How Technical Should CSM Be?

Startups are asking for their CSMs to be very technical, and it's burning $$$ and employees out.

Would you rather have your CSMs be able to code, or have the ability to have C-level conversations? The 2 often do not co-exist.

Having a CSM that is technically adept may be impressive, but it's important to remember that customer success is about relationship building first and foremost. Therefore, having the ability to have meaningful conversations with C-level executives should take precedence over coding skills.

Create a strong foundation of trust and credibility with your customer by engaging in strategic conversations around their unique needs.

Find out what their key objectives are and how your company can help them achieve those goals. A CSM should be able to understand the customer's business, help them navigate through any potential challenges, and develop strategic recommendations that move the needle.

With that being said, there are a lot more technical products out there. DevOps, cloud infrastructure, API only, etc. Your CSMs will need to be able to understand the VALUE that these products are providing to the customer. Not just getting them up and running, but helping them understand how they can use it more effectively to benefit their business.

Having an engineering background may also allow for better customer interactions, but I have found that it is a scale, and the more someone leans towards heavy development skills, the LESS they will be able to connect with the customer at a business level.

The very technical CSM is often IMPOSSIBLE to find. And if you find 1 unicorn, you will spend months looking for another 1. While this is happening, your existing team is drowning to keep up with a huge book of business.

The ideal CSM should be able to provide strategic advice and guidance on how customers can best leverage your product for maximum value. They should also have an understanding of different technologies so that they can help those customers who are more technically savvy and need assistance with more complex projects.

At the enterprise level, I prefer a strategic CSM paired with either a Solution Architect or sometimes a Customer Success Engineer that has a development background and can make the tweaks and configuration needs that a customer has to enable the strategic decisions that the CSM is helping with.

I am recording a podcast with Lizzy Rosen about this - drop any questions that you have below.

What are your thoughts on this besides that my eyes are closed?

Transcript:

(00:00) so this Topic's been coming up a ton I bump into it a lot I work with technical customers and they always think their csms need to be super technical how technical that's a great question I work with people that make some developers tools very API driven things um but I see this even when it's not as Technical and the younger uh less mature in a customer's life cycle that they are or my customers or a company's life cycle earlier on a customer is in their evolution they're going to think that

(00:36) their CSM is going to be super technical like they need to be able to write python so what I normally tell people is this it's a scale if I had some fancy Graphics you'd see a scale in the background going like this but here you go here's your scale I'm half Italian it works so anyways you have technical capabilities and if one Rises super high like yes I can write code I can tell you all about stuff like that this is the ability to work with with with customers get them to renew have strategic conversations

(01:13) and hire technical the less they're going to be wanting to that you can find them you'll find one maybe they're going to cost you about two hundred thousand dollars maybe more I swear now combine that if you're working with some real high contract people you know 200 300 400 ACV or something like that what's that going to look like do you want somebody who's basically a developer interacting with a c-level person are they going to want to go out and take them out to dinner and do all

(01:43) that fun stuff yes that still works by the way um that's it's probably not gonna work so what's more important to you be able to have strategic conversations on an Enterprise level or to be able to talk about the intricacies and what the technology is doing behind when I think about it and what I've seen is being successful the csms always need to know the value that you can provide they need to be able to hear business problems and know how your software can provide value back and resolve some of those business

(02:14) problems get these key outcomes that you're looking for I will admit when it's a developer type product or something like that developer only no uis or interfaces or something like that yeah you probably do need somebody more technical a better model is to have a very good and strategic CSM and then pair them up with somebody that can talk these Tech talks with them you can have your solution Architects you can also have what's coming around is known as the customer success engineer those can be somewhat junior

(02:45) level people you can grab somebody a couple years out of school that I always say the worst developer on the on the software team might be an amazing person for this um for you there because they just couldn't cut it to be able to like crank out that much code but they get the software and things like that but I will fight pretty hard about this I'm seeing a lot more of this especially from the technical co-founders where they just really think people need to know very very deep architectural level things and

(03:16) and Concepts and I just don't see it out there I think it's a trade-off and you're gonna have a hard time finding those people hang them keeping them involved getting them to do the the value work and the CSM work it's not impossible but you're gonna have a hard time finding these people Am I Wrong I'd love to hear how you're dealing with this I'm seeing a lot more of it I think people are buckling down um and there's a lot more technical products out there these days you know

(03:45) AI is blowing up you want people to be able to talk about that it's a lot of AI products and llm models and things like that but at the end of the day as I said previously the customer doesn't care if your product is written back in the old days in Java or python or whatever or whatever Microsoft was having those days.

(04:07) net right so they don't care does it yes there will be some people that care but that's probably like your CTO or something like that but are you able to provide the outcomes with your software and then put the people who can have those conversations with the sea levels to be able to have those conversations as well hey before I forget I'm recording a podcast with Lizzy on this subject uh Lizzy Rosen good friend of mine we were commenting about this so we're going to record this podcast let me know any questions that you have drop them down below and happy

(04:37) to get them on the podcast thank you