5 Tips for Leading an All-Star Customer Success Team

Building and leading a customer success team is no easy feat. From gaining the buy-in of other departments to training team members and earning customers’ trust, the role of a customer success leader can be as challenging as it is rewarding.Recently, Totango had the opportunity to speak with two rock star CS leaders to hear their stories and learn some of their tips and best practices. Belinda Brooks, Customer Success Director at On24, talked about her experience leading a well-established CS team, while Maya Zippel, Enterprise Customer Success Manager at WalkMe, spoke from her perspective of leading a CS team that is just getting off the ground. Here are some key takeaways from this great discussion and be sure to watch the full webinar below.

5 Key Takeaways

• Buy-in is critical: In order to be successful, you need to get buy-in from leadership, other departments and customers. Spend time talking with these groups to understand their needs and expectations as well as to establish the importance of CS to their overall success.
• Break down silos: Effective collaboration and communication between CS and other departments throughout the organization is key. Establish clear rules of engagement as well as processes to facilitate this communication.
• Clearly define objectives, onboarding and enablement programs for CSMs: Give CSMs all the tools and guidelines they need to effectively manage their portfolios and become a trusted advisor for customers, helping them understand the impact they will have on their business.
• Collect and activate data: Don’t gather data just for the sake of having data. Put data into context and use it to help improve the success of customers or other departments.
• Instill a culture of proactive management: Ensure CSMs have the knowledge, data and communication tools they need to proactively manage clients, providing new ideas as well as ways to implement those ideas to improve customer success.

[embed]http://youtu.be/clqRjwEJ-2w[/embed]Need help leading your CS team? Totango makes customer success team management a breeze with a wide variety of ready-built tools and solutions, like customer success dashboards, templates, playbooks and campaigns. Get started for free today!