintaining. For example, she follows a rule to be in bed at 9:30 p.m. and asleep at 10:00 p.m. every day. She's a morning person, and she is also one of those unfortunate people who need at least eight hours of sleep. She wakes up at 6:00 a.m. and refuses to check her email until she has gone through her morning routine of reading and meditating. Whenever she makes an exception and checks her email before she has completed the routine, it puts her mind in a scattered state for the rest of the day—whereas reading helps her focus, think bigger-picture, and tap into creativity.
Taking this further, we have a rule at Gainsight that we don't send email on Saturdays. We have made this a core principle of the company, as a part of our value of driving “Success for All,” since the beginning of our company. We take pride in the “no-email Saturdays” concept. We educate new teammates, and especially leaders, on it. The intention is that if one person sends an email on Saturday, others feel accountable to have to respond. So barring a critical client issue, we are all in it together.
Nick models this himself by disabling email (and other work-related apps) on his phone each Friday night, only turning them on again Sunday night to catch up on the coming week.
We spend our days trying to empower others—through coaching, persuading, comforting, reconciling, aligning—which, when effective, requires a great deal of emotional energy. To take care of others, we need to take care of ourselves.
A key part of self-compassion is recognizing that none of us is perfect. Many of us at Gainsight were inspired by Brene Brown's powerful TED talk on how leaders can show vulnerability and become even more powerful. As such, we have pushed the boundaries as executives on our comfort level in being open with our stakeholders.
For Nick, this started with opening up with our team about the loneliness he felt as a child, and sometimes still does today. He took it further when he started speaking with vulnerability in front of the thousands of customers attending our Pulse conference every year. The year he spoke about eating alone every day at lunch in school was transformative. Other speakers—Gainsight and customers alike—embraced the concept, and now Gainsight events feature vulnerability front and center. As such, everyone in attendance is in a frame of mind of openness, connection, and growth.
Peterson at Culture Amp observes a big trend in companies building geographically distributed teams and investing extra effort to help those “remote” team members feel included. “More and more people are not working from headquarters, and more people are not even coming into the office if they're near one—they're doing their work on mobile devices. When you're building a culture, you need to account for that.” This is especially relevant for Customer Success because as we discussed earlier in this chapter, the difficulties of the role can compound when there's no one physically nearby to help the CSM bounce back from an emotionally challenging situation.
At Gainsight, we embrace the idea of geographic inclusion. We were founded in the unlikely combination of cities of St. Louis, Missouri, and Hyderabad, India. Over the years, we embraced the idea that our best people are everywhere, not just in tech hubs like Silicon Valley. As such, we tell our teammates that we have no headquarters, that our HQ is wherever each of our employees—our Gainsters—reside. We try to live this value in as many creative ways as possible, from always prompting people on the phone in meetings to speak first to streaming our all-hands meetings from a studio so that no employee feels less included because they aren't “in the room where it happens.”
So what does it take for a chief customer officer to adopt these behaviors of servant leadership, and specifically to help CSMs cope with their challenging roles? Let's come back to Tracy Cote, who has studied the attributes of CCOs who create successful teams.
Cote observes that great CCOs don't just spike on one attribute; they're multitalented. “The best CCO is high IQ and high EQ. Strategic, tactical, empathetic, and relational, chief customer officers must navigate not only the emotions of customers but also those of the extended internal team. There is a natural tension between Sales, Professional Services, Product, and Customer Success as each team does their best to navigate a complex business landscape internally as well as externally.” This kind of navigational ability helps the CCO shelter their team from the worst of stress. “For example, Sales is generally incented to bring in new customers, and move on. But the CCO is responsible for retention, expansion, and advocacy. This can sometimes create issues especially if the handover between Sales and Success is not clearly defined. Additionally, CCOs are frequently drivers of change, and they need to be great at that. Other internal teams don't always understand what the CCO organization really does, so communication is essential.” When a CCO creates alignment at the top and across the company, they give the space to their team to get into the flow of doing their jobs. “And because of the stress level of the role,” Cote adds, “a sense of humor never hurts.”
Peterson from Culture Amp said it well: “It's almost cliché now to talk about how happy employees lead to happy customers. Honestly, there's simply no doubt about it.” In this chapter we discussed the typical reasons why Customer Success Managers can have a tough time. And we discussed how treating CSMs like a kind of client, through certain well-known servant leadership techniques, can result in a thriving Customer Success team.
Now that we've discussed how major functions within a company—ranging from Services to HR—are evolving along with the Customer Success movement, we'll explore how to launch a Customer Success initiative at your company. This is the topic we'll focus on in Part III.