Best Practices for Expanding Customer Success Teams in a Growing Company

alice_bell

Hello Everyone,

I’m currently working in the customer success space at a rapidly growing company, and I’m looking for some insights on scaling our Customer Success (CS) team effectively as we continue to expand. We’ve seen significant growth in both customer base and revenue, and now we’re at the point where our current CS team is stretched thin. I want to make sure that as we scale, we don’t lose sight of the high-touch service that has been a key part of our success so far.

Some specific questions I have:

1. Team Structure – How do you recommend structuring a customer success team when scaling? For example, should we separate teams based on customer size, industry, or complexity of the product?
2. Tools and Technology – What are the most effective tools for managing a growing customer success team? We currently use basic CRM systems but are considering implementing more specialized tools for customer success management. Any recommendations?
3. Hiring and Training – As we expand the team, what should we prioritize when hiring for new roles? What qualities or skills should we be looking for to maintain the quality of our customer relationships? Also, how do you approach training new hires to maintain our team culture and approach to customer success?
4. Customer Segmentation – How do you manage customer segmentation when scaling a CS team? Do you find that separating customers by tiers (small, mid-market, enterprise) makes sense, or should the focus remain on providing personalized service regardless of size?

I’d love to hear any advice or experiences you’ve had with scaling customer success in your organization. Thanks in advance for any input!

alicemendix

William Buckingham

Hi @alice_bell. Great questions, and I'm happy to share my thoughts below. I'll give you more "how to think of it" insights than "exactly what to do". Also, I changed the order of your list based on how I think through such questions.

1. Customer Segmentation - First determine your customer segmentation. Segmentation should be based on A. How the company wants to analyze the customer base, and most importantly, B. how the customer journey needs to be optimized differently to deliver lasting success. Every company is gonna want to slice customer data and performance around size, industry, product plan, etc. And combining those might be all you need to drive the proper customer journeys to drive lasting success. However, it also might not be all that is needed. You might find employee count, or certain integrations (say, OOTB vs Custom), Professional Services vs no Professional Services, or some other metric is what determines what customer journey is needed.
   1. Basically: Answer the question: What customers need what customer journey, and how do we capture that in our segmentation model?
2. Team Structure - Now that you have solidified your customer journey strategy, you can build your team structure around this. There are some key questions to ask yourself that will help you solidify this strategy.
   1. Does your segmentation strategy demand different skill level and candidate profiles?
   2. (If a. = yes) What Segments would be easiest and hardest to directly hire for from outside the company?
   3. Is there an opportunity to mitigate risk by hiring externally for lower value/lower complexity segments, and then develop those hires into promotion tracks for higher value/complexity?
   4. Ultimately, our team structure should enable CSMs to become lazer-focused on the customer journey(s) they are supporting. So if you have 12 different customer journeys, you shouldn't be asking CSMs to be masters of all 12 in their first year.
   5. Will we have enough growth to pitch, promise, and execute this type of career leveling? (be realistic with yourself - the answer might be "hope so, but don't know so). Will we actually invest in their development for this career leveling to become a reality?
3. Hiring & Training - Now that you know the structure of your team, based on segmentation, you need to build the hiring and training that will enable those strategies to flourish.
   1. What roles do we want to hire externally for vs develop internally for?
   2. For roles we need to develop internally for, how will we do that via consistent enablement with a high ROI on their current CS role, and the one we want to build an internal candidate list for?
   3. What capacity do we have for such development of team members?
   4. For externally sourced roles, what are the interpersonal(soft), administrative, technical, and strategic skills they must have?
   5. Map the skills of the externally sourced, most junior candidates and the most senior role in your CS org, what enablement would develop that former person INTO the latter over the course of 1-2 years?
4. Tools & Training - Primary question to ask is:
   1. "What customer journeys need to happen to reach our OKRs and KPIS?". Then look at all the activities your team is doing and either eliminate or automate anything that doesn't contribute to those OKRs/KPIs.
   2. What activities DO contribute to these KPIS/OKRs but should not require human interaction or human decision-making? Automate or simplify these for the CSMs as much as possible.
   3. Ensure that real time monitoring is available to CSMs, CS Leaders, and Execs on the metrics that matter - yes, this likely requires a CSP(Vitally, Gainsight, ChurnZero, etc), and potentially even a data visualization tool(Tableau, Looker, Hex, Etc,).
   4. When we automate or eliminate something, what do we want the team to re-invest the saved time into? This is what so many companies miss, don't just save time for the sake of saving time, save time on low-value activities so it can be intentionally funneled into high-value activities.
   5. Think of upstream, large impact tools. For example:
      1. If your hiring strategy is to hire low and develop heavily, you'll NEED tooling that enables efficient training and enablement - think iorad, loom, gong, and even preset education platforms like aspireship, successhacker, successcoach, etc.
      2. If you have lots of low value customers who will be part of large books of businesss (BoBs), you'll need 1:many emailing tools that can be managed by your CSMs and or are completely automated.

This is far from a complete list, but I hope it helps give some direction at what questions to ask yourself.

Will Buckingham