Totango just completed a survey with Customer Success executives that sheds an interesting light on how customer success is organized, staffed, and compensated. Some highlights:

• A third of the customer success organizations in the survey report directly to the CEO. This makes for great visibility for the organization!
• Less than a quarter of companies surveyed have had a customer success function for more than 3 years: customer success, as we know, is a new role. Not surprisingly, 75% of CSMs come from other fields, especially support and sales
• 75% of CSMs and their managers have a variable compensation, usually in the form of a bonus (rather than a commission)

You can check out the entire survey here. The usual caveats apply as the survey was conducted with volunteers, and with a relatively small sample.