In these times where NRR, churn, and delivering fast value to your customers is crucial, the Customer Success team has never been more important for the success of your business. Position Green is a SaaS company developing software for sustainability reporting, and they have over the last three years scaled their CS organization from 1 to 40 employees.
Sofie Folkesson, Head of Customer Success at Position Green, has shared her insight on how to grow your CS team effectively. According to Sofie, there are three main factors for successful scaling of CS: the right people, repeatable process, and technology.
CS Scaling Factor #1 – The Right People
A critical part of scaling your Customer Success organization is a great culture. A thriving culture is built by doing many things right, but you always need to hire people ready to embrace it. You should always be transparent during recruitment, so the individuals know what’s expected of them. Failing fast is also important, meaning that your employees should be learning by doing after onboarding. As a leader, it’s crucial to be vulnerable in order to create a helpful workplace.
At Position Green, they have shared ownership of the customer between CS and sales, making it unable for sales to “over-sell” the product. However, don’t confuse this with not having clear responsibilities. There should always be one person in charge of a specific task. Specializing early inside your CS team can be very helpful in creating expertise early. Also, never forget to celebrate when CS succeeds, by for example having a Slack channel where go-lives, reviews, etc., are posted.
CS Scaling Factor #2 – Repeatable Processes
Processes should not make people stop thinking, but rather make your organization more effective. Setting processes early is a great way to get into this habit. Documenting everything on your intranet enables your employees to always have these processes at hand. Early on, Position Green developed an internal and external help guide that makes everything easier for both the CS team and the customers. If you don’t have any clear processes currently, consider starting with the most important process of them all: the employee onboarding process.
CS Scaling Factor #3 – Technology
When scaling your customer success organization, there will come the point where technology becomes a necessity. Implementing a customer success tool is very helpful. Sofie mentions how she believes that the CS team should significantly influence the product roadmap to push customer needs onto the technology. To scale efficiently, you should categorize your customers based on different values to spot trends quickly and create efficient automation.
Key Takeaways
- Specialize your CS roles early.
- Let people wear too big shoes – they will grow into their roles.
- Lead by example when creating an open and transparent culture.
- Create repeatable processes, even if you think you don’t need them right now.
- Document everything and make it easy to find.
- Develop a clear employee onboarding.
- Implement a CS tool.
- Have your CS team influence your product roadmap.
- Create customer categories and base your automations on them.
