Customer Success Enablement & Training

Sana Farooq

Hello!

I'm looking to bulid out a CS Enablement role for our team and would love to chat with anyone who is either currently in the role, or has experience building it out within their own department so that I can understand the scope and requirements typically associated. Since this is a fairly new function in the CS space I want to avoid going down a potential sales enablement path since the needs are more focused on change management, cross-sell discovery, and uncovering painpoints with customers. Please reach out if you're willing to hop on a call to discuss!

Max Smith-Gee

Hey Sana, 

Great question and (just playing devils advocate) I'm curious about this new role you are launching, and why this has become a business need? Obviously, I don't know the whole picture, but I'm curious as to why your CSMs aren't already focusing on "...change management, cross-sell discovery, and uncovering painpoints with customers" - based on your message it seems like there would be a high amount of overlap between a CSM and the Enablement role. 

I've worked at past organizations where we leveraged CS Enablement roles, but they were really only focused on the initial onboarding phase of the new customer. They basically helped build the bridge/hand-off between the Sales and CS teams from when a prospect becomes a customer. The CS Enablement team's KPIs were speed of implemented, time-to-value, 'go live' date, etc. 

Happy to chat with you and at least be someone to bounce ideas off of. 

Max

Sana Farooq

Hi Max,

We provide ongoing training and development opportunities to CSM's overall- they are definitely focused on those areas, but we are always leveling up on skillsets as an org. This role would be a way to centralize all of the training programs, call coaching, and employee onboarding initiatives we have internally for our team members, ensure a high level of technical product proficiency with releases, etc. At the rate that we're growing, a dedicated role to oversee the end to end process has become necessary. 

Nicholas Ciambrello

Hey Sana

We actually recently and currently going through the same thing. We used to call these ppl QAs back when we were just a support team but have evolved their responsibilities as we grew it into CSMs and Onboarding roles. The way we approach it is as if they are internal coaches. We developed a list of skills the team needs to have and we put together a whole training curriculum with exercises, have tools to review live calls, and try to get them the tools and softwares they need to run consistent calls with clients.

Really the enablement team is an extension of myself to train the team on our customer interaction philosophies and then they strategize how we can ingrain that philosophy into their roles like its second nature for the reps.

So if I were starting all over the biggest thing that helped us get through things is having a clear philosophy to teach and building frameworks around that. You dont need a call script but if you have a general engagement strategy that you want build it out so that its repeatable once you have that repeatable system it makes it wayyyy easier to build an enablement team around because theyre just helping support and coach to that philosophy then everything else starts falling into place as you figure out the heiarchy of team needs to meet that philosophy   

Sana Farooq

Thank you Nicholas! The approach you took is completely aligned with our current and future state- we spent the last year+ building out the philosophy, framework, and curriculum to reach a repeatable process, so that's very validating to hear.

I'm curious about the background you typically look for when hiring for this role considering its a fairly new title in the Customer Success function. If you have any tips to share around that it would be a huge help!

Ido Barnoam

Hey @Sana Farooq

I've actually transitioned to an enablement role recently and happy to share what we were looking for and what does the role involves in Cloudinary.

Please Feel free to DM me and we could set up a call.

Sana Farooq

Sounds great, really appreciate that @Ido Barnoam! Will shoot you a note to set up some time.

William Buckingham

Hi Sana, 

Wonderful question.   I just transitioned to a CS Ops role with a focus on Enablement.  After having been a Strategic/Enterprise Account Manager at another firm in which I was also running much of our operations and enablement on the side.   More than happy to connect and learn a bit more about where specifically you and your team are in the process and what the needs look like for your org, and what insights I might be able to share.  We are building out our Enablement function and strategy for CS currently.  Shoot me a direct message if you are still looking to chat with peers.  More than happy to sync on this.

Sana Farooq

Hi William,

Thank you for reaching out! I would love to chat; I will send you a note to set up some time.

I had a great convo with @Ido Barnoam yesterday- I will post a recap of both conversations afterwards in case it can be helpful to anyone that visits the thread in the future.

Courtney Clements

Looking forward to the recap @Sana Farooq!

Sana Farooq

I had great conversations with @Ido Barnoam and @William Buckingham and sincerely thank both of them again for their time!

Per my earlier note wanted to provide a quick recap of our discussion in case it can be helpful to anyone in the future.

• The CS Enablement role is typically created internally based on an existing CSM determining departmental needs in building out knowledge sharing/procedures/ and ongoing training materials for the team to access.
• This role typically sees the technicalities of onboarding rather than the day to day - they work hand in hand with managers and team leads, but are behind the scenes of a growing team to ensure all of the accurate LMS and resources are in place to ensure a successful process
• CS Enablement/ Data Analysts/CS Operations are the ideal trifecta for a high growth team looking to scale and should work very closely together to ensure consistency across all new projects, and ensure change management internally, while also providing reporting and areas of opportunity upwards into management/team leads
• Potential pitfalls: define what other departments expect from enablement, and ensure the roles between CS Ops and CS Enablement are defined in the way they each start and stop
• This role typically works best plugging into an existing training framework rather than having an external hire build a new one from scratch. Ensure the foundation is set before bringing someone in. 
• Rise360 and Ecosystems.us are great project management and ROI tools that may help aid the team

Will/Ido- I'm sure I missed a few notes since I was thoroughly engaged in our convos, haha. Feel free to add to this in case I missed anything!

Ido Barnoam

It was a real pleasure speaking @Sana Farooq. Thanks for the opportunity to share!

One thing I would add pertaining to the first bullet is that another aspect of enablement is also creating, updating, and improving existing collateral i.e account review/EBR decks and any other collateral the team is using.

Let me know if there is anything I can further help with.