Are Customer Success Managers in Demand?

is customer success manager in demand
Are customer success managers in demand?

I could just say “yes” and that would be the end of this blog. But I really want to build a case and prove that there is high demand for good customer success managers, no matter the economic climate. At the time of writing this, there’s a sharp pull back on tech hiring. You might think it’s a time to keep your head down and work, but hiring is still happening. Tech companies are desperate for people who are good at helping their customers get more value out of their solutions. Hopefully by the end of this blog, you’ll put your hand up and volunteer as tribute.

Search trends

The reality is that Customer Success was not a hot topic 10 years ago. While tech companies did exist, the focus was only on sales, while the customer experience was more on the back burner. Now, look where it is:

is customer success manager in demand stats

Now mixed into this might be people who are curious about what Customer Success management is, as well as companies who are searching for customer success management strategies, but they’re just two sides of the same coin: there is rising interest in people who are able to help people use tech better.

Key Stats

This blog post from Custify highlights a slew of stats around customer success, including:

  • $62 billion being the amount of money that’s lost every year by companies who are delivering poor customer experiences (NewVoiceMedia),
  • 70% of customers say that modern tech acts like a double sword, being that while it makes their lives easier, it also means that it’s easier to take business away from vendors with underwhelming customer experiences (Salesforce), and
  • 72% of customers say that improving their customer success experience is a top priority for the organisation (Forrester).

“So how do I begin?”

I’m glad you asked! Firstly, you’re in the right place, reading the right blog. It’s all about helping everyday people use their existing skillset to start a career in tech as a Customer Success Manager. But to give you a few key steps to begin, read on:

  1. Ask yourself why: you have to be clear on the reason you want to get started as a customer success manager. It’s OK to want to do it to get paid more, but if that’s the only reason you’re doing it, you might find that you’ll get bored. Do you feel a sense of fulfillment from helping customers get that “aha!” moment? If yes, then you should act on it,
  2. Write down what you already do: this sounds like a boring task. You might think that you don’t have skills that are transferable, but you’d be surprised. Writing down your day-to-day tasks from existing work will help you better translate how these skills will port over to customer success. I’m a firm believer that if you’ve done any customer-facing work, you can become a tech customer success manager.
  3. Put together your Customer Success Resume: you have to take your existing resume, map the skills over to key skills that customer success managers know how to do. Have a look at some in this blog to learn more. The great thing is that because they’re soft skills, you learn them on the job. If you’ve come from retail, hospitality or any customer-facing role, you have a head start.

Begin with those three steps, then start applying. Go on LinkedIn or your preferred job portal. Start talking with hiring managers or recruiters. Fake it til you make it. Be uncomfortable but trust in your skill set. You’ve got me in your corner. Don’t hesitate to reach out to me if you have questions or just need a bit pump up! πŸ’ͺ🏽

Customer Success Manager Company Review – Oracle

This blog is part of a series of posts exploring the different companies that have looked for or are currently looking for Customer Success Managers. Learn more about your potential employers, see if their values align with yours and whether you can see yourself working there. This is the last one for this series. For this one last one, I’ll be talking about a company that’s had a big impact in my career to date: Oracle.

customer success manager oracle
https://www.oracle.com/au/industries/construction-engineering/

Oracle – One company to acquire them all

Indeed, my own experience with Oracle wouldn’t have come to be if it wasn’t for the fact that it had acquired Textura, the payments management company that I had started working at in 2014. I remember walking into my office one morning, my colleagues crowding around a computer, watching the screen intently.

“Did you hear?” Ryan (a colleague of mine) asked. I shook my head. “We’re been acquired.” Over the next three or so years, I learned what it was like working in one of the largest tech companies in the world. It’s definitely set me up for my career so far and I feel that many people could stand to gain a lot from being able to work in a company like Oracle.

The Services Themselves

Oracle is huge. You’ll notice that I’ve actually selected a particular industry – construction and engineering – for the screenshot above. That’s because it’s the Business Unit I worked in at Oracle and what I know best. Obviously, choose the industry you’re most drawn to, but I’ll talk about some of the products and services that the Construction and Engineering Global Business Unit (CEGBU, Oracle loves their acronyms!) provides. Here are the main products that are part of the CEGBU suite. I’ll look at two today.

customer success manager oracle products

Aconex was Oracle’s last acquisition to complete the piece de resistance in the construction and engineering industry. It was Australia’s first big tech unicorn, paving the way for others when tech was not a big thing. Aconex is a tool that facilitates collaboration amongst construction teams by enabling documents to be better shared and tracked, all tied together with an audit trail.

customer success manager oracle aconex
Oracle Aconex

Primavera Cloud is one of the earliest acquisitions from Oracle for the CEGBU suite. It’s a scheduling and risk management tool, allowing teams to sync up on decisions that have to be made so that everyone has visibility over it all. The problem of “you don’t know what you don’t know” is a thing of the past with Primavera.

customer success manager oracle primavera
Oracle Primavera

Job Description Example

This screenshot is from a CSM role for Oracle CEGBU. Let’s have a look into it further below…

customer success manager oracle job description

Let’s go through each of the dot points:

  • You can nurture and build strong relationships, making sure users user the CEGBU tools to their maximum potential,
  • Become the trusted advisor that your customers go to within your organisation,
  • Maintain a contact cadence with your customer so that they are aware of the most recent changes and upgrades to products,
  • Nip risks in the bud so that good relationships don’t go bad,
  • Keep an eye on customer health and take steps to improve it if it’s heading in the wrong direction,
  • Keep up to date on product releases so you can share these details with customers as well,
  • Be a team player and share your perspectives to help improve CS performance,
  • Be the Voice of the Customer and push for mutually beneficial scenarios,
  • Pull in the right people at the right time if escalation is required,
  • Work remotely and in person.

What They Care About

customer success manager oracle company benefits

Despite being a larger company, their benefits don’t seem as generous as other fresher faces in tech. Having worked there though, their health cover is one of the highest in the tech industry and their career paths are pretty well documented. People who work at Oracle tend to stay there for years and years. They can try different jobs and have a long career without ever leaving the company. It suits people who want security, but also want variety – a formidable combination in this day and age!

Customer Success Manager Company Review – Microsoft

This blog is part of a series of posts exploring the different companies that have looked for or are currently looking for Customer Success Managers. Learn more about your potential employers, see if their values align with yours and whether you can see yourself working there. As we’re nearing the end of this segment, we can’t ignore one of the OG tech brands. Before the Instagrams, the Facebooks, the Twitters, before there was any social, there was an operating system. That’s right, I’m talking about Windows and the brand that owns it, Microsoft.

customer success manager microsoft
https://www.microsoft.com/en-au

Microsoft – One of the founding fathers of commercial tech

In the early days, when I was in school in the 90s, my first experience of Microsoft was through Word. I can’t remember the specific machine I worked on, but I do remember becoming familiar with the different tools within Word, typing slowly with two fingers, then more over time. The funnest part was using Word Art!

Fast forward to today and I do most of my typing in web-based browsers and applications. But there’s no denying the impact Microsoft had on that early behavior. You would hardly attribute it to a commercial company but if it hadn’t been for Bill Gates in those early days striking a deal to have his Windows OS installed by default on a bunch of computers, who knows where we would be today?

The Products Themselves

So Microsoft’s definitely an interesting beast. It straddles the line between software and hardware. Depending on the individual, you might know it better for its gaming consoles (XBox), laptops (Surface) or even smart phones. However, software has been a big part of its core offering, most notably it’s Microsoft Office Suite.

In terms of which products/services needed the help of Customer Success Managers, I had to do a bit of reverse engineering to find out. We’ll look at the job later, but I found that the CSM role was recruited (at least in Australia) for their Modern Workplace solution set.

customer success manager microsoft modern workplace
Modern Workplace

This was borne off the back of COVID and the changing world that means that companies have to better accommodate the needs of modern workers who want flexibility. However, on the flip side of the coin, how does this impact on the organizations supporting them?

customer success manager microsoft empowering users
Empowering users

It’s mainly through:

  • maximizing productivity,
  • maintaining security, and
  • increasing remote collaboration.

Job Description Example

The below JD is for a CSM role based out of the ANZ geography:

customer success manager microsoft job description
customer success manager microsoft jd

Let’s go through each of the dot points:

  • You have to know about the collaboration platforms modern enterprises are using. Hint: having an understanding of Teams would help a lot here,
  • Being a trusted advisor to ANZ enterprise accounts is critical,
  • FSI (Microsoft’s Financial Services solution) would be a big plus,
  • customer journey mapping to look at the customer’s business process to match product capability is important,
  • being a consultant in IT/business would help out a lot, and
  • experiencing building relationships at the Executive Customer level would also help out a lot.

What They Care About

customer success manager microsoft company benefits
Microsoft Benefits

They have a lot of benefits that emcompass work-life balance:

  • starting a family,
  • health and wellness (including mental health)
  • financial wellbeing

The list goes on. This link is for the Australia page, but feel free to check it out in your own locality.

Like many of the larger companies, being able to put Microsoft on your CV could be a game changer in your life. Maybe you don’t feel ready for it now, but one day, you might find “Customer Success Manager at Microsoft” next to your LinkedIn profile!

Customer Success Manager Company Review – Splunk

This blog is part of a series of posts exploring the different companies that have looked for or are currently looking for Customer Success Managers. Learn more about your potential employers, see if their values align with yours and whether you can see yourself working there. We’re going back into the data world with today’s post, looking into a company called Splunk. Funny name, but serious problem they solve: making use of streams of data to help businesses identify risks before it’s too late.

customer success manager splunk
https://www.splunk.com

Splunk – From Visibility to Action, Fast and at Scale

When I went on their website and saw this little byline, I knew exactly what they did. This is also a sign of a company that understands not only its customers, but also its core value proposition. Its main headline is “unified security and observability”, which is what it does, but the benefits are really in the byline.

Wikipedia also explains what Splunk does pretty well. Essentially, they take the disparate streams of data (customer, software, sales, diagnostics, etc), organizes it, then allows it to be readily accessible in a web interface. From there, how it’s used internally is really up to the customer (as well as the customer success manager!).

The Services Themselves

Let’s have a look at some of the specific solutions and use cases that Splunk solves for.

customer success manager splunk services

I’m going to dive into Advanced Thread Detection, Cloud Migration and Incident Investigation & Forensics in this blog.

customer success manager splunk advanced threat detection
Advanced Threat Detection

Before I start diving into each of these areas, can I just say I’m a fan of the way they lay out these pages. They start with the problem space, that each customer can relate to before talking about the solution which they can solve in their own specific way. You don’t have to be tech savvy to understand it and it makes the brand very approachable.

Anyway, for ATD, it’s about winning the data arms race. The biggest shame is that many companies have this data, sitting in their virtual repositories and collecting virtual dust. Meanwhile, hackers are running circles around them, laying traps and webs for them to fall into. ATD nullifies these tricks and shields them from the attacks.

customer success manager splunk cloud migration
Cloud Migration

Cloud Migration is a key aspect of modernizing IT departments that’s not going away any time soon. The biggest problem with doing this is doing it in a way that won’t break more things or introduce more complexities to untangle. The worst problem is that it might bring down customer-facing elements of the business. Splunk Cloud Migration lets companies use proven scaffolding to support the renovation of IT infrastructure so that it can be elevated to the cloud confidently.

customer success manager splunk incident investigation
Incident Investigation & Forensics

Think of Incident Investigation as the emergency department of a hospital. A patient comes in, complaining of a pain. As the head doctor of ER, you perform some tests, but it’s still inconclusive overall. You put them in a curtained off area on the side. Now multiply this by 50 per hour and guess what: there’s still only one of you. You are your own worst bottleneck.

Let’s make it even worse. Let’s say there are 500 per hour. How can you possibly manage it? Thankfully in the IT world, Splunk has a solution to automatically triage, rank and allocate resources so only the worst situations get the highest level of attention.

Job Description Example

This is for a Customer Success Manager role in Sydney, Australia:

customer success manager splunk job description

Let’s go through each of the dot points:

  • As the CSM, you own the end-to-end customer experience and help them adopt and grow usage of the Splunk platform,
  • You yourself become a Splunk Architect to elevate your subject matter expertise to new levels,
  • Build customer success plans individualized for each customer, directing their actions towards key milestones.
  • become the trusted consultant within the customer organisation,
  • help them use Splunk better so they are experts in the field,
  • stay up to date with all the updates in Splunk and provide insights to help customers use it more,
  • support the professional services and education services departments in Splunk to help them achieve their goals,
  • be the Splunk customer liaison to help the account and technical teams resolve their issues.

What They Care About

customer success manager splunk company benefits

Now here’s something you don’t see everyday: Splunk has a dedicated website for their company benefits. It’s broken out to the main regions their employees work at: Americas, APAC and Europe. Instead of going through each of the benefits, I’d recommend you go into the area you’re based and see what’s on offer. Safe to say it’s pretty generous and they’re keen on retaining employees once they’re in the company.

Customer Success Manager Company Review – Amazon

This blog is part of a series of posts exploring the different companies that have looked for or are currently looking for Customer Success Managers. Learn more about your potential employers, see if their values align with yours and whether you can see yourself working there. We’re veering away from all the hardcore technical companies and going now to a company that all consumers have heard of: Amazon. Actually, I lie. While it’s known as a consumer company, the customer success side of it is still very much for its enterprise solutions, which we’ll look into today.

customer success manager amazon
https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/

Amazon Solutions – System Architecture for your business

As much as I’d like to talk about the consumer side of the business, Amazon solutions is where their money’s at. Don’t get me wrong, they make good money from Kindle and their ecommerce side of the business, but they’re known as a formidable player in the solutions space.

Basically, the provide cloud based architecture that is easily configurable, as well as functional out of the box. Because of this, their services are as varied as there are use cases. Speaking of use cases, they have an entire page dedicated to it, which we’ll look into next.

The Use Cases

customer success manager amazon use cases 1
page 1
customer success manager amazon use cases 2
page 2
customer success manager amazon use cases 3
page 3

Whoa! It’s no wonder that they’re as big as they are. While a lot of tech companies niche down, they’re only expanding and conquering more territory. While they wouldn’t target every single use case, it wouldn’t surprise me either if they are making decent revenue out of each one. Let’s look at a few examples.

customer success manager amazon data lake
Amazon Data Lake

Data lakes are term used to describe pooling many disparate streams of data together and making the output more useful than ever before. In a past life, I worked for Oracle and this was something they were trying to do. They had acquired many companies and were working hard to feed the data streams from each acquisition SaaS into a data lake, with the intention of turning the it into a scrying pool that would help their customers anticipate unforeseen risks and cost better.

customer success manager amazon machine learning
Amazon Machine Learning

Machine Learning shouldn’t be new to anyone. For those who aren’t as familiar with it, it’s essentially the umbrella that encompasses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other technologies that take inputs for the intended result of predicting an output with a high chance of accuracy. Very much leaning into the Data Lake technology, it uses a high volume of data to train machines to recognize specific stimuli so that it might avert a crisis in the future.

Job Description Example

The following JD comes from Amazon Japan. It’s actually more aligned with the consumer side of the business, where the CSM helps business customers develop solutions to buy on Amazon’s Japan website.

customer success manager amazon job description

Let’s go through each of the dot points:

  • The interview is conducted in Japanese, so you’d better know how to speak fluent Japanese.
  • You also need to know how to speak English at a professional level.
  • they’ll want to see at least five years experience in project management, or a number of different B2B, system and service related disciplines.
  • do you know how HTML? You’ll be ahead of other candidates, who might not know any web languages.
  • Bachelor of Arts or Science as a base, tertiary minimum,
  • the old, “fast-paced, challenging environment”. Get ready to move fast and break things.
  • Probably goes without saying that if you’re able to speak fluent English and Japanese that you’re a great communicator, especially in a professional context.

What They Care About

customer success manager amazon upskilling commitments

There’s quite a bit on their website about company benefits, but what caught my eye was their commitment to upskilling individuals in the high-growth, cloud space. Not only would they upskill 300,000 of their US employees to grow into more employee individuals, they will also provide free cloud computing skills for nearly 30 million people globally. Pretty generous if you ask me.

Amazon has its fans and its detractors. One thing’s for certain: if they appear on your resume, you can bet that your future employers will look highly on it. What do you think? Could you see yourself working for the ‘Zon?

Customer Success Manager Company Review – VMWare

This blog is part of a series of posts exploring the different companies that have looked for or are currently looking for Customer Success Managers. Learn more about your potential employers, see if their values align with yours and whether you can see yourself working there. We’re staying on theme with big tech players this week. We’ve talked about Experian last week and today, we’re looking at VMWare.

customer success manager vmware
https://www.vmware.com/au.html

VMWare – an all-in-one cloud service provider

VMWare are a provider of cloud services for corporations. We’ll go into the details in just a second, but here’s a quick run down of the sorts of services they provide:

customer success manager vmware solutions
  • App Platform: a stable environment to help you build applications,
  • Cloud Infrastructure: creating a consistent environment for cloud applications,
  • Networking: accelerating modern app operations with state-of-the-art network protocols,
  • Anywhere Workspace: enable secure and seamless remote working,
  • Security: make sure that no matter the platform you’re on, it’s seamless and secure,
  • Telco Cloud: enable a telecommunications network in the cloud.

The Services Themselves

Here are three of the main services that VMWare provides. Let’s dive a bit deeper into what they actually cover.

customer success manager vmware app platform
App Platform

Tanzu is an modular application platform that enables the development of cloud applications.

customer success manager vmware cloud infrastructure
Cloud Infrastructure

Cloud infrastructure has to be built right the first time, otherwise it can be difficult to streamline it as a company get more mature over time.

customer success manager vmware networking
Networking

The way that each solution speaks with each other is also critical. Connectivity has to be reliable, stable and pervasive.

Job Description Example

customer success manager vmware job description
customer success manager vmware job description 2

This is what they would hope you can achieve in the first 6-12 months. Let’s go through each of the dot points:

  • they’ll want you to onboard in a five-week onboarding plan (sounds easy enough),
  • hone in on a specific area of technical knowledge.
  • after 90 days (3 months), you’ll understand how to fit pieces of the VMWare puzzle into the framework of your customers’ business problems,
  • build a long-term relationship with your customers (critical for customer success),
  • help them get time to value faster by adopting VMWare’s solutions quicker,
  • be the SME and educate the customers on what’s coming up,
  • show your progress with VMWare’s internal tools,
  • be proactive and lead, coordinate and guide customer’s major VMWare initiatives,
  • be an advocate for customers with strong Voice of the Customer straetgy,
  • become VCP (VMware Certified Professional) certified.

What They Care About

customer success manager vmware company benefits

Pretty decent perks here too. I think the key is that even though they’re a larger tech company, they allow employees to really buy into the growth of the company with their Employee Stock Purchase Plan. At the same time, they provide a safe environment for families to grow through the Medical Coverage and other similar types of benefits. As a larger company, they also invest in your development with different events, trainings, course works and similar, not to mention physical and mental wellness initiatives.

Does VMware appeal to you? In my opinion, while it might not seem as fast paced as a smaller tech company, it makes up for it with stability and a strong brand. What do you think?

Customer Success Manager Company Review – Experian

This blog is part of a series of posts exploring the different companies that have looked for or are currently looking for Customer Success Managers. Learn more about your potential employers, see if their values align with yours and whether you can see yourself working there. Today, we’re looking into one of the bigger tech players in the world right now. They’re by no means a start up, but still try to keep the spirit of entrepreneurship in their organization. Say hello to Experian.

customer success manager experian
https://www.experian.com.au/

Experian – Information Services is their forte

From the outset, it’s a bit difficult to see what Experian actually does. They tout themselves as a leader of Information Services management, but what does that actually entail? We’ll dive into it momentarily.

Their main products are analytics and credit reporting. Many companies – as well as individuals – will use the latter when it comes time to buying a house, taking out a credit card, or any sort of official matter that relates to their credit history.

The Services Themselves

Unlike all of the other companies that we’ve looked at so far, Experian is the only one that doesn’t have a fully fledged SaaS solution. They are big on the services that they sell. Let’s have a look at them now.

customer success manager experian business services
Business Services

They offer credit checks at a corporate level, as well as analytics and digital data for research purposes for different industries. They’re well known for having robust processes and a clear methodology for their conclusions and findings. Companies will go to Experian for risk management and peace of mind.

customer success manager experian individual services
Individual Services

They offer similar services to the individual level as well. The main way they do this is through allowing consumers to order their credit report, which tracks their credit history to date. They also allow amendments to said credit reports. If the individual has been a victim of finance fraud, they can place bans on their credit history so that it is not tainted with the transactions that are a result of fraud.

Job Description Example

customer success manager experian job description

Let’s go through each of the dot points:

  • You keep an eye on when it’s time for renewal and also track your customers’ timelines as well to help them achieve their goals on time,
  • You can find opportunities to grow your account both cross and up your portfolio. This means selling things to your customers that they don’t already have but will also benefit from,
  • you can write at a professional level,
  • help improve the Net Promoter Score (NPS) for your accounts, as high as possible but the goal range is there,
  • help with negotiating bigger contracts,
  • help the marketing team with creating case studies that can be used for collateral purposes, and
  • learning and upskilling within the services that Experian offers so that you can know the value they can deliver and how you can best communicate this.

What They Care About

customer success manager experian company benefits

It looks like the focus here is on flexibility and making sure the benefits suit you and your lifestyle. Worth digging into! If you’re curious, they have a guide here that is a sneak peek into their culture and what Experian workers care about. If you like big, stable companies with lots of opportunities for career progression up as well as sideways, Experian might be your cup of tea.

Customer Success Manager Company Review – Okta

This blog is part of a series of posts exploring the different companies that have looked for or are currently looking for Customer Success Managers. Learn more about your potential employers, see if their values align with yours and whether you can see yourself working there. This week, we’re looking at at industry that’s only becoming more and more important as tech becomes more prevalent in the world: digital, online security and authentification.

customer success manager okta
https://www.okta.com/au/

Okta – Securing the world’s online identities

Back in the day, before this crazy thing called the Internet (I know, did that time ever exist?), you used something called a key to open a door. It was made of metal and could be cut in certain configurations so it was unique to your door (or unique enough).

Nowadays, the same concept still exists, but everything is lifted online. Instead of metal keys, we have online keys that are tied to our identity so that we can access only what’s ours and no one else’s. Okta has turned this into a science and extends its capabilities to both protecting workplaces, as well as their customers.

The Software Itself

You can see from this screenshot of their product page that they have a multitude of products to suit different needs. That’s one of the advantages of their software: it’s not really industry specific and can be packaged up to serve different jobs.

customer success manager okta products

They do have Workforce Identify and Customer Identity, which we’ll dive into a little bit deeper.

customer success manager okta workforce identity
Workforce Identify Splash Page

At any point in a day, more mature, larger organizations won’t only have hundreds – if not thousands – of employees logging into their company’s applications. There might also be contractors, visitors and other entities that might have specific use cases for having temporary access.

Workforce Identity allows companies to bolt on a user-friendly SaaS to their applications that facilitates getting access to digital and online services, saving their own IT department the headache and hassle of managing this themselves.

customer success manager okta customer identify
Customer Identify Splash Page

Customer Identity tackles the challenge of allowing external parties – whose level of IT savviness may not be clear – to log into their own portals that you supply them. This in itself is a gargantuan piece to tackle. Software developers work in teams to build the back and front end so that this works as it should. Okta takes care of everything in this case, include the installation, configuration, testing and customer support.

Job Description Example

This is a job listing for a Customer Success Manager in Sydney, Australia:

customer success manager okta job description

Let’s go through each of the dot points:

  • you’re the go-to person for your customer. You help them get onboarded and manage escalations should they occur.
  • become the trusted advisor for customers, being the one they turn to for any questions regarding the application, making sure they get the most bang for their buck,
  • make sure you link up with the business stakeholders so that the application is inline with what they want to use it for,
  • be the one who spreads your knowledge about new features,
  • if you see risky behavior, pick it up early. Seeing good behavior? Point it out and make it a habit in them.
  • Check the customer health through product usage.
  • be the focal point that helps with the renewal process,
  • be the voice of the customer and champion their needs cross-functionally.
  • be super chummy with sales to sell and position the Success Services component of the business.

What They Care About

customer success manager okta company benefits

Like most tech-forward organizations, they work hard to keep their employees happy. Benefits are numerous – as per above – and they also have advisors who work in Okta who’s sole purpose is to help you make the most of said benefits! That’s something I haven’t seen before and shows that they really care about their people.

Online security might not be a field that you’ve considered working in, but if it’s in a company like Okta, it sounds like you’ll be well looked after. ☺️

Customer Success Manager Company Review – Yotpo

customer success manager yotpo
https://www.yotpo.com/

This blog is part of a series of posts exploring the different companies that have looked for or are currently looking for Customer Success Managers. Learn more about your potential employers, see if their values align with yours and whether you can see yourself working there. This week, we’re diving into a company that does it all in the e-commerce space: SMS/text marketing, loyalty programs, referrals, subscriptions and visual marketing. Headquartered out of New York City and helping turn user-generated content into a powerful sales tool, let’s look at Yotpo.

Yotpo – Turning Online Shoppers into your own personal brand army

I first heard about Yotpo seven or eight years ago, into one of my first full-time jobs out of university. Back then, it was a platform to help manage reviews online. Now, it’s evolved to be a lot more.

Tying into the social commerce trend, it turns online influencers into an army that helps companies sell. Using tools that help to structure online selling in a way that’s less haphazard, but still retains the trustworthiness of social selling, it’s a Swiss Army Knife that e-commerce big hitters use to get a leg up in the game.

The Software Itself

There are five main modules, but in the interests of keeping this content succinct, I’m shortening it to three. If you want to check out more of what Yotpo has to offer (and what you might end up supporting as a CSM for them), feel free to visit their website and explore.

customer success manager yotpo reviews
Reviews

Their Reviews module slips in unobtrusive, gentle asks for reviews when they’re statistically most like to generate them. It might be right after the sale, in a thank-you text message a few days later, or in an email. Yotpo works with you to find out what works best, then does the heavy lifting to garner the reviews so you can use them as powerful marketing collateral.

customer success manager yotpo loyalty
Loyalty Program

Every ecommerce brand has a loyalty program now. Some do it better than others. It’s not as simple as offering a points system and hoping it works. There’s the issue of collection, redemption, then slicing and dicing the data to find which customers are more likely to be your most loyal. Leave it to the experts at Yotpo to help you do this.

customer success manager yotpo visual marketing
Visual Marketing

Where everything now is so visual, using images, photos and video to powerfully drive home messaging is a must have to stand out in such a crowded market place. Yotpo has modules within its Visual Marketing section to help you do this.

Job Description Example

Yotpo is a multinational company, with offices in USA, UK, Israel, Bulgaria and Australia. They are a big hirer of Customer Success leads and will continue to do so, as that’s a strong value add for their organization. The following JD comes from one of their Sydney roles:

customer success manager yotpo job description

Let’s go through each of the dot points:

  • you become the consultant within their organization that helps them grow their business while using what Yotpo has to offer.
  • you can build rapport with them,
  • keep renewing annual customers and show customers that you’re able to help them keep making money in their business,
  • help customers find more opportunities to use Yotpo solutions more effectively to generate higher revenue,
  • look at usage data and find points where risk might be creeping into accounts,
  • be the voice of the customer within Yotpo and share the information within all departments,
  • be the point of liaison with all other departments so that you can resolve issues.

Why You Should Join Them

customer success manager yotpo company benefits

This is just for the Australia business, but it’s pretty good overall. Generous in many areas and importantly, there’s opportunity to develop your career, which is what you want to see in a tech company.

So what do you think? Could you see yourself working at Yotpo? Keen to hear your thoughts!

Customer Success Manager Company Review – Hubspot

customer success manager hubspot
https://www.hubspot.com/

This blog is part of a series of posts exploring the different companies that have looked for or are currently looking for Customer Success Managers. Learn more about your potential employers, see if their values align with yours and whether you can see yourself working there. This week, we’re looking at one of the most recognisable CRM SaaS out there. This company has really made a name for itself over the last decade, starting as a small fish but is now well and truly a big player in the sales and marketing CRM arena: Hubspot.

Hubspot – the user-friendly sales and marketing CRM

Starting in 2006, Hubspot is a success story in the crowded CRM space. The way that they went about it is simple, but not easy: starting with SMEs, they built a delightful platform that helped them to track, manage and create value at every step along the marketing and sales customer life cycle.

In this day and age, it’s hard to find a tech company that’s not at least interacted with Hubspot. I’ve seen it being used in larger enterprises the likes of Oracle and even smaller start ups. It’s the de facto standard for improving the sales and marketing standards in tech companies the world over.

The Software Itself

While its original products were sales and marketing, it’s since branched out to include departments like Service, Content and Operations. I’ll focus on the OG offerings and content, but feel free to dive a bit deeper into each one if you’re curious.

customer success manager hubspot marketing hub
Hubspot Marketing Hub

Marketing Hub contains all the pieces to help conquer your marketing pipeline. Assign value to each step of the funnel, find out where you’re losing customers, identify opportunities to add more MQLs and automate processes.

customer success manager hubspot sales hub
Hubspot Sales Hub

Track the leads that come in, then the conversations that eventuate from each customer. If you need to follow up with customers, Hubspot Sales Hub will do the heavy lifting and send you reminders, as well as send your prospects information that they require to make the final decision.

customer success manager hubspot cms hub
Hubspot CMS Hub

Hubspot’s Content Management System (CMS) Hub is the beating heart of your tech website. Customers need to see case studies, testimonials, collateral and widgets so that they slowly can get more comfortable with the idea of buying from you. They need to trust that you are who you say you are. The CMS Hub can automate this so that you can go back to focusing on the real life conversations with customers.

Job Description Example

Hubspot is kicking huge goals; they’re hiring all the time. I was able to find this job listing for Sydney, Australia, that was only up last week. It had over 200 applications according to LinkedIn!

customer success manager hubspot job description

Let’s go through each of the dot points:

  • you hold the keys to the customer relationship and know how to make customers happy, as well as keeping them happy,
  • you can get deep into the organisations you look after through key stakeholders, across multiple teams.
  • you yourself become a Subject Matter Expert (SME) in Inbound Marketing and the trusted advisor to your customers,
  • help customers define their success and help them navigate your roadmap so they can get successful,
  • make sure that you can maintain revenue in your accounts, growing the accounts and renewing them,
  • get more people to use more features, growing revenue in this way as well,
  • monitor customer health and nip risk issues in the bud before they get worse,
  • work with the CS team to find new ways to scale and grow your customers’ use of Hubspot.

Why You Should Consider Hubspot

customer success manager hubspot company benefits

Hubspot looks after their employees. Every other day, I see the stories their employees share on LinkedIn. Outside looking in, it seems like a great place to be. Checking out this list πŸ‘†πŸ½, I would tend to agree.

Hubspot is a great company for a Customer Success Manager of any level to work in. They hire all around the world and have world-class training. If you do apply for a role there, say hi for me!