Scaling a Customer Success Organisation

2 min read

As any Customer Success leader knows, recruiting strong CS team members is incredibly challenging. Firstly, CS is fast growing but still a young profession so the pool of experience is small, secondly there are many different forms of Customer Success Management from high touch to pure tech touch and thirdly succeeding at Customer Success requires a broad set of skills. Put simply, it’s hard to succeed at Success.

In this edition of Planhat’s Customer Success Podcast, Anika Zubair talks to Adrian Beck, Senior Director of Customer Success at Tanium about his experiences growing the Customer Success organisation from 15 people to 70 people in 7 countries over 3 years!

Tanium is a fast growing endpoint communications platform. Adrian was the company’s first CSM and joined as they began to invest in Customer Success to support their growth and manage complex delivery models. Today he leads Tanium’s Customer Success efforts outside of North America.

Adrian built out a detailed high-touch Customer Success methodology, building repeatable processes, templates and documents for efficiency and creating internal feedback loops to ensure Tanium’s executive team saw the progress. Once establishing a basic formula, he introduced more advanced concepts such as Customer Healthscores to help identify clients at risk and his team were soon seen as internal thought leaders.

In the discussion, Adrian provides some great insight on hiring and developing Customer Success talent, how to have a great resume for Customer Success and his thoughts on the future of Customer Success!

  • They hired all team members remotely, so preparation and transparency of the roles requirements was key.

  • In 2019 they hired 50 CSMs in 1 year. To operate at that scale required close process control.

  • Customer Success role applications need to be precise and punchy. Make your resume stand out!

*Apologies for the audio around the 17 min mark

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