Top 10 CSM Skills Hiring Managers Look For

hey everyone today i have shawn ruan with me all the way from the uk and we're going to talk about what are the top hiring skills you should be considering when hiring a csm so if you're in the process of hiring or you're thinking about applying for a position of a customer success manager you should stay tuned and really listen to what sean has collectively learned throughout the years from his own experience as a customer success team manager and leader as well as talking to other customer success leaders stay tuned we'll be right back [Music] hey shawn thanks so much for joining me today this is such a hot topic hey thank you so much for inviting me yeah i'm really looking forward to talking about it i agree especially now it is a hot topic it is why is it such a hot topic i think everybody's trying to hire a csm or everybody's wanna be a csm right yeah i think it's probably a combination of probably two things i'm certainly no expert in kind of recruitment or anything like that in that sense but i think it's this kind of great resignation that's come after the pandemic and a lot of movement in the employee market where people are looking for new roles that may be more meaningful more flexible for them you've got a lot of movement of talent now and i think that's being compounded by the fact that companies are now looking to continue to invest in a cs function and this idea of recurring revenue and i think that when you bring those two together you have a lot of people looking to even transition from a non-cs career into cs now is a great time to be looking at it so perhaps they're the two kind of big reasons that that i've seen in your career as leading customer success teams you have found about 10 top skills that you always look for and then you and i had a prep call and we added an 11th one let's dive in i think everybody's curious what are those 11 elusive traits that i should really pay attention to and by the way i just want to qualify this not every csm has to have all 10 or 11. it's desirable but i think the main thing to listen to is that holistically is my team gravitating towards those skills would that be a fair statement yeah absolutely yeah i totally agree with that all right top on your list when you look at all your 11 skill sets that you placed in your infographic and by the way guys you can go to our website and download it from there csmpractice.com what is the number one skill set that you're looking for when you're hiring a csn the number one thing that i look for is communication um communication is definitely an art rather than a science there's certainly no right way of doing it but the ability to communicate very clearly the ability to understand how to simply explain something that might be a little bit more complex understand the audience that you're you're talking to there are so many different factors that go into how we communicate why we communicate and the way we communicate and as a csm you are constantly changing stakeholders externally and internally on a variety of different topics it could be advocacy it could be jumping on pre-contract calls something like a sales person and could be a bug so there are so many different scenarios at which we need to pitch and articulate different things so communication was the number one thing that i would look for everybody puts on their resume great communication skills like communication is such a wide topic or such a wider skill what how do you test for communication as it pertains to the communication style or skill set that customer success managers need do you have a test for that to just make sure do you really have great communication skills yes or no i think firstly you're absolutely right i think some people can confuse or oversimplify talking and literally just communicating with someone as meaningful communication they're really not the same kind of thing talking is not just communication so i think in terms of testing for it there's not really a replacement for just having a good conversation with someone about a variety of different topics during an interview that was a really good litmus test that's a good foundation just by talking about their home life their hobbies even let's just not talk about cs for the moment just spending 10 minutes talking to someone will give you a really good baseline in in how they communicate their clarity how they articulate their answers but role playing was a meaningful way of being able to do this so i would kind of step in and out of maybe different scenarios so talk to me about your current business as though i was a prospect or i've got an issue with my software or my subscription and how would you tease out the the problem from me so role playing was a really good way of getting this person to very quickly beat different types of people if you will and seeing how they communicate in the moment so role playing was was very helpful definitely i think role play is a great way to test almost anything in an interview i encourage everybody to do that but that really leads us to skill number two on your list which is authenticity explain to me like a little bit what are you looking for there how do you test for that in an interview if you liked what you've heard so far that's awesome more coming in a second here but in the meantime i want you to click that like button so that youtube knows that this is great content and you can start sharing it with others authenticity again i guess if we talk about things that tend to be confused with one another i think authenticity is more than just being honest sometimes they can be used interchangeably and it is important to be honest of course ever looking for a csm to be any way kind of deceitful or anything like that honesty is the key to a long-term relationship professional personally it's all built on honesty but authenticity is being real and being your true authentic self now there is an element of course being more professional than maybe you would be with your friends or family of course but ultimately a cs professional is there to foster and grow a meaningful long-term relationship and there are going to be times where your professional mask will naturally slip it might be during code one bug that the system's gone down it might be that someone's caught you on an off day there could be so many different scenarios where you can't prepare and suddenly the true shawn might come out instead of the professional sean and i don't mean that in an argumentative way it could be humor it could be something that you wouldn't typically put within the professional bucket and i think the closer you can exist to your true self in in all those scenarios the more meaningful and deep the relationship will probably end up being we're all quite attuned to understanding whether or not someone is being their true self or their kind of being that professional self nothing wrong with it but i want to build a relationship with james instead of the professional james slightly i want to know that i'm really talking to the real james so being authentic your version of authenticity don't be anyone else than yourself but being you is gonna underpin a long-term relationship yeah i think i just got a little bit inspired by this i actually think this video is not just for hiring managers and css who want to be a csm i think everybody should listen to this how do you become a great csm and these are the skills that get you there and just a great human being i think that in general all right skill number three what is it yeah skill number three is emotional intelligence so i think the reason why eq or emotional intelligence is really important is again coming back to that last point of ultimately regardless of the industry you're working in regards of the the software regardless of the type of customer you're working with and it's not sector specific you are really just a human being building a relationship with another human being or team of human beings we are emotional irrational creatures on this planet we do not work on algorithms and binary ones and zeros like computers and people are going to have off days they're going to be slightly more confused in different situations and having the ability to interpret someone's emotions understand your own emotions and being able to regulate depending on what the scenario calls for is really important to fostering that kind of honest true relationship if you're not really self-aware of how you're exhibiting your emotions or what you're exhibiting with the wrong person at the wrong time with their wrong emotions you can really start to create this weird void between the two of you so understanding your and their emotions regulating appropriately is going to be really helpful in so many different unknown scenarios that we will face as cs professionals and that is something that can be taught everything is of teachable of course and you can a growth mindset it can sometimes be a harder one to teach so that's why i put this on like what hiring managers look for innate emotional intelligence is going to make the onboarding experience certainly a lot easier if you're innately more in tune with your emotions and how other people are feeling around you and also let's not ignore the fact that as cs professionals we will live within teams and businesses so forget customers even internally having that emotional intelligence is going to really help create a smoother working cohesive team as well absolutely i think that's so important so three really important soft skills there's a few more on your list by the way like relationship building and let's see curiosity and problem solving i think all of them are really great soft skills one of the skills that caught my attention which we talk about a lot in customer success is productivity can you kind of like share what sets apart i mean everybody's proactive to some degree as a csm or at least we aspire to if you think about the best csm you ever had on your team how did they approach productivity versus everybody else before we continue don't forget subscribe to our youtube channel and smash that notification button so that you don't miss out on any new videos i think that best csm that i've ever had on my team they kind of looked beyond what the job role would describe them to do so you're here to help make this personal this company a success with your software within that context let's say i'm oversimplifying it but it's quite easy to understand that dynamic and that's why you're here for a salary let's say it's looking at the wider picture it's looking beyond that to say this person is putting their professional reputation on the line by bringing in this piece of software i owe it to that person to be able to make this a success they're operating in maybe a bit of an isolation maybe they're an internal champion that is having to fight the good fight against maybe a more traditional thinking cfo or investor board perhaps so what this csm would sometimes do is firstly they'd turn on google notifications for their top businesses if an article was flagged by google to say hey this week we've found xyz articles mentioning this customer reach out to them and say i noticed this has happened this week how do you think that may affect us how can i best serve in this instance they were also a networking expert i was talking to this person i thought it would be great to introduce you to this person because of these reasons would you like me to set this meeting up for you this kind of level of proactivity was something that really separates the best csms from great csm's even i mean not doing that doesn't make you a bad csm but the exceptional ones that stand out and create long lasting career changing relationships is looking outside that and empathizing with what these people may want to need and pulling it in into that kind of working relationship i mean such great examples i think most people would think productivity oh i have a customer journey life cycle and i do proactive activities with my customers but this does go well beyond the scope of what the job is called for another really interesting skill set that you put on your infographic is data analysis can you tell me like when you look at again maybe from your past experience is this skill mostly important for small startups you think when you have less people and you kind of have to do data driven type of analysis or is it important for any company and if so how should customer success managers use data analysis to get better at their job being data driven to inform your decisions with your customers i think is always going to be important regardless of the size i think the size of company will have an impact on the how how you glean that data the amount of data you have access to how that's served up when i've been cs director in a large corporate business very different from a scale-up they would have a cs ops teams that would help this kind of gathering of data serving up in terms of insight and then using that insight to inform you but fundamentally it's all coming from the same place and the reason why i think being data driven is important is i guess two reasons number one again coming back to my first point we are irrational emotional people and sometimes we might lean too far to the think and feel i think this might be i feel that we might be going down this road being able to use data to back up your decisions and share that data with your customer is going to be really important because your customer is going to have very hard data-driven people within their teams you know a traditional cfo is going to be very kind of data driven rather than kind of think and feel you know the numbers don't lie so being able to provide the data to your customer for their internal relationships is really important but being able to rationally come up with plan of action rather than just your emotions and just your intuition is going to be really important i'm a big believer that being able to to use that data leverage that data to inform your decisions always going to be fundamentally important yeah i agree i actually think that the best executives i've worked with always leverage data to make sure that their point is coming across not as an opinion and it's much more convincing when you can say hey we deduce this because we did research because this is what the data is showing us and when you come to a meeting with the data to back you up the listening uh that you're going to get the commanding attention that you're going to get from the room is going to be elevated whether it's an internal conversation or a customer facing conversation so i want everybody that's watching this video to actually think do i know how to weave in data to get a point across and we actually have another video about this about how to create a presentation for your board that's very data driven check out that video even if you're not going to ever present to the board because i think it has a lot of points on how to present something that in a data driven way last skill we're going to talk about is organization i know some people are definitely not very organized in their homes in their lives what do you say you know if i'm messy should i not apply right what did you really mean by it i think that being organized is important in terms of your things that you need to be working on your prioritization is really really important the reason for this is every day your priorities will shift because there will be so many unknown factors that will influence this and you kind of think of things like a matrix your customers and and the size and wants and needs of your customers combined with the list of things that you need to do some of them might be more time sensitive and you know you figure out your way of saying right this is the most time sensitive for this customer i'm going to go for that first the next day it'll be very different if you're not an organized person with your tasks updating your main contacts your internal champions whatever it might be updating the fact that this person has done a case study two months ago rather than embarrassingly reaching out to them again and saying oh i forgot you know you don't want to be that unprepared person not only because it looks slightly unprofessional what it kind of does is potentially eats away a degree of your authenticity where you're trying to meaningfully build a relationship but if you're not remembering something to work on something and prioritize something in the right way and kind of slipping up often then it might start to slip a little bit and you want to feel that you're in a safe pair of hands as a customer and someone that's not organized and kind of chasing just the the latest email that's coming through that might work for a short period of time but i've seen it before where over time that will start to degrade and you know you will start to lose that connection that bond and that trust with your customers i love that one great tips on how you know the kind of skills that customer success managers should hone in as if they want to progress throughout their careers and i would say when you master these skills you usually become someone that is ready to manage a team even a very large team i think the same skills apply for being a good csm and managing multiple customers to being a great cs leader i think you're absolutely right the exact same skill set that you need to manage a portfolio of customers that are all emotional they're all got their own plans their own drivers and fears and things like that it's really important because this exact same framework you've got a team of 30 cs professionals who've got their own careers their goals their personal lives different emotional makeups and different communication styles you're absolutely right they overlay perfectly as a customer success leader that you have been in the past when you were looking for that one csm you were going to promote out of all these skills or maybe a bunch of skill set what were you looking for exactly i think ultimately it's not a specific skill set i would say i think it would be the way that that person uses and changes this this kind of concoction of skills in an efficient way so i think that's probably a better way for me to be able to articulate it because different scenarios and different customers will call for any one of these skills to be magnified at different times so it wasn't necessarily that the best communicator was the best person to be promoted it was the person that was agile enough to be able to pivot and change the mixture of these at different scenarios and their ability to see that and implement it made them an excellent csm you could promote to a senior csm a team lead that was the macro skill of these micro skills if you will that i've probably looked for yeah hone in on each skill but also learn how to pull the right skill set for the right situation and you will be promoted guys thank you so much for listening today if you like this video if it helped you out in your customer success career or in general give it a thumbs up give it a like share it with others and most of all subscribe to our youtube channel because it helps the channel a lot and you won't be missing any of our new videos you will actually get alerted fairly quickly sean ron thank you so much for joining me today this was inspirational informational and so thoughtful my pleasure thank you so much for inviting me i've really enjoyed talking about this thank you all right everyone i'll see you at the next video [Music] you

Channel: CSM Practice

Views: 21,198

Keywords: Customer Success Manager Traits, Manager traits, Top 10 CSM Skills Hiring Managers Look For, Top skills employers look for, candidate character, csm, csm practice, csm skills, customer success, customer success management, customer success manager, customer success manager role, customer success strategy, irit eizips, jobs, required skills, skill, skills, skillset, what does a customer success manager do, manager traits, CSM Skills Hiring Managers look for

Id: -ZMwCxPKrrk

Length: 20min 40sec (1240 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 22 2022