If you’re reading through this blog, there’s a good chance that you’re doing so because you’re interested in becoming a Customer Success Manager. You’ve been on LinkedIn, Seek, Monster.com and all the job boards and seen that there’s a lot of hiring going on right now in 2022 as tech companies look for people who are good at simplifying complexity to look after their customers.
But one question remains: why become a Customer Success Manager in the first place?
You can see that search trends for Customer Success Managers in Google are as high as they’ve ever been. The above graph is for the United States, but the same behavior can be seen in all countries that tech companies call home.
I’m going to try and put aside my bias to tell you why you should consider a role as a CSM.
You don’t need specific qualifications
This is the big one for me. When I was working in client services, I wanted to take my experience and elevate it to a higher level role that would let me make more of an impact. After bumping around for a while, I found that Customer Success was a natural progression.
My background was in management and marketing, but what worked in my favor was my experience. It’s more about what you’ve done than what you’ve studied. While more and more certifications are popping up that give you a solid grounding in CS, don’t be fooled. These are not necessary to get you in the door.
Variety is the spice of life
I like being kept on my toes. It doesn’t only make the day go faster, but it helps me grow professionally and personally as well. The great thing about working in customer success is that no two roles are the same. It very much depends on the company and industry you’re working for.
If you’re in a younger company that’s starting to find product-market fit, a bit part of your job will be establishing best practices while literally writing a playbook that they can refer to. You’ll also likely play a big part in what features of a product get worked on.
If you’re in a more mature company, you probably will have more processes to abide to, but the variety comes from working with different people within the organization. Product, engineering, tech support, sales, finance… the list goes on. You can use your skills not only to connect with your customers, but also with the people trying to build your company to be the best damn version of itself.
Money’s pretty good
I’m not going to lie: the money isn’t anything to sneeze at in customer success. I remember the day that I started earning 6-figures. There is a feeling that you’ve “made it”. But the great thing is that it’s just the beginning.
You can take your career as deep as you want and there’s always going to be a market for experienced customer success managers. If you opt to be a people leader, that’s great too. Leading teams of CSMs is a skill in of itself. An emerging field is customer success operations, that is, setting the systems and analytics up to allow CSMs to focus on doing the work and excelling.
But as tech has grown, so have the opportunities to be paid well if you’re a good customer success manager.
Ultimately, I can’t decide for you whether you want to be a customer success manager or not. But hopefully with these three reasons, it’s given you some food for thought. I’d love to see you on the other side!