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In early 2000's to mid 2000's we saw a major shift in the Computer Software industry. Businesses were sick of providing all the infrastructure (hardware, networks etc) to run software that they were tied to via multi-year contracts with huge penalties if they left. The business world was changing rapidly and businesses needed to be more flexible and adaptable to their market conditions. Finally, software companies started listening and realising that they also needed to change the way they produced and sold their software to accommodate the fast paced changes. In the late 1999 and early 2000, we saw Salesforce start selling SFDC via a Software as a Service (SaaS) contract.

This pretty much started the wave of software companies all providing some form of Software as a Service to their customers. So now we have software being sold on a month by month basis with some being sold for a 1 or at most 2 year contract with options to cancel. Businesses now have choices!

This suddenly made software companies aware that they need to ensure their customers have success in their implementation of their product such that they do realise the business value they paid for. Stated more simply....that their products became "sticky". No longer could software companies simply sell something and then walk away with the software literally sitting on the customer's shelf untouched (which happened A LOT back in the 1990's)!

(drumroll)......Here is where we see the emergence of the Customer Success Manager.......

If you look in the job market today you will see a lot of adverts for Customer Success but look a little more closely and you will see a whole lot of different descriptions for the job role and requirements. If I were to summarise them, I would say 20% of the jobs are for Sales people simply relabelled as Customer Success Managers ('cos that's the new cool buzz phrase) and 80% of the jobs are for what I would classify as the truer role of a Customer Success Manager. So what is the role of a Customer Success Manager in this world of SaaS?

So just before I get into that, I want to break down the 80% of jobs that represent the truer role of Customer Success Managers further. I see companies taking 2 approaches when they set up Customer Success; 1) have the Customer Success Managers focus on Expansion and Renewals (more Sales oriented) or 2) have the Customer Success Managers being very technical and concentrating on the product rollout and adoption (more support oriented). Companies have their reasons as to why they choose a particular slant, however my opinion is, that a Customer Success Manager should be more sales oriented as they can never be a replacement for support or implementation, as they are a very special blend of skilled people (in a future post I will talk about these skills). I think this graphic below sums up quite nicely the difference between Customer Success and Customer Support focus .

Back on track, so what is the role of a Customer Success Manager in this world of SaaS? Actually, the graphic above tells the story at a high level of their role. However, when we talk about the role of Customer Success we typically talk about their role in 4 areas, that of, Land Adopt Expand and Renew.