4. Organizational Structures
Each org has its own goals…
• Sales: New BusinessARR
• Marketing: MQLs
• Customer Success:Gross Renewal Rate and
UpsellARR
• Support:Ticket ResolutionTime
• Services/Onboarding: Project Completion
Time, Services Gross Margin
CS org…
• Ensures SupportTeams are not just driving time to
resolution, but also driving toward the right resolution
from the customer’s perspective
• Gives feedback to the SalesTeam
• Works with the Services/OnboardingTeam to help
overcome any negative sentiment during onboarding
and ensure value is delivered
5. Describe your relationship with Sales
• One word
• Who owns renewals?
• Who owns upsells?
• Whose responsibility is it to map out and communicate the customer’s org structure
and build broader relationships?
• Does Customer Success need anything from Sales after the deal is closed?
• Does Customer Success have any input into the Sales process?
• Are there circumstances where Customer Success brings Sales back into an existing
customer?
8. Organizational Model #1: Carve Out
Silos
• This solution argues that if Customer Success is to be a peer to Sales and other departments, it has to be fully accountable for its own metric – i.e. take
full credit and blame for it, even if the team’s influence is limited.
• In this world, every department is accountable for one to two key metrics. For example:
• Sales: New Business ARR
• Marketing: MQLs
• Customer Success: Gross Renewal Rate and Upsell ARR
• Support:Ticket ResolutionTime
• Services/Onboarding: Project CompletionTime, Services Gross Margin
• This is what most SaaS businesses look like today. In this model, every department head fights for resources to achieve his/her metric.At Gainsight, we
call this model the “Team of Rivals.”
• The benefit? Every metric is well-represented in a cross-functional debate.
• The downside?There are often significant negative externalities from each department’s actions. For example:
• Support strives for faster resolution time to the detriment of the customer experience, hurting the gross renewal rate that the CSM team is responsible
for.
• Customer Success strives to improve the renewal rate, but doesn’t make the effort to convert happy customers into advocates, which is a missed
opportunity to drive the MarketingTeam’s MQL generation.
9. Organizational Model #2: Make Customer
Success the Glue
• At Gainsight, we know Solution #1 isn’t the best way to run a company.That’s why we’ve written so much about the role of the CSM in serving as the
quarterback - on behalf of your customers - to hold other departments accountable for their role in customer success.
• This model takes for granted that other departments – Sales, Marketing, etc. – are largely focused on their own one-to-two metrics and operating in
their own silos.TheCSM’s role is to prevent the resultant inefficiencies from affecting the customer experience.
• In this model, the CSM…
• Ensures that SupportTeams are not just driving time to resolution, but also driving toward the right resolution from the customer’s perspective.
• Gives feedback to the SalesTeam when they sell to customers that aren’t ready for the product (see our Readiness Risk).
• Works with the Services/OnboardingTeam to help overcome any negative sentiment during onboarding and ensure value is delivered (see
ourImplementation and Sentiment Risks).
• Etc.
• The detriments of this model are as follows:
• Your CSMs have to be strong – they’ll be expensive.
• Your head of CS also has to be strong.
• Ideally, non-CSM teams keep customer happiness in mind even when theCSM team isn’t monitoring them.When CSM has to monitor, opportunities to
drive customer happiness are inevitably missed.
• Pattern recognition will invariably slip through the cracks.Your CSMs might succeed in tactically resolving cross-functional issues that arise, but they
won’t be in a good position to identify patterns that require functional expertise. For example, they may not recognize that a product enhancement
