5 Reasons Why CSMs Are Not Thinking Strategically

Continuing our 5 Reasons series, this month we talk about why CSMs are not thinking strategically–or at least not strategically enough. This is a common complaint from their managers, who seem to be able to effortlessly assess a customer portfolio, identify opportunities, pursue said opportunities, and avoid time sinks. In contrast, some CSMs seem to get bogged down in low-value activities, struggle to prioritize between accounts, and fail to capitalize on rewarding opportunities.

Let’s take a look at 5 reasons for the lack of strategic thinking behind these struggles and practical approaches to address each of them.

1. The sales team expects them to do their admin work

CSMs who are drowning in routine admin work simply don’t have time to put on their strategic caps. It can be an isolated issue (a handful of sales reps offloading work they don’t want to do) or a systematic issue (the entire sales team relying on the customer success team for admin support).

If it’s an isolated issue, reinforcing boundaries with the offending sales reps–and strengthening the backbone of the CSMs on the receiving end–may suffice. If it’s systematic, it’s time to (re)define the roles and get agreement at the leadership level. Also, see what can be automated. Routine tasks are a waste of everyone’s time.

Lesson: Define roles clearly.

2. They work with tactically-oriented contacts

In a previous discussion, we talked about the fact that CSMs don’t reach high enough into their accounts. This is both a cause and a consequence of not thinking strategically: it’s hard to maintain a strategic outlook if the individuals you work with on a daily basis are just not interested. Reinforce the need to cultivate and maintain relationships with leaders. Leaders will expect more strategic thinking from the CSMs and provide constant reminders to think strategically.

Lesson: Require CSMs to regularly meet with their clients’ leadership.

3. They cannot translate strategy into action

This is a more subtle issue, but with devastating consequences: CSMs may actually be thinking at the proper, strategic level but be unable to execute on the strategy. For instance, they may perfectly understand that clients in a particular vertical are most likely to upgrade to a particular feature, but be unable to actually persuade their own customers in that vertical to do so.

This is a great opportunity for managers to model action steps and mentor CSMs to follow them. Don’t just define strategic opportunities: spell out the steps required to get to the outcome. Sure, some CSMs will naturally intuit what’s needed but don’t expect all of them to naturally know what to do. (You will also save everyone a lot of time by modeling the steps once instead of each CSM having to do the work individually.)

Lesson: Model the action steps and provide mentoring when needed.

4. They confuse movement and results

Most CSMs are very busy, and they equate busy-ness with results, which is certainly not true. And some customer success tools and customer success managers are very focused on actions, fostering a focus on doing rather than thinking.

Make sure that your metrics are focused on outcomes. Most success organizations do well with ARR targets. And make sure that  performance management doesn’t focus exclusively on actions. For instance, managers can ask CSMs to prioritize their customers, and to create a detailed strategic plan for the most important ones.

Lesson: Reinforce strategic thinking through performance management.

5. They focus on one customer at a time

Many CSMs are very client-centric, and that’s a good thing: we want them to be very attentive to customer needs. But they can easily focus on one customer’s very particular requirements and lose track of the larger picture: what’s good for the organization as a whole.

I’m a big fan of Customer Success Ops organizations, which can identify trends across the board, define processes to interface with other organizations, define action steps as mentioned in point #3, above, etc. Instead of each CSM fighting their own, necessarily small-scale, battles, establish a structure to establish priorities and act on them at the organizational level.

Lesson: Establish an Ops function to elevate and manage cross-customer strategic needs.

Are you successful at getting CSMs to be more strategic? Please share what’s working, or not. And think of us to train your CSMs.