Explore the customer success mindset

- Most hiring managers look for a range of attributes in candidates who are hoping to pivot into customer success. My friend Matt Katz, who's led customer success teams at multiple companies, breaks them down into three categories, mindset, skillset, and toolset. Let's start with mindset. The job of a customer success pro is to ensure that every customer is getting all the value they're entitled to. In customer success, your key metrics are retention, satisfaction, and financial growth of the relationship over time. So ultimately, customer success is about building good relationships. The role favors people with a natural empathy who can put themselves in their customer's shoes and think, "What would I want or need in this situation?" Customer success professionals are proactive and curious with a can do attitude of, "I'm going to find a way to help this customer." Even if you don't know much about the company's products or who in the organization can impact how a customer feels, are you the kind of person who can figure it out? This mindset requires more than just a supportive attitude. A customer success professional needs to be comfortable challenging customers in a positive way, pressure testing their requests. And if you think a customer would be better off if they spent more money with you, you need to be comfortable asking for the business. You need to be results-oriented, motivated by metrics like satisfaction or revenue. Land and expand is often the mantra cry for many customer success teams. You don't have to close the initial sale, but you do have to be comfortable with growing the business by upselling. People with this mindset often find their way into other customer-facing roles like customer support, technical support, retail, inside sales, or even nursing. Often, they like developing relationships but don't like the transactional nature of sales. So if you work in these areas, you can probably make the connection between what you've been doing and how your mindset could help you thrive in customer success. Mindset can't be taught. It's who you are at your core, who you probably were when you were five years old. Rod Cherkas, author of "The Chief Customer Officer Playbook," tells a story about how as a child, he often worked in his mom's dry cleaning shop. He loved to memorize customers' names and be able to pull their clothes before they even walked into the store. It was a game for him, building relationships and anticipating customer needs. If you're naturally hospitality oriented, motivated by problem-solving for customers, and willing to work your network in service of others, you definitely have a leg up in customer success.