The Customer Success Economy

20Organizational Structure: Should Customer Success Be Part of Sales or Its Own Org?

If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.

—Lao-Tse, The Analects of Confucius (Chapter 13)

What does Customer Success mean, anyway? Is it the team of Customer Success Managers? The post-sales organization? A company-wide imperative? When we use CS as the name for so many different concepts, we can confuse ourselves. It's why CS people are often confused about what to call themselves. When we speak with leaders of “post-sales” in B2B businesses, one of the most candid, often-hushed questions we get (especially over a glass of wine) is, “What should my title be?” As the quote above illustrates, names matter.

The question of title goes hand-in-hand with the question of organizational structure: Where should Customer Success report? To dig into these two questions, we collected data from Bessemer Venture Partners' (BVP) Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index (EMCLOUD),⁷ a set of public cloud companies. The data includes the titles and responsibilities for the functional “Customer Success” leader and the overall head of the “post-sales” organization. There are three key takeaways.

1. Hire a VP of Customer Success

When we researched the org charts of the EMCLOUD, we found that 44 out of the 50 companies employed a functional CS leader. The other six may have an equivalent ...