How to hire a great Head of Customer Success
I have spent my 20-year business career in client-facing roles and 15 years in early-stage and growth-stage software startups. I have learned a few things along the way. One truth I've picked up is that a strong customer success function is critical to building a high-growth, sustainable software business. A great CS function will compensate for product deficits, impact retention, and build your brand through customer delight. I've found that founders/CEOs often undervalue the importance of the CS function, minimizing it as a COGS burden, and end up underinvesting their time and resources in customer success. What a mistake.
A strong customer success function begins with a great leader. Smart founders and SaaS executives should be well-versed in these five key competencies when hiring a customer success leader. These competencies, when properly understood and evaluated, can significantly enhance the effectiveness of your customer success team. A well-considered job description should include these competencies as desired skills or experience.
Startup founders should use first principles thinking to identify the critical competencies needed to build their customer success team. I have had some success using the "Who Method." While there are some aspects of this hiring framework that I disagree with, I highly value their recommended exercise of documenting the outcomes you are seeking and working backward to deduce the competencies required to achieve those outcomes.
In no particular order, here are the top 5 competencies needed in a Head of Customer Success for an early or growth stage software company:
(1) Customer Empathy
Customer Success is about understanding your client's needs/wants and helping fulfill them. Honed with experience, this is the soft skill of deducing how to serve your customers best so that they accomplish their goals and renew. The best customer success pros I have worked with inherently want to be helpful (Why? We can save that psychoanalysis for another article) and combine that with problem-solving business chops.
Some of my savvier clients have screened for empathy using scenario questions, such as "How do you navigate a demanding customer who deems everything top priority?" Look for signs that your candidate can direct the customer to more productive lines of communication, and read between the lines to deduce what is truly their priority.
(2) Listening and Communication
Strong communication skills are critical for any customer-facing role, and customer success is no exception. Outstanding communicators can express complex ideas with simple language. Perhaps more importantly, they possess excellent listening skills. This is an easy trait to evaluate during the interview process. Does your candidate practice active listening during the interview? Do they signal that they have retained what you said and include your ideas when it is their turn to speak?
(3) Team Building & Management
If you are building a team from scratch, this is likely the most indispensable capability. Is there evidence from their work history that your candidate can hire and develop a top-flight customer success team? Do their leadership values and style align with your organization's? Unlike some of the other capabilities on this list, this one almost certainly requires prior experience. Effective hiring and management are learned by doing, and projecting the capability of a first-time manager from outside your organization is just too risky to undertake.
(4) Systems & Process
You want this hire to build an effective system for managing and growing clients. They will establish a culture and a way of working that will persist. This includes how your company runs client onboarding, establishing success criteria, check-in points, QBRs, renewal playbooks, crisis management playbooks, and more. Having the candidate talk shop with a subject matter expert about their most critical or favored systems - and their impact - is generally sufficient to evaluate a candidate.
(5) Analytical Skills, Data-driven Decision Making
Most CS roles require the ability to draw insights from customer data. This means CS practitioners and leaders must have baseline math and data analysis skills. For CS leaders, the baseline skill requirement increases as the role requires analyzing company and customer data to assess the impact of CS programs, processes, and decisions.
Similar to listening skills, you can learn a lot about a candidate's analytical thinking from how they conduct themselves in the interview process. For example, strong analytical thinkers will quantify impact when discussing their career accomplishments. When speaking about decisions they've made, they will reference data points and evidence that pushed them in one direction or another. Listening for these queues is a good starting point for assessing analytical competency.
Conclusion
Investing in a strong customer success leader is a high-impact investment in your business. By prioritizing competencies such as customer empathy, communication & listening, team-building, systems development, and analytical skills, founders and their executives can ensure they have the right person driving their customer success function forward.
Make the requisite time investment to think through the outcomes you seek from the role, the competencies needed to achieve those outcomes, and how to evaluate them in your interview process. You will not regret it.
