Uniting CSMs and Account Managers: A Strategy for Enhanced Conversions
Explore the synergistic potential between Customer Success Managers (CSMs) and Account Managers (AMs) in this insightful session. With CSMs' deep understanding of client needs and AMs' commercial expertise, bridging the communication gap is key to maximizing client value and boosting conversion rates. Join this session to discover actionable strategies that ensure seamless information flow and collaborative success.
Hello everyone. Welcome again to track 3. Must have skills for high-performing
CSMs.
I am your track leader, Rishibha, a CSM at Kain site. Now before we start our
session
somehow and it will be available to you on Pulse library along with the
presentation.
So you no need to click pictures. You can just focus on the session and yeah,
which is uniting CSMs and account managers a strategy for enhanced conversions.
The
session is going to cover the idea of synergy between the CSMs and the account
managers to
maximize conversions and ensure the best customer experience. Now with that, I
would like to
invite the amazing speakers for this session. Sana and Jennifer from personio.
[Applause] Them, Sana has actually got a Kinney's World Record for biggest YMCA
with the village
people. That's great. And for Jennifer, she has lived on sailboat for half a
year, which
is like a long time. Well done. Okay, over to you ladies.
Alright. Thank you very much everyone. Yes, I said I am Sana Faran out working
at personio
now for four and a half years. I come from this beautiful end of bicycles and
windmills,
but I am actually based in Wuhl. I also have been working for personio for five
years.
I am usually based in Munich, Germany. And personio, even in case you don't
know, where
a holistic and intelligent HR platform serving more than 14,000 customers at
the moment.
And the reason why we are here on stage today is because we actually were part
of the project
team that introduced the lead generation process at our company in the past
year. So
we are guiding you through our topic today. I will kick off with a couple of
questions
just to get to know you and see who we are going to have any audience today.
Then we
are going over and tell you a little bit more about why we actually decided to
introduce
the process at personio. Sana will guide you through the process itself. And
later on,
we are going to show the findings, but we will also make sure at the end at
this point also
a friendly reminder you can go to the app, select track 3 and ask any questions
you might
have there. Thank you very much, Jenny. So actually we want to get to know the
audience
a little bit to start with. So maybe you can... I heard France and Germany.
Anyone from the
Netherlands? Okay, perfect, nice, nice, very good.
So good distribution, that's good. Now let's dive more into the professional
side. Who
here is a customer success manager? Okay, it's good. Who here is an account
manager?
Okay, okay. I can see a little bit more CSM, that's good, that's good. I would
remember
it very far. And do you already have a process in place like raise your hands
if you already
have a process of collaboration in place between customer success managers and
account managers?
Okay, wow, nice. And why are you here? All right, who doesn't have a process in
place?
So we can see if it's 50/50. Oh, not really. But all right, that's very good.
Thank you.
Okay, perfect. Then I would say let's get going where it all started. And we're
going
to start with the basics. So like in many early stage sales companies, when we
started, we
only had one role that was focusing on customer experience. We called it
account management.
And this role was basically onboarding and so on. Then at one point in time,
obviously,
while we were growing, it was time to split responsibilities. And now the way
we're set
up is that the customer success retention adoption and obviously customer
satisfaction.
They are usually the ones that have the relationship with the customer, and
they are also the ones
who have regular touch points. And then on the other hand, we have the account
manager
who is the commercial account owner focusing on expansion, renewals, partially
also, of
course, on retention. They have usually fewer touch points and at least a
personia to have
a way larger book of business. Now, of course, this is also reflected in the KP
Is and incentives.
It's the net retention rate as the primary target. And for the account manager,
it's
the net retention MR. Now, when we were talking about introducing a lead
generation process,
what we needed to look at was how we can reflect that in the KPIs. So what we
had to do was
introduce metrics to track lead generation, also to measure our success. Of
course, we
needed to make sure that these targets are aligned with the overall business
targets.
Second of all, we needed to make sure that they aligned with our account
management team
in terms of capacity, but also in terms of KPIs that we're working towards the
same goals.
And last but not least, we also needed to make sure that at least we needed to
ensure
that our app cell and expansion efforts were not going at the cost of our
retention with
our customers. Now, easier said than done, right? Now, when we look at the next
slide,
there were basically a couple of challenges we needed to look at was our
mindset change.
So our CSMs were basically scared that when focusing on app cell and expansion
efforts,
the customer. And second of all, there was also the question about a conflict
of interest.
So, and are we taking away pieces of the job from the account managers? So we
needed to
make sure that we're tackling these challenges and answering these questions.
So basically,
what we needed was a mindset shift. We needed to ensure that customer success
managers understand
that we can drive value with our customers, while at the same time focusing on
expansion.
So CSMs are usually the ones that know their customers best. They know the
account. They
know in the person use case. They know in our practices. They know the industry
. So they
had the best people to position apps and basically tell the customer how they
can generate value
with our product without going at the cost of retention. And at the same time,
of course,
it was also beneficial for our account managers because they had more time to
focus on their
book of business, to focus on renewals. And when they were taking over leads,
they were
qualified leads. So they basically needed less time in the conversion of those
leads.
In the end, we're all responsible for net retention while driving value for our
customers.
Now, easiest than done, right? Obviously, what happened was we encountered a
couple
of challenges again when we were looking at that. So first of all, when we look
at this
from an operational perspective, what happened was that CSMs handed over leads
on an individual
basis. So it was a very inefficient process. They contacted account managers on
Slack or
one on one. Second of all, what happened was that obviously there was no
standardized
process. So some leads were good. Some leads were not good. And there was just
a lack of
quality. And thirdly, what we were missing was cases actually have on revenue.
So we
needed to basically implement metrics. And this basically led to two situations
. Situation
A, the CSM jumps in right away. They conducted a demo with the customer. They
qualified
a lead. And they basically run the entire sales process. So that's not what we
wanted.
And Situation B, the other way the AM has to start from scratch again, runs
through the
entire process. They missed important background information. And we're
basically giving away
the advantage that we have when bringing in CSM into lead generation. And this
was basically
because we were missing two key items. One was a standardized process. And the
second was
enablement. And this is basically the point in time where I hand over to Thanet
to lead
us through the process. Do you recognize these two situations in your
organizations? Okay,
let's raise your hand if you have too much CSM involved. Okay. And raise your
hand if
you don't have enough CSM involved. Okay. A few more then. All right. So in 23,
we were
asked to develop a process which would be actually able to check the generation
, the
lead generation that was created by customer success managers, right? And this
took 38 Zoom
calls for confluence brainstorm sessions. And an extensive cross department to
call
collaboration between customer success managers, account managers. Here in a
few months, we
can finally say that we're 75% there. So it is taking a little bit. This is
fine. This
emoji was actually used seven times in our Slack channels. Because everything
is changing,
right? The environment is changing. And sometimes we just have to go back and
see where it all
started to go back and get again on that road to get this process running. This
is the process
that we came up. It looks like the customer success manager asking the clients
some questions.
And these questions are about getting enough information to be able to qualify
the opportunity.
An opportunity represents a chance to generate value revenue by addressing the
prospect needs.
When the customer success manager quality, we send this over to our account
managers in
our CRM. All of this is automated. So basically the customer success manager
provides all
the information. The account manager gets an email that an opportunity has been
created.
And then the account manager can actually pipeline by the customer success
manager or
can reject the opportunity. And if the opportunity is rejected, it also means
that it doesn't
go into their book of business. Now, if you're able to track how many
opportunities were
created in the first place to see if your CSMs are actually working on these
opportunities.
But also how many of those got accepted. So how is the qualities of these, the
quality
of these opportunities? How is the information? But ultimately as well, how
many of these
opportunities are actually closed? A lot of things went wrong actually when we
launched
this internally. We expected, okay, this is it. It's perfect. Let's go with it
and Q4.
We launched it but it didn't go that well. So what went wrong? We had alignment
challenges
between the account managers and the customer success managers, right? Because
they were
speaking a different language. The questions that were asked by the customer
success manager
and the information that was gathered was not the same that account managers
would actually
do while performing their qualifications. The opportunity remains in the
initial qualification
stage which is the stage where the opportunity is created in the first place.
And this is
bad because it means that those opportunities are actually not being worked
with. And they
weren't aligned. The questions answered were not what the information that
actually we're
looking for. The hygiene of our CRM started to get a little bit worse and then
the account
managers started creating their own opportunity because they were tired of CSM
opportunities
and they just started getting their own thing with their own information as
well. And then
ultimately the customer success managers were just not motivated to use the
process. So we
had to change that. So after launching the process, we actually enabled the
people to
use the process. And what we did, we brainstormed about questions that the
customer success
managers actually asked during orton for our account managers. We trained them
on Medic.
And Medic is a sales qualification process. It's a method where sales agent can
actually
understand if it's worth it or not worth it to work on this opportunity. I'm
not going
to spend too much time on Medic but that is what we actually taught our
customer success
managers to use. Then we create a role of the client at CSM. So we had a client
customer,
no, the client customer, same words. The client in CSM, so once they see those
roles and we
also had a sales trainer there to actually be able to give some tips and tricks
about
how these qualifications were going. And then we created sales pitches for all
our different
products. So Prasano has an HR software and we have products like a survey for
all these
extra products. We created some sales pitches that the customer success
managers could use
during this initial qualification process. So these are the questions that we
actually
asked our customer success managers to ask the client. So we started with the
existing
problem. So what do they want and why? Identify which actually helps to
identify the pain
points of the client. Stakeholders who are the users, who is buying it and so
on and
so forth, timeline, give information about the timeline. So when do you
actually think
this deal is going to close? And budget, do you actually have the money and the
budget
to buy this product? And we specifically focused on the identified pain points
to a
problem. So I brought you a few screenshots of how that happened. So here is
the presentation
that we did about Medic and specifically about the eye of identify the pain
indicated and
implicated pain framework. This is a screenshot of our Zoom meeting. And in
this Zoom meeting
you can see that we had the role plays. So we had the briefing preparation, the
role
play, the feedback, there will be a switch between CSM and client. And then
again, briefing
role play and feedback where the CSM but also the sales train, it could
actually give some
feedback about how none of our sales pitches with the questions that the
customer success
managers can actually ask to the client in order to identify these pain points.
Then
after the enablement we also started to measure some goals because it was
important to show
our customer success managers where this process was actually going. We started
with created
pipeline which is the created opportunities and this shows that from H1 to H2
this increased
by 108% at Portonio thanks to the adoption of the process. The second is open
pipeline
and open pipeline means every single opportunity that was accepted. So there
actually it's
in the pipeline of the account manager minus the ones that are closed, one and
close loss.
So every single thing that is there and that the account manager can actually
work on.
And this increased by 65% and then we also had converted pipeline. So of these
opportunities
that were actually created and accepted how many generated revenue from Q4 from
when we
launched the process to Q1 by 4% to 16%. And you can think that in SAS more or
less the
average would be in between 15% and 20%. So thanks of course to the enablement
and to
the work we did we managed to increase that by 4%.
Lastly my favourite one we actually celebrate wins as well. So every single
quarter we have
a message like this going into our inter-aslac channels where we have the
opportunity to celebrate
our opportunity champions so the people actually created more opportunities as
well as how
many of these opportunities actually generated revenue to give a shout out then
of course
as well to our account team. And this gives us the opportunity to get a little
bit of
a healthy competition but ultimately to celebrate wins as a team. And I'll hand
over now to
Jenny again. Thank you. You can just click. Oh yeah okay.
It's just one slide. So last but not least the learnings. As I mentioned in the
very
beginning we were part of our cross departmental project team that has been
working on this
process and while we're actually incredibly happy how we have now implemented
the process
and how the process has been adopted of course there are things that we learned
and that we
would have done differently if we had the chance to repeat this project all
over again.
So if you could click something part is to secure buy-in from all relevant
stakeholders.
It sounds pretty straightforward but what we underestimated in the beginning
was how many
people are actually involved and how many people we should get on our side in
order not
just to launch the process but also to have everyone involved and engaged in
the process.
So first and foremost of course it's the leadership team so X, X, X, Y and but
also the account
manager leadership and CSM leadership of course. And then the next piece is to
get buy-in from
the account managers that they see the value. As I mentioned earlier in the
beginning we
had a little bull so we needed to make sure they understand how this is
beneficial for
them and then on the other side the CSM's of course they were afraid that they
were pushed
into a sales position and that they were just going to be one more point of
contact that
have to drive revenue with their customers but as mentioned ultimately it's
about generating
value we kept repeating why the process is beneficial.
Second of all be proactive not reactive so as a project team what we also
learned was
that sometimes of course things were discussed and we didn't necessarily know
about it right
so what we were trying to do was and ask what is going well, what is not going
well.
This also brings me to my third point listen to feedback so after a while we
put time aside
to really check in with different groups and ask them hey what is going well,
what we can
do to adjust the process if needed. So of course we reiterated and reiterated,
we adjusted
questions, we adjusted the process in our CRM tool, over time we also embedded
some more
triggers to inform people either it's a new opportunity like a flag trigger
that people
know about it and don't have to go into the CRM to check for themselves and so
on but we
constantly kept asking the IC's hey is this too much, is this too much noise do
you want
to know more, do you.
Then enablement and training, Sonna mentioned it, of course in the beginning we
thought
maybe it's enough if we just introduce it but we realized also when checking in
with the
teams that they actually really wanted to role play so they were really asking
okay
let us try this out, this gives us confidence, makes us feel more comfortable
and over time
people were even doing role plays with each other and now we're trying to embed
it as
our product is growing when we have new apps or launch new features, it doesn't
turn on
going thing.
Set clear goals, so basically what are we working towards, what is expected but
also
what do we want to achieve and as Sonna mentioned previously of course
celebrate wins so make
it punch teams together so as one CS team that is customer facing and make them
basically
see what we were a bit fast.
Thank you everyone.
Thank you so much that was such a wonderful and insightful session and you can
see it's
people they want to know more and more about what you have been doing so far.
So I think the first question that we have got here is what compensation
strategies do
you consider for CSMs?
Yeah I can take that.
So at the moment AMs work very traditionally with a quota framework whereas in
CSMs we do
have team bonus that is consisting of several items so net retention is our
North Star metric.
At the moment the pipeline generation is not part of our compensation strategy
but we're
looking into that whether we are going to change that in 2025 moving forward
but when
we initially launched the process what was more important for us was basically
the adoption
and to get CSMs to use the process and then only as a second step are we going
to.
Okay the next one is who owns the customer at person who is it the CSMs or the
account
managers any other functions.
So as customer success managers we like I'm not sure what you mean by own but
customer
success managers would have their own book of business depending of course if
you work
on smaller medium and larger organizations that would define the size of your
book of
business but account managers are also assigned to these organizations and to
these companies
right so we would always have on every single account a customer success
manager that is
big enough customer success manager and an account manager so it's always two
people
working on.
Okay the next one is how do you make sure that the account managers accept the
lead based
on qualification criteria not just by their own gut feel on how easy or complex
this sale
would be.
Chase them.
Basically yeah it's a good question and we are not 100% there yet as well to
figure
this out ourselves but it's good for account managers to have a good pipeline
right so
of course when it's accepted and it goes into their pipeline this does show an
opportunity
for them to generate revenue to hit their quota so there's no wrong thing that
comes
with having opportunities in your account or in your book of business which
also ultimately
brings a second issue that all the opportunities get accepted right so we are
still understanding
how to tackle that issue what we would normally say is to bring those deals
those all to them
so that for example if an account manager if a customer success manager stock
and opportunities
are not getting accepted and the lead sees that that you can come with an
action plan
about okay do you want to speak to the account manager do you want to tell me
what is going
on and the same thing goes for the account manager right we have the trust and
leadership
which was one of those first points as well to make sure that you have all
stakeholders
on board that we have to trust that these leaders will actually sit down with
the account
managers and to understand why do you have so many opportunities in initial
qualification
or also why are so many of these opportunities rejected is not good enough so
we go into
a little bit on trust but what we also say is don't reject an opportunity out
of the
out of the blue right so we have a conflict is what do I need to do when I don
't want
to accept an opportunity for the account managers right because we always try
to see both sides
and the answer goes as follow don't reject an opportunity out of nowhere just
make sure
that you contact the customers ask your customer success manager to discuss
that information
into the next meeting or try to find it to find information together but I hope
that
answer the question yes do your CSM provide pricing information to customers
during the
qualifying period so usually no usually the guideline is to deflect it to the
account manager
but it's a really good question because patient at least otherwise how would
you understand
if there is the budget for a certain product but when it goes deeper into
commercial topics
no we would usually ask CSM to loop in the account manager or to deflect the
question
because they're just not unable to basically understand all the discounts or
all the contract
specifics okay the next one is in theory splitting out these role makes sense
however
in practice is it not confusing for the customers to be connected with two
different stakeholders
from personio I think it's a it's a very fair question right and it was one of
our main concerns
when we did split the roles in the very beginning when we said hey one of our
main USPs in our
customer experience was that the customer has one point of contact whether it's
commercial
or product related but I think one of the reasons why we decided for it and why
it also makes
sense is conflict of interest that you have because when you were when you were
discussing
commercial topics sometimes they can't draft sometimes they can't get tougher
in the negotiations
and I don't want to say it jeopardizes the customer relation but very often
when you're
on a call you're in the scenario that the account manager is a little bit the
bad cop
and the CSM is a good cop they can always retain their relationship with the
customer no matter
what's going on on the commercial side so it takes some time and we also had to
really
train customers to tell no for this topic your account manager is responsible
only product
related topic as a sport as CSM but over time actually customers became really
accepting
of the situation and of the fact so if you ask me at personio if we would ever
go back
I would say no so the way it's set up now it's beneficial for us internally
that you
have to focus on the roles but from the external perspective also for the
customer works a
lot better because they have their subject matter experts depending on what the
topic
is.
The next one is to you also have solution consultants who deliver a sales demo
do you
feel CSM should deliver?
We don't feel CSM should deliver the demo but CSM should definitely in certain
cases depending
also on the complexity of the account support the account manager in the demo
so as you
saw before I didn't point it out specifically but what we do is normally the CS
M would join
these sales calls if they can add any value and also if it's one of if it's
like if it's
a big and complex account obviously because other CSMs they might have a lot of
accounts
in their book of business and there we wouldn't normally have the CSM joining
all of these
sales demos right.
We actually do have solution consultants but that's something that we actually
introduced
quite recently and we didn't bring it yet into our process because it's also
going to
be the second step because we didn't run this in all the in all the teams so
for example
in international they're not there yet but in that we are starting doing that
and that's
another of our not issues but challenges right because when of course these
sales consultants
are going to join the account manager and the customer success manager team we
need
to understand what role are they then going to play in that process that we
just showed
you and that also means that we have to go back again and say okay why did we
start the
process in the first place what did we develop and how can we make sure that we
can add the
sales solutions managers to this process as well.
I think to answer the question it's beneficial to have CSMs there to help with
workarounds
or any else and any other technical information but definitely the sales demo
that should
be either for the account managers or the sales solution manager depending on
how the
team is formed.
You want to add anything?
Okay I'm going to combine the next two questions here so it is like how do you
get CSMs and
AMs to accept the CSQL process altogether from CSMs perspective how do you get
them to
sell or to thinking that AMs will are going to get the credit and from AMs
perspective
there is a common issue that someone has came across that not being credited
for the CSM
sales and they think that they could have sold more be in for this process.
The first and the second question you see.
Yeah so ultimately if the accounts that we have in our portfolio increase so
the NR increases
value of it increases it's both beneficial for account managers for the target
but also
for the targets of the customer success managers.
So yes of course it's sorry I think it's time to qualify the opportunity when
it seems
to benefit.
Yeah so that would answer more like I think the second question.
It can be hard not to be resentful for doing someone else's job because
ultimately these
are both are of our targets so we want to make sure that as a team we get there
that
we get the NRR higher here and for the first questions how do you navigate the
top of CSM
of selling kinds without upsetting AMs.
So the collaboration piece comes across right.
Yeah.
I'm not sure if you have any thoughts about that.
I think for the first question especially it's important to understand the
account manager.
The CSM is generating the lead but they hand over the opportunity so the one
who basically
processed the opportunity in the end and it's also more in the driver's seat
for the conversion
naturally is the account manager.
So in the end an opportunity is just an opening so the account manager would
always have the
chance to use this opportunity and also sell more products right.
So it's not that you're limited to this one opportunity it's an opening that
the CSM is
generating based on their knowledge based on how well they know that and gets
the most
out of the opportunity but the app sell is with the account manager whereas the
generated
pipeline that's basically the target that lies with the CSM so it's a process
that goes
hand in hand.
Alright.
The next one is what criteria do you use for a space on lead generated or leads
accepted
by account managers?
Yeah.
So basically at the moment it's based on accepted pipeline so basically yes
leads that the
account manager accepted.
But as mentioned what we basically want to see in the long run is a stable open
pipeline
that our account managers can work on so we don't want to see any ups and downs
but really
the stability over time.
So I'm going to keep an eye on conversion so while from the CSM sign as
mentioned we're
obviously our span of control is limited we still need to see if our efforts
have any
revenue output in the end but this will not be a hard KPI for CSMs so it's open
pipeline
and the question is how many accounts does a person use CSM own?
Thank you very much Sam that's very nice of you so depends a bit on which
market you're
working in for sure on you so we do distinguish between L1, L2 and Excel
depending on the amount
of employees that the organization has that we're managing and in international
we manage
more or less all those three else or L1, L2, Excel so you would have base of
course on
the complexity of the accounts that you have in your book of business you would
have more
or less around from 22 to 35 accounts into your book of business whereas in DAG
I'll
hand over to you for the number.
Yeah so it very much depends favorite answer depends on the size of the
customer and the
complexity of the customer so it could be from only 12 accounts if we're
talking about
enterprise accounts up to 70.
And we're now expanding the scope so we're also starting to the books of
business that
our account managers are taking care of smaller so account managers go up to
200 accounts per
book of business.
A little more. The next question is I think it is somewhat answered already but
if you'd
like to add something here what strategies did you use for CSMs who aren't
commercially
minded?
We trained them, yeah we trained them and we try to also always you know have
the mindset
of like a positive mindset and be like hey this is going to increase your NRR
it will help
towards your target but as well as bringing the to jeopardize your relationship
with the
client so obviously maybe some CSMs might be a bit scared of bringing those
topics to
their calls but we tried really hard and it's not easy and we're still not
there of course
with every single CSM and might even be one of the hardest things here is to
make them
understand have a product and they're struggling with something and you have
the solution for
them and in your portfolio of products that you're offering who is then the
best at your
point of contact right?
You're CSM the person is sitting with you and those office hours sitting with
you and those
quarterly business reviews and so on and so forth they should always be the
person to
tell you hey I know that you want to launch an engagement survey or other
examples in
your organizations we actually do offer that would you like to have a look into
it and
tell me if this is something that could help you right so you don't need and
you don't
need to have a commercially mindset to be a good customer success manager or a
good
salesperson as well you just need to understand the value that you're actually
bringing to
the table and I think that's important.
Okay we are going to take last two questions so please upvote.
The next one is what kind of segments have you applied this process to with
market and
enterprise or SMB as well.
So that's a very good question so basically this segment is applied to every
single account
a customer that has a customer success manager right and for us that would only
be for now
and then we would have a bigger scope in the future for the large business so
this process
is solely for the large business accounts that have a customer success manager
and also
an account manager.
But it was like how many AMs do a CSM interact with in the role?
How many AMs does a CSM interact with is it like a one on one it's gone now.
Sorry sorry then I didn't see that well I was reading Gombe.
If you have for example a smaller book of business it's very likely that you
always have one
account manager but it doesn't mean that you only have one account manager
because
the account managers have bigger portfolios and customer success managers have
smaller
portfolios right so a customer success manager that works with me on my
portfolio could also
work with my colleagues on their portfolio so it's never one on one
relationship.
It can be for some smaller accounts but it's not always the case.
Okay and the last one question I said two more but yeah it's a nice question.
How do you feel about divided thoughts on which roles should own renewables?
How did you decide on AMs?
Do you think it's one size fits all answer or if not how did you know AMs were
the right
owner for your company, for your customers?
Yeah that's actually it's a really great how do we decide or how do we know
well the
reality is we don't really know if there is a right or wrong answer.
We decided for the account managers because this is how we basically put how we
set the
focus internally at Passoni that we said okay renewals should be on by the
account manager
and not by the customer success manager because they should really focus on the
customer satisfaction
right but this doesn't mean that there is a one size fits all answer.
I think you can also set that up in a different way and pretty stage of the
company on the
product on the product adoption where you want to put your focus and a
framework and
at how we split our responsibilities to see if this is still the right way or
if we need
to make adjustments at one point in time.
At the moment it's working really well the way we've split it but could also
change it
some point in a few questions.
Alright with that we come to an end of today's session thank you so much
Jennifer and Sonnet
was an amazing session.
[Applause]
