How Iterable Hires Top Customer Success Talent
2023 has already seen many layoffs at companies like Meta, Salesforce and Yahoo.
We're seeing an unprecedented time where some companies in the Martech space have cut most or all of their customer success team. And more are likely ahead, so it’s a great time to brush up on your interviewing skills. In this blog, we’ll talk about what managers at Unicorns like Iterable look for when hiring top customer success talent and the components make up a customer success role.
About Tasmin
I sat down with Tasmin Singh, who manages an Enterprise Customer Success team at Iterable, one of the leading cross-channel marketing automation platforms in the marketing technology (Marctech) space. We asked Tasmin to spill the tea on what she looks for when interviewing candidates, and she's not one to gate keep. 🙂
Tasmin has been in Martech for over a decade and while she leads a Customer Success team now, each role leading up to where she is now has been what she calls “a 30 degree pivot.” She began her career as a Data Analyst for cross-channel marketing campaigns at Yahoo!, pivoting to a Mobile Developer Evangelist role at Flurry Analytics. She describes the evangelist role as “customer success light” since her focus was on engaging and retaining customers on a free product.
Her first traditional role in Customer Success was at Localytics (a mobile analytics and messaging platform), where we worked together!
After that, Tasmin joined Iterable as an Enterprise CSM, and fairly quickly, got promoted to an enterprise team lead, where she now manages a team of 7. Since she joined 4 years ago, Iterable has grown from 200 to over 700 people and most notably the CSM team went from 10 people then to 70 and counting now.
Aisha: Every team structures their Customer Success team differently. Some businesses have dedicated Account Manager, Solutions Architect, and a Customer Success Manager, whereas Iterable hires Full Stack CSMs. Can you share a bit more about what it means to be a Full Stack CSM?
Tasmin: Iterable’s customer success team sets the bar very high when interviewing and we look for “full stack CSMs”. A full stack CSM is a blended role between revenue, strategy and technology. In terms of sales experience, we look for CSMs who have experience with contract negotiations and renewals.
Aisha: That’s so important. I’ve learned that this is a critical thing I need to ask before interviewing somewhere, so I know what type of support I’ll have and what I’ll be expected to handle myself. What else do you look for in a Full Stack CSM?
Tasmin: On the strategy side, the obvious things we look for is the ability to conduct business reviews, create mutual success plans, ability to assess usage metrics to create adoption plans, devise and present use cases to unlock, but strategy is more than these basics.
We value CSMs who can provide customers with guidance and best practices. For example, one of the biggest challenges facing marketers today is stricter privacy rules that make measuring performance marketing harder. So we look for CSMs who have experience helping customers overcome these challenges. This means folks who are coming from the martech industry who are familiar with recent privacy changes with ATT (App Tracking Transparency), GDPR, deliverability changes, BAAs, etc. If the candidate is able to describe a scenario in which they provided a high level strategy, this is a good indicator that they are aware of industry trends.
I’ve also seen CSMs who try to tackle everything alone, and end up failing to deliver customer outcomes. So I look for candidates who know when to bring in our Professional Services or Solutions teams. We call these resource coordination skills: the ability to draw a line in the sand where CS expertise ends and the need to bring in other teams to solve a customer problem begins.
Lastly, we evaluate technical expertise. Now let me be clear, we don't expect that everyone is going to be an engineer. This is why resource coordination is an important part of the role. But some candidates don’t have the technical depth to ask the right questions. So I look for folks who are familiar-enough with the language and the product to know when to bring in a Solutions Architect, and how to articulate the problem at hand. We call this gathering technical requirements, the ability to frame the technical issue.
I also want to note here that we don't expect every candidate to be strong at all three. We prioritize one skill over the other based on what the team is missing at that time. For example, someone might be great technically, but not good at contracts. If the team has many technical people and just a few negotiators, we might pass. My advice would be: ask the hiring manager what is important to them or what the team is prioritizing, and be open about your strengths.
Aisha: What do you look for when you are Interviewing candidates?
Tasmin:
Resource allocation skills: Since we were on the topic - Understanding and executing resource coordination is key, especially on the enterprise side. We’re not looking for experts because Iterable has made it more nuanced overtime, we have a handbook with scenarios.
Company Values: When we do peer interviews, we generally have each candidate focus on one core competency for the role and one core company values (in Iterable’s case those are Trust, Humility, Balance, and Growth Mindset). Doing so allows us to avoid redundancies in the questions you are asked but also gives us some breadth and depth into your background. This is an increasingly common practice for larger companies so I recommend spending some time on the company’s page to understand what their values are and how you’ve displayed those in your own career or life.
These kinds of questions can run from “what is something you’re proud of personally or professionally” to “what was your last professional development investment and how has it helped you grow” to “how do you build trust with a customer.”
Strategic/industry experience: My advice here would be to know and practice your key customer stories that you want to tell. For example, anyone who has worked in customer success should be able to tell a story about a time they had to give a customer bad news and how they turned around a poor customer relationship. We need to know that we could put you in front of a $3M customer and you’d be able to build the right relationships and articulate their business needs. If it’s an industry that’s less familiar to you, make an extra effort to learn the language of that industry and its trends.
You don’t have to have a strictly CSM background for me to hire you but do need to show me that you excel in communication, problem solving, escalation management, and proactively thinking about customer expansion. For folks who are considering a full scale pivot into to a CSM role, my #1 recommendation is to look for a CS role that serves your current industry since you will understand what that industry’s customers’ needs are and allow you to speak their language; it’s the superpower that will make you uniquely suited for those roles!
Research what the company does: I like to assess when people have done their research about our company as well as if they are able to describe their current company.
In a phone screen I will usually ask “how does your company make money?” and in a later stage interview, I will ask “Can you explain what you think Iterable’s product does?”
It is shocking how many people come into an interview not being able to answer these questions. If you didn't take 5 seconds to google our company or are unable to articulate your company’s business model, no matter how prepared you are otherwise, I’m almost always going to pass on you. The reason is that because at the core of it, the CSM role is about knowing your customer, understanding their business model, and how to tailor your strategic initiatives with them and not knowing these answers shakes my confidence that you would do those things in a customer setting.
A couple of sentences will usually suffice, but the candidates that have stuck out to me have gone above and beyond and will do things like citing case studies on our site, mentioning trends they’ve noticed (positive and negative) in our reviews on G2, or comment on nuggets they’ve found on our knowledge base.
Aisha: What is the # 1 piece of advice you’d give to new and aspiring Senior CSMs?
Tasmin: Do your research about the company that you’re interviewing for (clearly I have strong feelings about this haha) and ask insightful questions during an interview. If you aren’t asking me any questions during an interview, that is generally a bad sign. That being said, please do not ask me what a typical day in the life looks like! It’s a boring question that doesn’t add much on either side. Understanding what your future managers and peers are goaled on, what business challenges and triumphs that have come up recently or are expected for the next year, how the team is structured and how your role fits in, and how you can best add value are all much more interesting for both parties and shows you’re thinking about the kinds of things I want a CSM asking their customers.