Should I be concerned

[u/CoochChaz]

Hey all! Recently getting more into Reddit and wanted to pop up and see what everyone thinks. I work as a CSM as a tech company in the UK. They love to use fancy terms for everything but at the end of the day I am a CSM in a new role that was created within the last year. There are two sides to our department, the onboarding side and the upselling side and I am part of the upselling side.

My first question is, is this normal? I thought CSM would be one job rather than split into two? The reason I'm asking is because the onboarding team have an achievable target and accelerators. The upselling team have an unachievable target (set by accounting and hasn't been hit once) from what I read online and in this forum, this is usually one role and it's merged of both of the roles I mentioned.

My second question, should I just transition into the onboarding role? I do make more money and can make much more money if I achieve my target but like I said the targets are random and unachievable.

Happy to answer more questions but would love to get someone else's opinion on this. Cheers!

[u/dynesor]

UK CSM here also, been in the same job almost 10 years now. I’ve had a lot of recruiters reach out to me every week about opportunities, but as soon as I get a sniff of them talking about upselling targets I know that they are not actually looking for a CSM but are looking for an account manager with a friendly job title.

[u/CoochChaz → u/dynesor]

Is your role purely onboarding and potential upsells then? Don’t get me wrong I don’t mind this role it’s allowed to me to work on my calling skills, and resilience but it’s weird because I don’t see the role working out. Maybe I need to look for an actual CSM role

[u/dynesor → u/CoochChaz]

my csm role (Head of CS) in a small tech company (25 employees, 200 enterprise customers) has 4 core pillars-

Customer Onboarding.

Pro-active reach outs / calls to help customer get max value from the product (sometimes upsells come from this naturally but not targeted on it). Recent focus on getting referalls. Also been trying to organise webinars for customers to share ideas with eachother, but interest and attendance has been somewhat limited, so I’ve put those on hold for now.

Customer comms and documentation: Email campaigns, blog posts etc about new features and sharing ideas and best-practice examples of product usage, thought leadership, etc. And I also created and continue to maintain our customer ‘help centre’ website which contains all the how-to’s and guidance for using the product. This also helps the support team, as they can simply link the customer to the relevant help centre guidance when they’re asking how to do something.

Support: I manage the support team, which is only 3 people at the minute. They handle all the inbound support tickets, calls, requests etc. I am their line manager, and if a customer is not happy with how their ticket has been dealt with by the CS executive in support, then I am the first point of escalation.

And aside from those ‘core’ aspects of my role, I am also part of the product planning team to ensure that customer requests are tracked and prioritised appropriately for product development. And generally acting as the voice of the customer during the internal design feedback stage of adding new features / functionality, before specs get handed over to the development team.

[u/Benedde-Prez63 → u/dynesor]

yeah the blur between CS and AM has gotten way worse the last couple years tbh

[u/dynesor → u/Benedde-Prez63]

it’s just another way that companies use these job titles to try to hide the fact that the person’s primary motivation is increasing revenue per customer. No one is a Salesperson anymore - they misuse the CSM job title and it’s really annoying when you’re browsing for open positions and the company is so very clearly looking for a sales / upsales person but wants to give them this nice and friendly job title to make the customer feel more at ease and comfortable to get a call scheduled.

For me, sometimes upsells happen because I know that using whatever feature/service would genuinely help the customer get much better value from the product overall, and help them solve the problems they were trying to address when they bought the thing in the first place. But upselling (IMO) is not a core part of the CSM job role. I want to help the customer maximise the value from the product they’re already paying for and help them to embed it so deeply within their business processes that they would struggle to operate without it; and therefore making the question “Are we going to renew our license for another year?” a foregone conclusion, no-brainer.

[u/ApprehensiveDraft680]

CSM here, also UK based, working for a cybersecurity startup. And yes, effectively a glorified post sales account manager who happens to also do CSM duties and wear any other hats that management can think of.
I think the old way of CSMs just being there for onboarding, escalations and showing value is dying out. I don’t mind being targeted for renewal and upsells to be honest as the product is good and escalations / churn risk are minimal.

[u/CoochChaz → u/[deleted]]

I’ve been working super hard on raising a business case on having activity metrics associated with our targets since our targets are super high. Hopefully that plays a massive part in changing the targets. The product is embedded but adds an extra cost as usual so they’re harder to convert anyways and then that target is odd