2021 Staffing - Opportunity to Grow!

John Faria

Good morning GGR community!

My company has a budding, multi-pronged CSM program that is looking to scale-up. I am fortunate to be faced with the good problem of creating the process and strategy for CSM growth!

Recently, the executive team is doubling down on CSM to ensure we improve retention and allow for expanded growth moving forward. Because of this, I am being faced with the opportunity to create a growth plan for the organization.  On account of that, I have many staffing question stemming from the ask for 2021 and would love to leverage this community and the collective professional experience.

Scenario: Create a budget ASK for growing the CSM team(s) for the organization. This should be primarily a headcount exercise. 

The current example organization is:

$300 million revenue across 4 primary business units. These units include, but are not limited to:
SaaS Business Services
SaaS Software Services
Hardware sales and value-added hardware reselling

Let's take 1 business unit as an example. I'll try and put round numbers into context:
$60 million revenue slice (of $300)
5 primary product/services offering groups
          - Not all offerings are in the GROWTH stage
4 groups are $10 million in size.  1 unit is $20 million

Current CSM Staffing
5.5 FTEs across 10 heads
Only 2 product groups are represented today out of 5. 
            - Not all product groups need to be represented in CSM program

2021 Strategy conversation
- What should be our growth plan for staffing considering the size of the organization above?
- What are KPIs/ other indicators for determining NEED across the sub-orgs?
- How should be plan staff across the 5 product groups above?
- What is a good indicator of a product group we want to RETAIN the quickest/sooner? Put another way, how do we determine what product group is in most need?
- Best-practices and learning from YOUR experience here.

I know once you read the above, you'll want to flood me with questions, but feel free to make assumptions, including:
- Customer Retention is objectively not good
- Process and controls are loose or do not exist
- You have unlimited spend; shoot for the sky with your ask.  
- Sales, Support, Services and CSM are independent functional groups.  
- Let's assume that justification in staffing is provided by each head achieving 4x in value (retention-based.)
- Whatever else you need to know!

I hope for some lively discourse.  

Thank you so much team!