The Ultimate Guide for Customer Success Team Leaders

Defining Leadership in Customer Success

What are the crucial components of a successful sports team? Experienced athletes working on offense and defense, but that alone doesn’t win a game. Every sports team needs a captain – a leader to make strategic play calls.

Similarly, every customer success (CS) team relies on the leadership of a CS manager or executive.

No leadership role is static. In fact, it’s one of the most dynamic positions in a CS team, with its responsibilities evolving alongside customer success goals and expectations.

For a startup, CS leadership may only involve customer support and product training. But as your organization grows, you’ll also need to take on responsibilities like customer onboarding process, expansion, renewals, and product adoption.

Finally, in an established or mature business, a CS manager will need to focus on value-led or outcome-based consultancy.

Leadership Roles and Responsibilities

Different industries need different types of CS leaders. For example, SaaS companies building a customer success team need customer success managers with technical backgrounds, while a retail company will look for someone who understands supply chain dynamics.

Even after finding your niche as a customer success leader, you’ll be faced with one question: what type of leadership position do you want? Yes, there’s more than one. Here’s what leadership roles can look like in a CS team.

Chief Customer Officer: The Chief Customer Officer (CCO) is the highest-ranking member of a CS team. As a CCO, you’ll work with the executive board to put the right customer success strategies into motion. You’ll implement a customer-centric approach within the team and create a 360-degree view of your customers.
VP of Customer Success: CS VPs are also responsible for developing and implementing strategies. They manage the existing customer base as well as the growth of the entire CS team.
Director of Customer Success: CS directors maintain customer relations by anticipating their every need. These leaders also manage and support internal team members.
CS Operations Manager: As a CS Operations Manager, you’ll be responsible for managing the workflow to improve the individual impact and growth of all team members. You’ll also establish an early warning system for risk mitigation.
Customer Success Manager: CS managers have the most involved role, working one-on-one with customers and guiding them through the pipeline. They also anticipate how the team can help customers reach their goals.

Regardless of what role you choose, there’s nothing more important than clear expectations. You’ll need to make it crystal clear what your position entails and what responsibilities you’ll be taking on. The last thing you need is surprises when your team is relying on you to make decisions.

Building Strategic Internal Partnerships

Typically, each team in a business will focus on their area of expertise. In a perfect world, they won’t need other teams to further their processes, but that’s not the reality.

CS teams that work closely with the marketing and sales team can:

Upgrade every stage of the customer lifecycle
Improve product adoption
Increase brand advocacy
Access marketing and sales data

They can do so by collaborating on joint campaigns and promotions and, more importantly, sharing insights and feedback during every stage of the customer journey. These teams should also combine all their data on a central hub to get a better understanding of the customer lifecycle.

Expert CS leaders will always maintain a connection between their team and other departments in the business. Here’s what it can look like.

Sales

Customer success and sales teams are closely connected. A CS-Sale handoff is one example where the teams collaborate – the sale is complete, and it’s time for the CS team to take over. Such a handoff will include interactions like:

CS manager introductions to the Sales team. This is the perfect opportunity for the CS manager to talk about everyone’s roles and responsibilities, and how they support customers after the sale is complete.
A complete sync between CS and Sales. Both teams should have the same opinion about the customer's needs and any specific agreements made during the sales process.
Keeping CS in the loop during the Sales part of the job. For example, the CS team should be informed whenever the customer raises a concern about the product.
Complete transparency between CS and sales about the customer’s feedback and interactions.

Marketing

Marketing teams can also contribute to the CS pipeline in many ways.

For example, the Marketing team is responsible for creating educational content to share on the company’s social media channels. They can work with the CS to ensure the messaging resonates with different customer segments. The CS team will provide the customer needs and pain points, which Marketing will use to tailor their content to address specific challenges.

Product Development

For a startup, a collaboration between CS and Product Development can look like syncing a few customer issues or feature requests. As your business scales, the teams will work more and more together, needing a solution that helps them collaborate seamlessly.

For example, you could pick:

A simple Slack channel to handle all CS-Product interactions
Product Marketing syncs arranged by the Product Marketer
Regular check-ins to ensure all members on the same page about customer requests

Successful Internal Partnership: Strategies and Best Practices

Whether it’s sales and marketing or support and CS, internal partnerships can help meet long-term business goals by breaking down silos and improving efficiency. Most companies already practice cross-functional collaboration in one way or another.

But that doesn’t mean they’ve all perfected their collaboration initiatives. In fact, the Harvard Business Review found that 75% of “cross-functional” teams are pretty dysfunctional. The question is, how do you make sure you’re not part of this majority?

Let’s look at a few successful strategies and best practices.

Joint Goal Setting

Cross-team collaboration creates a sense of shared responsibility between the teams. Here, each team member isn’t just responsible for their individual tasks – they’re also involved in the bigger picture.

Conversely, teams that work in isolation can only get things off their plate, not get a valuable outcome. In such teams, members tend to blame others if things go wrong.

Joint goal setting allows teammates to share a vision for the company's future. Plus, they can better understand how much value they contribute to the overall team.

For example, a CS team can set shared goals with Product Development, such as improving user satisfaction or product usage metrics. Meanwhile, CS-Sales shared goals may include increasing customer lifetime value (CLV) or reducing churn rates.

Eliminating Silos

More importantly, your cross-team collaboration strategy needs to reduce the friction your teams face every day. Did you know that the average team, including CS, wastes over 20 hours on poor collaborative efforts every month? In fact, siloed teams spend 15% of the day working on communication issues.

The solution? Take a more intentional and strategic approach to cross-team collaboration. That means:

Establishing clear communication channels
Keep teams in the loop with regular updates
Setting mutual goals
Defining clear roles and responsibilities

For example, a CS team may collaborate with a product development team to address user feedback about a product. When each team’s roles are defined, they can work to create the ideal product for their customers without any friction.

Creating One Customer Journey

Your first responsibility as a CS leader is creating an optimized customer journey for each customer segment. Every team knows these segments by heart, and dedicating one journey to each will keep everyone on the same page.

Here are some tips that can help you create one all-inclusive customer journey for each customer segment.

Outline the major journey stages for your company, such as the awareness stage, engagement stage, etc.
Spread the stages out into a user-friendly map
Decide each team’s role in each stage. For example, in the awareness stage, Marketing will create targeted advertising social campaigns while the CS team will monitor buyer inquiries in response to the campaigns.
Illustrate how all the teams will collaborate in each stage. For example, in the engagement stage, Sales and CS will host webinars to engage prospects with in-depth product demonstrations.
Assign metrics to each stage of the journey. For example, in the conversion stage, you may track the average order value, conversion rate, and customer satisfaction score.
Regularly update the map to share with the stakeholders.

Training for Sales

For effortless cross-team collaboration, your CS team members need to have certain sales skills. They’ll occasionally need to present upsells and cross-sells, which causes friction between the two teams. Without the right training, your team will be asking questions like:

Who’s responsible for upselling?
Should Sales handle these tasks since they already have the expertise?
Should CS handle it since they already know the customer?

To prevent blaming and finger-pointing, training your CS teams for sales is crucial.

Mission and Goal Setting for Customer Success Teams

A clear mission plays a major role in guiding customer success efforts – providing a shared purpose and direction for the team. It instills a sense of belonging and empowers team members to make decisions that align with overall customer success initiatives. Mission and goal setting as a customer success leader, scaling a customer success team is a multi-step process. Here’s what it can look like:

First, the CS leader will need to understand the overarching mission and values of the company. The CS team’s goals need to align with those missions.
Next, brainstorm with your team to define the purpose of CS. What value do you aim to deliver to our customers? How do you envision the ideal customer experience?
Once you have clarity on your general mission, it’s time to turn it into actionable goals. That means defining what KPIs you need to meet to fulfill that mission. You’ll also need to define when you need to complete that goal and how you’ll do it.
Setting goals is just the beginning; you’ll also need to track your progress and adapt as needed. You should have a robust tracking system in place to monitor key metrics and milestones. This will let you know how far you are from reaching your goals and what you need to improve to get there.

Best Practices for Mission and Goal Setting

As a CS leader, you’ll be responsible for setting the mission and goals for your team. It sounds easy enough, but mission and goal setting can actually be one of the trickiest aspects of leadership. Still, there are certain tips that can make it easier.
While your mission statement can be a bit more abstract, the goal needs to be specific and measurable. Here’s an example.
- Mission: Help our customers achieve their goals through better support and personalized solutions.
- Goal: Increase customer satisfaction ratings by 15% within the next year, reduce churn rate by 10% through proactive engagement strategies, and increase product adoption by 20% through targeted training programs.
Next, your CS missions and goals need to be achievable and relevant – aligned with your long-term business goals. For instance, if your company focuses on user growth, your CS goals should increase customer retention and adoption.
Your CS goals also have to be time-bound. Even if it’s a long-term goal, set a timeline – it'll allow you to track your progress and make necessary adjustments. Here’s an example.
- Mission: To deliver value by anticipating customer needs.
- Goal: Reduce customer churn rate by 15% within the next six months through proactive outreach, personalized support, and tailored solutions
Most importantly, communicate each mission and goal to your team and stakeholders. This will make sure everyone is on the same page, and the right people are aware of your progress in CS efforts.
Lastly, review your mission and goals regularly. As your long-term business goals evolve, so will your CS goals.

Summary

Effective leadership in customer success demands a certain level of adaptability and collaboration. You’ll need expertise in multiple areas – the communications skills of customer support, the technical knowledge of product development, and so on.

But more importantly, you’ll need the ability to foster partnerships and collaborations within the organizations. As a CS leader, you can drive a ton of progress just by creating a customer-centric culture in the organization.