What makes a great CSM ?

Over the last 3 years, I had the opportunity to expand my own team, recruiting 10+ people to act as CSM or Account Manager.

I had, with the support of the recruitment team, to go through hundreds of CVs, hold more than 50 interviews and 20 practical days.

This recruiting activity combined to the daily management helped me to define the top qualities I consider mandatory to hire a best-in-class CSM.

They are all “soft” skills (NB: I hate this wording, they are way harder to acquire and grow than “hard” skills) and specifically suited to a CSM role. I didn’t consider generic qualities such as motivation, time/priority management, trustworthiness, technical/language/business skills, team spirit, autonomy, etc.

Bad humor didn’t make the top 5 but it would definitely have been top 10

I’ve narrowed my pick to 5 qualities (last want will surprise you, unless you found this article on my LinkedIn feed!), let me know your thoughts!

1. Customer centricity: Of course, but what does that mean? It’s a mix between empathy, generosity and rigor. Customer centered people want to understand their customers (needs, expectations, business challenges) so they can provide them with best service, help them to succeed but also educate them, for their own good (especially during the onboarding time)
2. Curiosity: CSMs have to be able to jump from a technical topic to an invoice one or a contractual/legal/sales/marketing topic, for a huge variety of customers and industry. They have to gain and retain decent knowledge about all those topics if they want to help their customers instead of answering “I note down your questions, get the information and send you an email”
3. End-to-end mindset (or ownership, if you’re speaking Amazonian). This one is my favourite. It means you should never hear a CSM saying “that’s not my problem, it’s a legal issue”. It’s a customer problem so it’s their problem. They are responsible to make sure their question receives an answer, as quickly as possible and with the highest level of quality.
4. Never satisfied: Have you ever heard a customer say “I love this product, because it’s ok”? Have you, as a customer, ever said this sentence? Of course not, you want a great product, a great service, a great experience, and you want to see it improve over time! So, CSMs have to be even more demanding than customers? Why? Because they will not discover a bug or potential for improvement, they already have identified it and put it on the roadmap (or at least they have asked the dev team to do so)!
5. Laziness: Yes, there is no mistake, and no, I didn’t need a fifth one to finish this article. I even considered putting it as #1. The best CSM are lazy !!! It’s absolutely obvious. Lazy are bored easily and don’t want to spend time on “useless” tasks. That’s great because that will lead them to simplify, optimize, automate and scale processes, leading to an even better customer experience!