What is a Customer Success Manager?

A Customer Success Manager (mostly post-sales) works with Sales, Sales Engineering, Product Development to ensure that the now customer (formerly prospect) is using and deploying the company’s products in an effective and efficient manner. The motivation behind creating the Customer Success Manager is that it is less expensive to maintain an existing customer than to convert a new prospect to a new customer (acquire).

One element of the Customer Success Manager is to ensure that the Sales Engineer and Sales/Account Manager’s statements (not supposed to be promises but Customers always treat them as so) are realized. This is also validating that the Value Proposition that sealed the deal is realized. The Customer Success Manager does not have a magic wand and can’t fix major errors on the Customer’s part. But a successful Customer Success Manager will be in contact with the Customer and will meet regularly to ensure progress is being made.

The Customer Success Manager keeps tract of new product developments and major bugs with an eye towards impact on their Customers and the ability to help ease progress or mitigate impact. A successful Customer Success Manager cant replace Customer Service or Support in the case of reporting issues and challenges but can proactively work with the Customer to prepare, avoid or react to situations.

The Customer Success Manager is also a proactive Sales Engineer by continuing to understand the customer’s future needs and to show customer’s new versions and products. The Customer Success Manager is actually a Customer Retention Manager. By relieving the Pre-Sales Team from managing customer expectations and deployment issues (so they can focus on their core competency of sales) they are also a conduit to the Company’s Marketing and Product Development teams as to new Market requirements.