The Customer Success Professional's Handbook

14Creating Career Paths for Your Customer Success Managers

In the previous chapter, we discussed the need for multiple “types” of Customer Success Managers. Depending on the needs of each customer segment, these teammates have different skills and aspirations for their roles. We believe that this topic not only deserves its own chapter, it also deserves its own separate author. For this task, we asked Nadav Shem-Tov, Director of Teammate Success-Customer Success at Gainsight. Since joining the Gainsight family, he has moved strategically into roles within our organization that benefited from his knowledge of Customer Success and his ability to create a career path infrastructure for our CSMs. He was also a CSM and Director of Customer Success. Who better to give you a glimpse into CS career pathing than the individual who does it for us.

Designing CSM as a Career

By Nadav Shem-Tov

When we were building out and scaling the Customer Success organization at Gainsight, we encountered several challenges surrounding the issue of career paths. As our CSMs gained experience in their roles, they wanted to see a trajectory that reflected their abilities and their desire to do new things. Some of them wanted to continue being an individual contributor CSM. Others had aspirations of managing people. Some even had their eyes on the C-Suite. No matter the goal of the individual, each member of the Customer Success team wanted more clarity on their role requirements and expectations. They ...