Most of the SaaS businesses now realize the value of having a well-equipped customer success manager and team to root the evolving success of their company. Satisfied clients are beaming with renewals and expanding the base, ensuring steady growth in the financial facets. In such a case, the topic of customer success manager salary is like a coffee bean that everyone eyes to spill. Luckily enough, this blog helps you do that. It helps you delve into the compensation structure of the customer success managers along with the burning salary trends. Let’s go now.

Responsibilities of a CSM

• Nevertheless, customer success roles could take form in many ways. Simply put, as a customer success manager, you will have a lot in your basket to render, both in terms of quality and quantity.
• Advocate your company: you will have to act as a personal cheerleader for your business. You will have to see whether your clients meet their specific needs or not.
• Onboard new clients: Onboarding is extremely vital to any company. You will have to educate the customers on how to use the product, the importance of the best features. And how they can be benefited from the product. Remember, the first impression is the last impression.
• Up your Upsells and Cross-sells: One of the easiest ways to enhance your customer lifetime value is by upselling and cross-selling. You should have complete dedication to fulfill customer satisfaction goals and introduce them to the premium services and products. You may also explain to them how the additional purchase could benefit them as well.
• Augment the renewals: The duty of the customer success manager is to create customer stickiness and repeat the customers. Not only that, but you should also keep full track of the customer product expiration dates as well. And follow up with the clients on a timely basis and propel them why they should renew the service.                          

Sample CSM Jobs           

• Customer Success Manager: You are responsible for developing a great relationship with your customers. A term that fuels customer retention and loyalty. Your set of goals will include aligning goals, ensuring the satisfaction quotient of the customers. And improving on the areas that lack some streamlined focus into it.
• Vice President, Customer Success: You will be responsible for managing and growing the current client base globally across the entire business segment. Not just that, you will have to build and manage a customer success team. And be responsible enough for ensuring that your clients have a longer customer lifetime value quotient.
• Chief Customer Success Officer: You will be responsible for taking up the executive and critical positions in the company. It will demand of you to create an organizational structure. That should best support all the clients to quickly climb the stairs to success. Although this role focuses on the customers and enhancing the lifetime value. You will have to see how profit maximization can take place in the meanwhile, as you put churn to a minimum.

CSM Compensation Structure                  

While there is an ongoing debate in the customer success business over the best customer success manager salary structure, most of these compensations center around this:

Base Plan

Here, a fixed amount is paid in return for the work which you perform without any given bonuses or perky commissions. Or any of the variable elements that can increase the total compensation. I guess it is safe to say that there is still no motivation to overachieve the decided target or performance standards. Happily enough, there is no penalty charged for performing below the par.

Base + Bonus Plans

Now here you will see a fixed amount being paid coupled with a bonus component for the teams that complete a set of projects or objectives. Meanwhile, bonuses align the client success manager. And their teams with any of the company objectives and the key performance indicators, KPI such as NPS, training, and development or expansion of the client base.

Base + Variable Plan

Interestingly, here a fixed amount is put up with a variable component based on the individual customer success manager performance. Aside from this, incremental and easy to measure targets that are directly related to the revenue are set. This will help incentivize customer success manager to exceed their goals.

However, the variable payment does not really limit the generation of revenue alone. Some of the other metrics like unpaid training and level of adoption could also be tracked and compensated as well.

CSM Salary Trends                       

One of the latest reports published by the LinkedIn and the State of the Customer Success Profession for 2019, says that customer success manager is one of the most demanding and quicker expanding jobs in the year 2019. Let us see how the performance of the trends in the States.

While the average salary hovers somewhere around $80,000 to $90,000, there are still some hitches and bumps. Texas claims its average to be within $90,000 to $100,000 whereas New York claims it around $80,000 to $90,000. Surprisingly, it is still on the same page for the mean salary in Washington as well. In the states of Chicago and Minneapolis, the average is somewhere around $85,000 to $90,000.

In a similar fashion, the average customer success manager salary in Austin takes a notch down with a cumulative mean of $60,000 to $65,000. However, it revives back in Atlanta with a whopping mean salary of $75,000 to $80,000. It shows a similar pattern for the statistics acquired by Denver as well.

Final Take

Goes without saying, it is the Client success manager who has a lot to do with the success of the company. It is almost safe to say that the performance and the revenue generation are directly proportional. Being the focal point of contact between a client and a company, you will have to have all the requisites qualities for bringing out glory to your company.

WRITTEN BYKaustubh Sangam

Kaustubh Sangam is a Customer Success Analyst with 2 years of experience. Committed to delivering exceptional customer experiences and driving business growth. Proficient in leveraging data analysis to optimize customer success strategies.

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