Craft your story | Ep. 121

[Rob] (0:00 - 0:21)

There's a lot of CSMs out there who are like, they look askance at support. They're like, I don't do support. Like, I don't do reactive work.

And there's a lot of CS jobs out there that just, well, you know what? We require some degree of reactive work. Yeah, let's do it.

[Dillon] (0:22 - 0:36)

What's up lifers and welcome to The Daily Standup with lifetime value, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas and opinions every single day. I got my man Rob here.

Rob, do you want to say hi?

[Rob] (0:37 - 0:37)

Hola.

[Dillon] (0:38 - 2:41)

Wow, that was nice and hurt my ears.

Rob, it's just you and me. I'm your host, Dillon Young. JP has abandoned us.

He's out, I think, gallivanting in Miami. Is that right? Yep.

That's right. Yeah. Following a hurricane.

I don't know if that was his smartest move he's ever done, but it's just you and me. And I have a question for you, Rob. You ready?

Do you want to guess what the answer is before I ask the question? I think the answer is revenue. Probably in part.

All right. So Rob, I ended up on my favorite place. Can you guess where that is?

Oh, it's Reddit. It's Reddit. And there's a question here from somebody that I think is really interesting and one that you have a lot to say about and have a unique position to answer.

So it's from Western Force 3875 and it is titled need help crafting my story as a CSM. And it says, I'm a young CS professional who works in implementation and deployment on my team while also leading the customer support team. I work with VPs, directors, and even C-suite level employees.

Really enjoy building, maintaining, and growing accounts. I've started applying and interviewing for CSM roles where my biggest challenge has been answering questions about how I reduce churn, manage renewals, and even the size of the book of business I manage. I've not directly done any of the above, but I am involved in making these a reality.

I truly believe I have the potential and willingness to learn and succeed at that, but I'm unable to get past the second round of any interviews because of that lack of experience. Any tips people can offer on how I can speak to these aspects of the role? Interesting.

Runs a support team. I feel like that's, it should be leaning more on that, right? There's a ton of statistics there, but tell me, first blush, what do you think?

[Rob] (2:42 - 2:56)

Yeah. So if I understand the situation correctly, sounds like this person is falling out of the interview process because they don't have background with some of the more commercial elements of like renewal, upsell, that kind of thing. Is that right?

[Dillon] (2:57 - 3:06)

And reducing churn even. Doesn't, can speak to it, but has no tangible experience being the person responsible for it.

[Rob] (3:07 - 5:41)

Yeah. So this is interesting. And this is completely off the top of my head because I've been there before and I think we're all in a position.

It's so funny. We're so in customer success. We're so hesitant to oversell because we've been burned by oversell so much before, but at some point in the interview process, there's a bit of a narrative or storytelling what this person is saying that that's worth telling.

I think experience is one way to merit a job that has certain components. And I think in that respect, this person has like a ton of experience. It just isn't exactly.

It's like Venn diagrammatic with the role that they're applying for. I would stop to ask, is this the right role to be applying for? And maybe this person wants to get out of support or managing a support team and move in a different direction.

But I think obviously the challenge at hand is starts with finding what is the middle of that Venn diagram and then what are the things in the side of the Venn diagram that actually make this candidate an exemplary candidate for this role? Because there's certain things. It's not every candidate that's going to have management experience.

And maybe there's a case to be made that owning that support experience is a real asset to a company. I would think so. Yeah.

Think about it. There's a lot of CSMs out there who are like, they look askance at support. They're like, I don't do support.

I don't do reactive work. And there's a lot of CS jobs out there that just, you know what? We require some degree of reactive work.

I think every job in many ways is going to have some degree of reactive work. So I think there's a combination of owning that history. But I also think there's other things to do that don't pertain to this candidate's experience.

I think having a developed opinion about the space that the company is in, the company that this person's applying for, like having a developed opinion, a thesis about the space, some research that you've done around the space is something that can also differentiate a person by saying, look, I understand where this is at. And maybe it's only the outside looking in. But guess what?

That's what we do all the time in customer success, right? We have to understand our customers' businesses from the outside looking in. So I do think there's a way to develop a thesis that pertains to the company that you're applying for, ideally in the late stages, because you're not going to have this during the phone screen phases.

That can be compelling to the hiring manager.

[Dillon] (5:42 - 7:08)

I'm reminded of a conversation we had with Kristen Gray Sykes. That conversation was probably close to six months ago at this point. But I am reminded of what she said, like this is not the market to try to change job titles or to jump levels.

And I'm not necessarily saying that this person needs to stay in support. But I wonder if they're just running up against the same challenges that most folks looking for jobs are right now, which is that the competition is just so fierce. And so if you do not meet the criteria, if you can't speak to your experience with churn and expansion and those commercials, do you, this is a fatalist statement, but do you even stand a chance against folks who have?

And then on top of that, where I think they may even be finding additional challenges, they're also a people manager asking to go back to an IC role. And in many cases, people think that's not allowed. They think, oh, you're a people manager.

You must love managing people. Why would you want to go back to doing the work? So those are just two cons that I think are important to identify.

I don't know that they're true or valid in this case, but what do you think about that?

[Rob] (7:09 - 8:45)

Yeah, I think it's important. On the second point, it's important to have an explanation for that question. I have hired quite a few people who are really good ICs who have managed people before, but they're like, you know what?

Management is not for me. And I relate to that. If it weren't for the fact that Lauren, who just joined my team, is just such an all-star, I've spent the last two years saying, I have no interest in managing people again.

It's just not, it's really not. Coaching I love, but there are different avenues to coaching than management. In fact, I think management can be an impediment to coaching.

Coming up with some kind of narrative, like what I just said, can be pretty compelling to a hiring manager to help them understand why you're interested in moving from a management role to an IC role. As far as proving your capacity to handle commercials, there's not an easy way to do that. You can do your best to train yourself on these things, but at the end of the day, having a lot of experience is the primary way to show that you're actually capable of managing those things.

The only exception to that, I would say, are either A, like I said, you've done a ton of research around the domains and you're like, I haven't done this before, but I have researched this a ton. Maybe I listened to The Daily Standup podcast where I learned a thing or two. Or B, I think more importantly, finding a hiring manager or a company that's willing to take that bet on you is pretty important.

[Dillon] (8:46 - 8:49)

I just wonder if anybody's gambling these days.

[Rob] (8:49 - 9:04)

Oh, I see people gambling. Typically, it's early-stage startups that don't really know. They're like, you know what?

Renewals, upsell, churn management, this all matters, but I'm not going to lie. This is like 10% of the role. Maybe 70% of the role is actually support.

[Dillon] (9:06 - 10:18)

Well, then that person wins. That's our time. Thank you for indulging me, allowing me to get my shadow sponsor Reddit mentioned in another episode.

I hope that this is helpful to folks. These are questions that I find myself asking a lot of. What does the landscape look like today?

Who wins in a landscape like this? I will say that what I think was really valuable in what you said is having some sort of thesis or opinion and not just saying, oh, what do you guys do? Yeah, you're an AI company.

Understanding a little bit more about what their mission is and whether you should believe in that mission, but understanding what that entails and where that might go. As a CSM, you should be able to do that because you've had to train yourself on how to understand different business structures and how do they make money and what's their roadmap look like and so on and so forth. I think that's a super valuable piece of advice and one that should be pretty accessible to CS professionals.

Anyway, that is our time, Rob. Thank you again. Hey, come back soon.

Talk some more. I'll check my schedule.

[Voiceover] (10:22 - 10:53)

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