Congratulations on being promoted to the VP-Customer Success! It’s a huge step forward in your professional life. Especially, in the field of Customer Success. But are you unsure where to begin? That’s understandable; you’re probably your company’s first Customer Success executive, and this is your first time in the position. The Customer Success movement is still in its infancy, and many businesses are only now beginning to apply it at the executive level.
So, let us start by looking at the importance of the role that a VP-Customer Success holds in the company.
Why is the role of a VP-Customer Success so important?
Taking advantage of existing clients’ success makes business sense in the face of uncertainty. No doubt that the pandemic has increased this uncertainty to the next level! This is why keeping existing customers is paramount. Investing in the success of existing consumers will pay off now more than ever. You may supply clients with enough value to keep them around by shifting the focus away from just gaining new customers and instead focusing on helping them achieve their goals.
For this to happen, you need a Head of Customer Success. By ‘Head’ I mean the VP. SaaS companies can become scaleable by bringing on a VP of Customer Success from the start. It helps overcome the long-term challenges of success and establish long-term growth. S/he ensures that Customer Success is truly a success. If so, then the existing customers not only become profitable but also have an impact on the company’s brand reputation in the market, which drives inbound interest.
Extra resource: The Ultimate Guide to Customer Success Manager
VP-Customer Success Job Description (Sample)
The following is a sample job description that will give you a glimpse into the responsibilities that a VP-Customer Success has on his/her shoulders.
- Setting the strategy and prioritizing Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) while leading the Customer Success teams.
- Deploying programs to help promote company value with customers, customer goal attainment, new features, and new use-cases; and designing the customer journey to assist drive customer lifetime value. cooperating across teams to discover and develop opportunities for customer growth
- By developing a customer-centric perspective across the organization, you may represent the customer’s voice and influence internal stakeholders.
- Architecting the customer success organization and solutions to leverage and grow in support of our revenue goals, including finding the correct balance of services and support for our many customer categories – Large Enterprise, Mid-market, and SMB.
- Increase Efficiency Through Technology. Oversee the technology adoption process with tools and systems like the Customer Success Management Software, etc.
- Working collaboratively with the sales teams to connect with executives at potential and current clients to identify goals.
- As part of significant cloud migration and digital transformation projects, collaborate with third-party systems integrators to expand services and deliver projects.
- Create a global professional services company to assist customers with anything from onboarding and training to multi-stage, long-term digital transformation projects.
Qualifications of a Vice President-Customer Success (sample)
- Proven progressive competence in a leadership capacity in Customer Success and/or Professional Services.
- To drive cross-functional efforts, you must be an effective and productive collaborator.
- Experience leading and managing large Customer Success and/or Professional Services teams in a dynamic environment.
- Ability to move rapidly and adapt.
- The ability to make data-driven decisions while also being willing to experiment and repeat
- Ability to communicate with technical clients in their own language.
- Customer experience, professional services, and customer support are all part of a solid strategic goal.
- The capacity to design services and support delivery methods that correspond with present client segments, create customer value, and scale to meet growth predictions.
- Listening skills, Humility and Empathy.
In case you’d like to know what responsibilities does the Director of Customer Success have, then check out Job Description and Interview Questions for the Director of Customer Success.
Traits/qualities of a VP-Customer Success.
So far we have been talking about the qualifications and the job requirements of a Vice president-Customer Success. Now let’s see what traits/qualities a VP-Customer Success should possess.
Know the customer and the customer success team
The VP needs to understand the customer well. You also need to know the Customer Success team really well. Your work includes managing your customer base and, if you’re in the recurring revenue company, maximizing their dollar value. You may or may not be held responsible for the company’s retention rate, but it’s certainly your compass when it comes to prioritizing the efforts of your staff.
You’ll want to get to know them personally anyhow so you can build a rapport and lead appropriately. You should also begin the process of learning about their abilities and job history. It’s especially vital to understand what drives Customer Success’s daily workload in this scenario.
Analyze company’s strategies-both short term and long term
A very important task for the VP is to analyze the business strategy. And it covers both long term and short term. This task is substantial to everything that a VP will do. For example- the strategies relating to segmentation, the revenue models, the industry specificity, customer engagement, etc.
Approach this process by first sketching out your top customer segment’s interaction model. Because one-to-one communication is the most effective touchpoints with those customers will be one-to-one. And your retention goal for that category will almost certainly be very high. Likewise, focus on the strategies relating to revenue model per customer, so on and so forth.
Understand the business
This is critical and depends on the size of your installed customer base and team. The only rational method to scale a Customer Success team is through automation. Hence, understanding it properly is indispensable. You can ask questions like,
- What systems and tools does the firm use?
- Does the Customer Success software predicts churn and recommend the next best actions?
- How are the triggers (or alerts) set up?
- What are the key metrics and KPIs tracked?
- What industry does the firm cater to mostly?
Drive Customer Success
Obviously! The job is to deliver success to customers. They should be able to achieve their desired outcomes using your product. And the VP-Customer Success must deliver that!
You’ll need to remind everyone in the organization that you’re a Customer Success-driven company, not just a Sales-driven one, and that increasing customer lifetime value is equally as vital as increasing quarterly sales.
You are your customer’s voice. It is your responsibility to not only deliver results to your clients but also, make the rest of the firm understand why your customer needs them. If customers are having trouble because they were not properly onboarded, you should put some pressure on the customer success or the onboarding team. If the Sales team is causing you problems because they aren’t properly setting expectations, you must address this. You must ensure that improvements are made if the product demos wonderfully but does not live up to the demo in real life.
Wrapping up…
It’s both exciting and daunting at the same time- the role of a VP-Customer Success. You need a VP of customer success if you want to reduce churn and boost client retention. A Customer Success Manager who became the VP is the best asset a customer success-driven firm can ask for. This is particularly important in the SaaS market. Because this person will play a critical part in your company’s success, you must choose wisely. The Vice President of Customer Success must have an action mindset, be enthusiastic about the prospect of rapidly scaling globally, and flourish in a bold, fast-moving, transparent, values-driven leadership team and company while ensuring both customer and corporate success.
P.S. – The main image has been taken from pexels.com
