There are many skills that a great Customer Success Manager possesses, but I want to highlight two hard skills to make you a competitive candidate. I want to preface that these skills are not required as a CSM. But are they going to make you stand out on an application? Absolutely.
Technical Skills as a Customer Success Manager
As a CSM, you should be able to navigate the product and the tech stack of your company or any company that you will join. That is a basic requirement for the role. However, if you’re able to layer that on with knowledge in writing scripts, coding language, APIs or other web technology tools, then you will be an asset to your organization. The companies that you work with want innovative solutions. CSMs will get requests from clients to build tools and custom scripts to achieve their goals. While building the tool may not fall under your jurisdiction, understanding and relaying complex to other teams or even back to the client will be an immensely valuable skill. You can continue to build on this skillset to upskill yourself, become a subject matter expert, or help other team members. Having this level of expertise can open up new opportunities to combine your knowledge to help others.
Now don’t fret if you don’t have the above skillset. There will always be supporting team members assigned to the account dedicated to helping the customer such as a Technical Account Manager or Solutions Engineer.
Analytical Skills as a Customer Success Manager
SaaS companies heavily rely on data to make informed decisions and so do the customers they serve. Sharing metrics on adoption, usage, and ROI is just some of the data you will share with the customer. You will receive requests from clients to recommend processes for optimizing their account. Being able to analyze a data set and leverage that information to tell a story or make suggestions to help increase the customer’s bottom line is going to help you easily manage the client relationship.
Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash
Comments