Aligning passionate CSMs with customers to ensure their success by…
CSMs are accountable for customer adoption, measurable outcomes, customer satisfaction, and creating true customer advocacy. We create successful customers by enabling, training, and nurturing them throughout their journey. The following areas incorporate the remit of a CSM:
| Responsibility | Context | How We Measure | DCI Roles |
|---|---|---|---|
| Success Plans | These plans are created in partnership with the customer and outline the agreed path to getting a customer to their desired business outcomes (e.g., improve cycle time) and the technical milestones required to get to these objectives (e.g., migration onto GitLab, overcoming a constraint) These mutual plans enable the CSM to be proactive in the relationship, ensuring that progress towards the agreed outcomes. As trusted advisors, our role is to ensure that we understand what will drive value for the customer and have the associated plan. |
Enterprise: Every customer must have an active success plan Commercial: Here, the plans are more adoption-focused, with PR1 customers having a more tailored plan and PR2 customers being focused on successfully adopting their primary use case & expanding into greater adoption |
DRI: CSM Consulted: AE, SA, Customer Informed: Leadership |
| Onboarding | Onboarding is a crucial time in the customer lifecycle, during which a positive or negative sentiment can last the partnership's length. This includes the period after upsell, where additional investment has been made, and often at which point a CSM is first assigned. There are several onboarding steps in both the new and existing customer onboarding playbooks. The CSM's role is to ensure all of these topics and enablements have been covered and documented. |
All customers for both Enterprise and Commercial are to be taken through the appropriate playbook (New, Existing Customer) | DRI: CSM Consulted: AE, SA, Customer Informed: Leadership |
| Cadence Calls | The cadence call is a proactive call. For this call to be proactive, the CSM's responsibility includes:
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Call frequency:
A CSM/CSE can expect to conduct a minimum number of calls as follows:
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DRI: CSM Consulted: AE, Customer Informed: SA, Leadership |
| Adoption & Expansion |
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Enterprise: At any given time, an Enterprise CSM will be driving enablement with at least half of their customer base (~6) and actively driving expansion with 3-4 Commercial: Commercial CSMs' primary objective is adoption, so CSMs should be driving enablement towards the primary use case for all of their customers in line with the success plan, and they should be driving expansion for half of their PR1 customers (~6) |
DRI: CSM Consulted: AE, Customer Informed: SA, Leadership |
| Executive Business Reviews |
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DRI: CSM Consulted: AE, Customer Informed: SA, Leadership |
| Renewal |
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Every customer regardless of segment or priority | DRI: CSM, AE, Renewals team Consulted: Customer Informed: Leadership |
| Managing Risk |
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DRI: CSM Consulted: AE, Leadership Informed: Renewals team |
Please reference this page for an overview of the CSM Rhythm of Business (daily to yearly) Please reference this page for an overview of the areas your CSM will engage with you in: CSM Points of Engagement
| Journey Stage | Activities |
|---|---|
| Pre-Sales & Alignment | |
| Onboard | |
| Enable | |
| Expand | |
| Optimize & Renew |
Objective: The 3 ‘big rocks’ to take on in FY24 with the overall goal of moving our team forwards. These rocks need to move us forwards as a team and as individuals, enabling us to scale, be impactful, and be inspired/fulfilled in our roles.
What are 'big rocks'? As outlined in this article, they are our priorities, our mission-critical objectives that we need to solve for in the coming year. We arrived at this list through CSM leadership discussions and final input from individual contributors.
Investing in the CSM team is a top priority, and this year we will provide team members with education and enablement to empower them in their role with customers and other GitLab team members, specifically related to:
CSMs will exit FY24 with skills to help them throughout their career, and they will be better equipped to drive customer results and ROI, through improved confidence, leadership, collaboration, and ownership.
Our goals with this big rock include the following initiatives:
For more information and specifics, please review the epic for Big Rock 1 (GitLab-internal only), which includes quarterly OKRs for FY24.
Equip team members to speak to product capabilities, value propositions, business impact, and help customers with use case adoption.
Epic for Big Rock 3 (GitLab-internal only)
Position CSMs to identify opportunity & risk through excellent account management practices. To ascend beyond transactional Q&A, and build relationships as a trusted advisor.
There are 7 pillars that we have identified as crucial for success as CSMs. It is expected and normal for all CSMs to have higher proficiency in some areas and lower in others, especially when taking job level into consideration, but these are all areas we are continually striving to be better at, as there are always opportunities to learn and improve.
CSM Team Metrics Overview (VIDEO)
The following articulates where collaboration and customer management is owned:
In Customer Success Management, it is important to be continuously learning more about our product and related industry topics. The education and enablement handbook page provides a dashboard of aggregated resources that we encourage you to use to get up to speed.
To ensure that opportunities are listed with the correct Order Type, this Salesforce report shows you all of the opportunities that have closed, or are soon to close, with your SAEs. Tracking Order Type is important since CSM team quota and compensation depend on this. Please reference the latest Sales Compensation Plan information to know what is counted.
Next steps for you:
