Because the current and future rules of customer success are The Perfect Customer Success Help Without the constantly being broken and rewritten, startups have to shift the Success Manager mindset to start thinking about customer success as an integral Think about how you can make it fast, relevant, cohesive, and part of their product and technology — a continuum of the personalized for customers — helping them help themselves, or customer journey. other users in the community. Build self-service into your roadmap to create a seamless experience with little to no involvement Hiring the Right Success Manager from a Success Manager. The trick is to use a sales and product When hiring a success manager, you have to think about more than mindset: every quarter, track the efficiency of your success solutions, adoption. What Venk, a former startup guy himself, learned over the understand what’s working and what isn’t, and iterate. years is that it’s about more than how often your customers use the product, it’s about helping them find and maintain business value. “Customers are going to want to self-serve Know Your Customer themselves before they reach out to a customer The success managers that do the best are the ones who support agent. [..] Deliver success at scale earlier than you’d think.” master “KYC” or Know Your Customer. You need someone who’s entrepreneurial, willing to build relationships with customers without Venk Chandran, Director, Product Management, Salesforce being asked to, and brings thought leadership to the table to inspire customers. Creating customers for life can seem daunting with everything else From there, success for success managers lies in: to focus on with a startup, but putting in the time to think through • Confidence� You’re here to help. Make it a bold statement. your strategy and playbook for customer success is critical to long- • Responsiveness� The speed of response is key. Even if term scale. you don’t have the solution right away, let customers know you’re working on it. • Transparency� Keep it real, and stay honest. How it Starts: Finding Success in the Ecosystem as a Startup 11