Was hoping for some help. It's badly needed. : ) Former sales guy, who will try and practice some brevity. But an emphasis on the word "try".
Who am I?
Recruiter operating entirely within a couple of specific areas of cybersecurity. (IoT and Industrial IoT)
Wheelhouse is typically:
C-Suite and Senior-level customer-facing roles impacting revenue generation.
Most of our client's are in that super high growth phase (massive YoY growth, pre-ipo or other liquidity event) and trying to nail down that elusive "repeatable process" to continue scaling. Most are in the early stages of building their Customer Success function within the org.
DISCLAIMER - I'm at the start of my journey on learning about Customer Success. Despite hours spent on Podcasts, YouTube, and articles I'm having trouble finding some similar case studies as it relates to having an Enterprise infrastructure focus. So, I may have some "dumb questions" to which I'll ask your forgiveness now. Just blame it on the "clueless recruiter", not the company. : ) But I'm coming from a good place and want to help!!
Problem?
One client in-particular is very dear to us. We've been partnering with them since the Seed round. So definitely because of past success the Founder reached out for help in bringing on their first Head of CS to build this function for them.
They are the market leader within their space. Unbelievably, have never had a customer leave since starting their GTM in 2016. Sub $50m in revenue, but have had fantastic YoY growth. Amongst their competitors, they're the ONLY one who reached their 2020 revenue target.
QUESTIONS I'M RUNNING INTO
This is a fairly new market and really only a handful of competitors who are all similar in size and the vendors who have traditionally served this market have had completely different products (non-security) and are huge orgs with different buying cycles/models.
- When considering CS function when dealing with Enterprise, how would you weight someone's experience as it relates to:
- Experience working with the target customers?
- Experience with a similar product within security? Possibly another traditional cyber vendor?
- Experience with the specific sales cycle/buying model?
- How would you determine if a CS leader has been effective at working with Marketing, Sales, Product?
- Any Enterprise B2B companies (preferably less than 15ish years old) who you guys would say are good case studies of what a solid CS program looks like?
Notes to consider –
Will report to the CPO and Founder. (He will lean very heavily on this person for guidance)
Pure Enterprise. Large and complex deals.
Zero churn to date, so the role will be more focused on the product happiness side. (Terrible or incorrect wording?)
Must haves
- Needing someone who grew up with a technical background as this role will report directly to the Founder and CPO.
- Definitely someone naturally curious and Customer Obsessed by nature. (Vetted heavily)
- Experience building a CS team. Hopefully both with an On-Prem appliance and Cloud SaaS model. (Although SaaS will be heavily preferred)
- B2B Enterprise for sure. Primarily B2C is just too much of a reach.
Highly preferred
- Has experience within network security
- Has experience working within high growth early-stage companies