What You Don't Know About Customer Success Career Paths - Deltek Does!

Dive into the depths of the Customer Success career path and uncover career development insights with Christine Boermeester, Senior Director of Customer Success at Deltek, on this enlightening episode of the CSM Practice Podcast. 

Christine, a true mastermind in the CS domain, shares her invaluable experience with Deltek's groundbreaking approach to establishing a clear career framework for CSM teams. This episode is a goldmine for tech CEOs and SaaS leaders, offering:

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

- Discover how Deltek's innovative career development framework brings enhanced clarity and motivation to their CSM team. 

- Gain access to Christine's expert strategies for integrating competencies with career advancement — essential knowledge for both CSMs and executives.

- Explore the transformative power of a well-defined career path in fostering team cohesion and nurturing a vibrant company culture. 

Click here to watch the interview on YouTube.

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Christine Boermeester, Senior Director of Customer Success at Deltek, has championed exceptional customer experiences and honed her expertise in building global customer success teams over her 20+ years with the company. She believes that proactively nurturing customer relationships, ensuring ease of doing business, and supporting and developing her employees are key to elevating both the customer and employee experience, leading to increased growth.

🔗 You may connect with Christine via LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christine-boermeester-9315472/

#TechLeadership #SaaSSuccess #CustomerSuccessManagement #CareerGrowth

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ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Women in Customer Success Podcast - https://www.marijaskobepilley.com/podcast

Women at Work Podcast -  https://hbr.org/2018/01/podcast-women-at-work

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Transcript

00:00 Hey, everyone, I think we're going to talk about career path and how can you define one for your CSM team and why this is a absolute game changer.
00:15 So, I have Christine Burmester, Senior Director of Customer Success, a huge company that did a big initiative around this. And she's going to explain not only what did this do for her team, for her company, kind of clarity created, and why was that such an important work?
00:35 The new discussions that ensued, what should you be caring about as an executive when you start tailoring this career path for your own CSMs?
00:45 Christine, welcome again to our show. I thank you. Maybe you can just share a little bit about what companies you work with, what kind of personas does your team work with and what kind of problems do you help them solve?
00:59 So Delta specializes in project-based businesses. So our main customers are government contractors, architects and engineers in creative agencies. We have over 30,000 customers and 80 different countries.
01:14 So that means our customer success team also quite large. The team has over 200 people. My team is about 80 customer success managers that are global as well from United States to Denmark, United Kingdom, Philippines, Australia.
01:29 You actually invested a lot of time answering a critical question that most customers success managers have. What's next in my career?
01:37 What was showing up and how long ago was it when you said we need to just sit down and create a clear career path for our team?
01:45 This was actually a 2020 initiative, so it was a great time during pandemic, where we were getting that question for years prior of how can I be promoted, where can I go next to my career, what are my options?
01:59 So we took the time to create a career path for our customer success managers and enroll that out to our organization.
02:07 And then we've recently evolved that into an organization wide template so CSMs can transfer and see what would work in other departments as well.
02:17 For organizations, don't have that. They don't have a clear career path for a CSM team, whether it's three CSMs or 80 CSMs or some of the issues that he was causing, like not having a clear career path that kind of showed out for you to say, you know what, this is going to be a priority.
02:35 At the worst side of it was CSMs choosing to leave our company because they were frustrated, and they didn't see a future path or how they could progress.
02:44 But even on the smaller scale, you know, CSMs would lose motivation, feel frustrated, feel undervalued, especially they would feel like it was subjective how people were promoted and not understanding why is this person getting promoted and not me.
03:00 Now, I feel like I'm doing the same job or we have the same requirements, not having that framework to have that discussion with the CSM, did make it difficult for the managers to have those conversations.
03:11 2020 happened, the pandemic started and you decided to sit down and make this a priority. Before you design this process, what are your three goals in creating a successful initiative?
03:25 What were you hoping to get out of this? It wasn't created in a vacuum, so we pulled in customer success managers, team leads, managers from across our entire organization, across all levels.
03:38 So we wanted it to be something that wasn't pulled directly from my mind of what I thought the career path would be, but something that the entire organization would buy into and we felt like represented what it takes to be a customer success manager in our organization.
03:53 And then that was also an opportunity for these CSMs to have a project to contribute to the organization and present that out.
04:00 And then we were looking once we did roll it out to have those conversations document those, see where they were gaps between where CSM was self-evaluating and where their manager might think they're at and then talk about what they can do to get to that next level, any developer demonstrate the skills
04:17 and capabilities that we think it takes to move up in the organization. Yeah, your goals, you said down, you started doing this, looking back, it's almost three years out.
04:27 What has been the biggest impact on the organization, on the team? We do a survey every year where we look at what our engagement scores are.
04:35 We have seen tremendous progress in this area. The morale with our CSMs, managers are required to have these individual development conversations with their team at least once a year and like a check-in on progress later in the year.
04:50 So now we're carving out that time. We're having those conversations. So, our CSMs feel like they understand what it takes to get to that next level, why people are getting promoted, what they can do to get promoted, makes it transparent, makes it a great conversation with their managers, which helps
05:07 motivate them, and they know exactly what to do and what to work on. There's no surprises, either. People aren't sitting there with resentment.
05:15 So, we've seen great progress with people moving up to get promotion because we call it owning your own career. So, they know what it takes, they're having those conversations, and is up to them to follow through as well with support from their manager.
05:28 You didn't stop there when you did it. I think the next step of that was not just a vertical promotion, but also you looked into what can they do horizontally speaking from a career standpoint.
05:42 Can you speak about that and kind of walk us through what were some of the outcomes of this initiative? Our organization is quite large.
05:50 So we've ended up specializing even within customer success, different career paths. So the traditional customer success manager that and then we also have a track for an onboarding success manager who is assisting our customers from signature through goal-life of our product.
06:07 We have an engagement manager who doesn't have one to one customer responsibility but owns like a one to many piece of the puzzle focusing on helping our customers adopt and use our product.
06:19 And then we also have an upgrade, success manager, path, specifically geared around those major releases and supporting our customers through those transitions and the changes.
06:29 So just within our department, we have that plus of course the leadership path and we love to promote from within.
06:34 So we love to pull people from CSM path and then they might move into team lead or we've seen them move on to engagement or onboarding or upgrading or vice versa.
06:43 So we like to be transparent, as you said, about those different options within our group, as well as Daltech overall, but so that they can see what's available to them, what would it look differently in each of those different roles?
06:55 If you're not working one-on-one with a customer, that skill sets can look different than full lifetime ownership of a customer.
07:03 Yeah, you mentioned that there were very specific competencies that you have to find for each role. Perhaps you could walk us through one of them and I believe maybe you have something that you can show.
07:14 Yeah, so for example, on the customer success manager track, the different things that we specifically look at for competencies are their sales strategy and performance skills, their product and market knowledge.
07:27 And then what we call a CSM mindset, so things like problem solving, being a team player, being responsive to their customers, being proactive, having executive presence and advocating for the customers.
07:39 Why did you come up with these three high-level competencies? What was the process you took to pinpoint these out? This was where we pulled that team together and we spent a lot of time brainstorming.
07:53 That was our first step, hey, each of you. What do you think helps you be successful in your role asking that question, as well as doing research?
08:01 What other companies do, when you see a job description for a CSM, what kind of skills are being looked for?
08:06 How does that fit within our organization? What our expectations are. And we had some great conversations, and ultimately we're able to narrow it down to these specific categories, and then the different competencies that we see within there, because sometimes it's hard to choose.
08:22 So the mindset one kind of encompasses a lot, but we think that's important to be a successful CSM-adultic. How did you validate that these are the right ones?
08:32 One way that I think about is, all right, now I'm going to hire based on these competencies and see if I hire based on these skills, I might get CSMs that onboard quickly get in touch with customers much faster and way more effective much quicker after we hire them.
08:50 So is that what you've done to test this out or did you test it out in other ways as well?
08:55 Here's an example as we start to dive in to these different capabilities and competencies where we took that higher level driving result being successful in these different areas.
09:07 And then talked about, what does that look like at each level of our career path? We had to be able to define it.
09:12 There has to be a difference between what we expect from a level one in associate CSM versus the level seven senior advanced.
09:21 If we couldn't successfully define it or didn't feel like there was a huge difference, then that's one that gets thrown out.
09:28 And we look at the people that are getting promoted, and the skills that they're demonstrating, and why they're getting promoted, why there are go-to people, and talk about what helps them be successful at these different levels.
09:39 Sometimes it's a small tweak between different levels, and sometimes it is a larger expectation as someone moves up career path as well.
09:48 A big jump. So that was one way to test, because if there wasn't like a real difference, maybe it shouldn't be part of the competency structure for a specific role.
09:59 Yes, correct. So you define the competency guide in detail. You have a list of things that you wanted to include in there.
10:07 What was next in your process? After we spent the time giving our high-level competencies, defining what that looks like at all the different levels.
10:15 The next step was presenting it to the management team to make sure that we had their buy-in, that this made sense to them, that this aligned with how they were thinking about promotions and the people on their team.
10:26 And then we rolled it out to our whole team. So we did a webinar, essentially, a waiting where we had each of the team members present on different parts of it and rolled out everything to them.
10:38 This is our career path. This is what it takes to be successful as a CSM. This is how you get promoted.
10:43 You have to do your continuous learning. You have to do these different things, these are the requirements. And the next step is each of you take time, think about this, kind of self-assess yourself.
10:51 And then your managers are going to be setting up individual development conversations with you to talk about where they see you, as well as where you see you, and we can address any gaps and also talk about how to further develop certain skills if you're not demonstrating them yet, or it could be that
11:09 you are demonstrating it, but your manager hasn't seen it. So how can we make sure that they can see that you do possess that skill?
11:16 So you did a road show. Once you launched it, you actually asked all the CSMs to kind of like score themselves as to where they are and their skill set and then align expectations with their manager, A's, my manager sees me the way I see myself and if there is a gap assess next steps or come up with 
11:35 a way to prove that you actually do have those skills. I think that's wonderful or some of the major if any pushbacks that you had and first presented it to HR executive leadership team to cross functional teams.
11:47 To anybody, kind of like raise their hand and said, hey, you need to tweak this. Like, where are the any kind of like, how moments for you as you were doing your roadshow?
11:55 One of the biggest troubles, I guess, is that gap? Where, I see some things they're completely ready. They think they have all of these skills and all the knowledge, but the manager doesn't agree.
12:08 There were some tough conversations after this rolled out. When someone would listen to the webinar, the roadshow got excited and went to the manager and said, I'm ready, and then there would have to be a tough conversation of, okay, well, you might be here on this competency, but I don't see demonstrating
12:25 this piece of it, but I think long-term and overall, that's a positive thing, because the CSM had that feeling all along that they were ready, but it wasn't out in the open, and the manager wasn't necessarily delivering that tough feedback that they weren't there.
12:41 And now they had a framework to sit and say, well, I see you demonstrating this level of this competency. I want to help you get promoted.
12:49 So what can we do to develop those skills for you or demonstrate them for you? I think it's just so healthy to have something like that.
12:56 We always talk about aligning expectations and being super clear with our customers around their customer journey. We don't always do that for our own employees and team members, but look at what showed up And so some tough conversations, but a lot of transparency had ensued, do you make any corrections
13:16 or should I say adjustments to the description of what each competency or capability is? Do you find some of them ambiguous?
13:24 We started this in 2020, and we recently evolved it into the newest template that you see here. So there were tweaks to descriptions.
13:33 That wasn't a piece that I got a lot of pushback from customer success managers on, even though sometimes it might say proficient versus excellent.
13:42 And what does that look like? How do they demonstrate that they're excellent versus just meeting expectations? Things like that can still be somewhat hard to describe when somewhat subjective, but at least it can be a conversation of, well, this is what that means to me, or to you, this is how we can
13:59 show that skill and show how you're developing it, or want you to take this course, or want you to do a business review with your customer and also then or record it, different things like that could be used to show where the CSM was at.
14:12 I would say one of the things you mentioned troubles, I guess earlier, and the previous slide when I was showing that overall, like the customer success manager mindset, one of the competencies that we put there was being a team player.
14:24 And that is important to us, but that was something that I would say maybe was a bit of a surprise to some of the CSMs, because they looked at it as an individual role.
14:33 I have my customers, And I work with my customers and I have to hit my number to some extent. They weren't thinking of it as like a team sport.
14:42 Hey, we fill in for each other when a CSM is on vacation. Different things like that. We expect you to mentor and coach other CSMs on the team.
14:50 That is part of your job. That's part of our expectations. And if you are alone, Wolf, you're only going to go so far in the department, because that's not our culture here.
15:00 So it's a good similar to those things where there's huge gaps and expectations. And it's also good to just bring all that out into the open, so that someone knows, well this is what we're expecting and we see you performing well on your own, but we don't see you contributing to the team success.
15:15 And what could that look like? I got to tell you, Kristy, and I've seen so many forms of people that just say, hey, I had 150% over a quote for my upsells, and I had these many renewals, and I saved this many customers.
15:30 And yeah, that's great. Obviously you're very strong CSM. SM, but to be an excellent one, got us step it out.
15:38 You've got to bring innovation to your company. You've got to be a team player and you need to play in the customer success community.
15:44 I love what you're saying, absolutely, because that's something we believe in strongly here at Dell Tech. It's not something that maybe people think initially when they think about the customer success manager role, but it's so huge to be able to contribute to the community and that also helps them grow
16:00 in their career as well through the coaching and the mentoring in those contributions. One of the things you've also done as you define this career path is not just to say of how do we move up, but you also took the time to distinct between, for example, a team lead role that's tactical versus operational
16:17 and how can I actually become a more well-rounded professional within Deltek, even if I don't become a team lead, there's a career path for me that might be even outside of the CS organization.
16:30 Maybe you can talk little bit about that. Here's an example of those different tracks that we have and this is a fly that was shared within our organization, so something we're very transparent about, the individual contributor tracks that are available.
16:43 See, I'm that an engagement onboarding upgrade that we mentioned earlier, as well as we were talking about with the functional management track there.
16:52 We start at team lead and we show everyone what the equivalent is that you can advance in your career through the individual contributor path.
17:00 I think there was a conception that the only way to get promoted was to go into leadership, and that was the only future career path.
17:07 So we wanted to demonstrate that there was a robust career path that was all the same levels as the leadership career path in different horizontals.
17:17 And then there was still that leadership path for people that are interested. And for us, the first step on that journey is the team lead position.
17:25 So, it's often a player coach role, so they will still hold about half of the accounts that they had before.
17:31 They'll take on a small team of about four to six people, get a lot of coaching and support in training.
17:37 It can be a great way to see if management's for them, or if they want to step back into the individual career path, or then progress on through management and eventually not beholding accounts and things like that and taking on more CSMs, more products and more responsibilities, things like that.
17:54 I think this takes a lot of work and a lot of thought to put into this what a great organization you have for taking the time to establish this career map for them.
18:04 Thank you. I think it's something that's really important at Daltech and it was worth the time putting it all together and then being able to roll this out to our team and being able to have those great conversations and then continuing to promote people.
18:18 That's the best part when we get to see people grow and develop succeed in their new roles. All right, so since you launched this and you created a clear career path for folks, and do you see more CSMs?
18:32 Not necessarily talk about moving up the ladder from a leadership, but actually having conversations around moving vertically to another role, or advancing a level in their own current role, so that they get more accountability for things and taking on more complex projects, for example, or complex accounts
18:53 ? Yes, absolutely. And that wasn't even necessarily one of our goals when we set out to do this. But that has been a benefit of this program, I would say, is that there was that belief that you had to move into leadership and not everyone wanted to do that.
19:08 So now they're excited because they can see that progression through the individual contributor track and what that means. So they didn't want to just take on more accounts or have more work to do.
19:19 But like you said, more strategic accounts, more complex projects or different aspects of the role as well. And they know what it's going to mean as they move up into these different levels and can talk about with their manager if that's what they're interested in and what they want to do.
19:35 I want to revert the conversation for other executives that are listening to this and they're Oh my gosh, yeah, I totally need to do it.
19:42 I don't need eight levels. I'm okay with three. They probably start up, that's okay. If you're another price company like DelTech, then obviously you're gonna have a more robust career path.
19:52 But regardless of size, Christine, if you were an advisor for other companies, small or large, what are the must-haves that you absolutely need to think about and define when you're creating a clear career path for your customer success team?
20:09 Obviously, one of them is the career path overview, so it's the vertical and horizontal, the competencies. Was that anything else that you would recommend that they would include in this initiative that's like absolutely a must have or nice to have.
20:23 If you don't do that, it's not going to be as great. Yeah, I would say most organizations are probably going to have CSM, a senior level, and maybe one above that, and sometimes that also correlates to segments.
20:34 It might be your managing small business and mid-market and enterprise and things like that. So I don't think all the levels are necessary for sure.
20:41 As far as must have, I would say those competencies drilling down into, what is your job description? What is a CSM at your organization?
20:49 It can look different at each company as far as what the responsibilities are. You sometimes there's a renewal or revenue responsibilities, sometimes there isn't.
20:58 So what does it look like at your company to be successful as a CSM to find that? And if you can get the buy-in by having a group of people create that and do the road show, that will certainly help you be successful and then it's critical to have that follow-up of the conversation with each person where
21:15 are you on this path and also where do you interested in and how can I help you get there and then checking in on that because it can change rapidly on a day-to-day and even the one-on-one conversations they get too busy.
21:27 So it has to be intentional the time has to be carved out to have that conversation. I often get surprised especially with the first individual development conversation of what skill someone wants to develop, or what they're interested in, or what they brought from their old company that they feel like
21:42 it's a skill they're not using today. It's always a great conversation. You learn a lot and then you've got these people in mind when different projects come up.
21:50 You know who to tap, or who's ready to demonstrate some skills. It can be successful that way. Did that impact your new CSM onboarding process or your hiring process?
22:02 So, we did end up redoing all of our job descriptions as well in the last few years. And this certainly fed into how we built those job descriptions, what we're looking for, what skills are necessary to be successful at Delta in this position.
22:20 So, it absolutely gave us a framework for that and gave us an idea of what kind of people that we're looking for.
22:26 And what to hire, what questions to ask and those interviews. So definitely helped us a lot there and we've standardized our job descriptions, which was also a huge effort to read any interesting books about customer success or anything like a podcast that even helped you with this specific initiative
22:41 . Anybody that's listening here, what do you recommend? I definitely consume a lot of customer success media and some that I would recommend and specifically there's a podcast called Women in Customer Success that I love listening to.
22:55 There's women at work podcast as well. So those are both in heavy rotation for me. Love listening to those. Both podcasts that you mentioned are very important for women in business in general because they're inspirational.
23:09 I will be dropping them in the description to the podcast below. Christine, thank you very much for those that are listening still.
23:17 If you feel like you need help with defining the career path for your CSM New CS on boarding. We are here and see us in practice to help if you needed to help if you needed like to push things through and accelerate through that process without having to second guess anything Guys and gals.
23:35 Thank you so much for joining us big hug for me. I'll see you at the next episode