Today, I’ll share with you a useful document that I’ve created in the past to help me get to the next stage of Customer Success Manager interviews. Some comments I’ve received about this document are:
- “Color me impressed!” – a recruiter hiring for a marketing AI tech platform
- “I haven’t had a CSM candidate go to this level of effort before.” – Head of Customer Success, for a second stage interview at a construction tech company
So what is this magical document that makes hiring managers sit up and pay attention?
The document is called a 30-60-90 Day Plan. As the name suggests, it’s a plan that outlines what you will intend to do in the first 30, 60 and 90 days in your role as a CSM.
Unless you’re looking to get started in quite a junior role, a 30-60-90 shows how you will apply your expertise in the early days of your role, essentially detailing the impact that you will have in the company. This document details a few things:
- Initiative: in the interviews that I’ve done, no one’s asked me to do this yet. The great thing is that it’s not that difficult to do (especially with this blog that you can basically swipe). So if you stand up and decide to do this yourself, you will automatically stand out from the crowd.
- Hit the Ground Running: tech environments can be demanding. You should get a good onboarding experience, but giving your future manager and your team that peace of mind that you can just slot in and get to work right away is going to put you in good stead.
- Understanding the business: you would have at this stage learnt more about the business, at least from reading the job description. With a 30-60-90, you’ll be able to show how you’ll begin to solve your prospective company’s problems that are specific to them in the context of your experience as a CSM.
How to Design the 30-60-90
The screenshots you see above are from an actual 30-60-90 that I used in an interview, which got me to the next round speaking with the co-founders of a company. I’ve changed my name and the company’s for privacy, but you can swipe that. I built it in Canva, but if you’re not design-inclined, Google Docs has an increasing number of nice design templates you can use. All you have to do is rename, customize and slot text in and images in.
30-60-90 Examples
I like having three, clear sections that shows the focus for every month. Generally, it will be around:
- 1st month – Orientation
- Understand Tech Group’s purpose and how they help their clients succeed,
- Meet the Tech Group team and get to know their challenges,
- Be introduced to current clients,
- Get to know Tech Group platform in demo environment,
- Shadow client support calls.
- 2nd month – First Steps
- Start taking support calls under supervision,
- Document end-to-end client support process into service blueprint,
- Give first sales presentation (web/offline),
- Assess CRM and support ticket management improvements,
- Propose KPIs to track customer success.
- 3rd month – Getting Going
- Take support calls without supervision.
- Confirm customer success KPIs with management and start tracking against them,
- Establish Customer Lifecycles for different segments (hi, med, low-touch)
- Build agile process with product team to improve platform,
- Create a case study to use as collateral.
Obviously, you can customize this to your own needs. I’d recommend not swiping and using as it is. I’d love to see the 30-60-90 day plans that you put together. Hopefully this gives you some ideas for ways to woo and wow your potential employers.