Accelerate customer success by aligning passionate CSMs with customers to:
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 | Mutually agreed (Customer | GitLab) adoption plans that outline desired outcomes (e.g., improve cycle time),technical milestones required (e.g., migrate to GitLab, overcome constraints), timelines and DRIs.
These plans enable us to be proactive and ensure progress towards the customer's goals. As trusted advisors, we understand what drives value for our customers and help them achieve it. |
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 | 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 those listed in the linked cadence call page | 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)
Ensure our customers receive ongoing value through increasing product adoption and growth, aligned with the customer's desired business outcomes.
CSMs equipped to work as trusted advisors with our customers to achieve their objectives in a reportable, quantifiable way through a framework that also enables early and accurate identification of both opportunity and risk.
Examples:
Objective: increase developer productivity
How is/will productivity be measured?
What are their technical milestones to get to this business outcome?
CSM Team Metrics Overview (VIDEO)
Landing Zones
Customer Metrics
Platform Metrics
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:
