Quick summary: When you land in a new CS leadership role, the first 90 days count. Build trust fast, deliver visible value in week one, and become the go-to person fast.
Ashley Stamps-Lafont, an executive coach, CS strategist and founder of The SuccessRx, says 90 percent of you will be brought in to fix things. More specifically, to fix churn.
“The jobs that ask you to build something new or help them expand into a new market are becoming rarer and rarer,” Stamps-Lafont says.
Before you accept the role, ask hard questions. Find out why this role exists and why now. Find out who left. Then ask what the last thing to get vetoed was, and why. That answer tells you whether this deserves your energy.
“I want every decision to be informed,” Stamps-Lafont says. “And to also be a conscious decision.”
This article was compiled from a recent ChurnZero webinar with Stamps-Lafont. Watch the full webinar.
The framework for your first week.
You make an impression in those first days whether you plan to or not. CS leaders can apply the same three-part framework they use to onboard accounts to these first days on the job, Stamps-Lafont says.
Start by reframing what you’re managing. Your role is an account. It might sit inside a parent-child hierarchy, or it might be one job in a longer arc you’ll have at that company. Either way, it’s the account you’re caring for, and the framework below is what you’d run on any new one.
1. Context: What the role needs from you right now.
Look at what they’ve communicated about goals, but also pay attention to what they’re not communicating. Note what they’re prioritizing and what should come later or not at all.
Some of that you already have. It came through the dialogue in your interviews and in the answers to the vetting questions above. The rest you collect in week one by asking, the same way you’d run discovery on an account you just inherited.
The objective here matches what you do for customers. Make the right calls, build trust early, and get that first value realized. Stamps-Lafont treats initial value realized as the success metric worth aiming at, for a new customer and for a new leader alike.
2. Self: The elements of your leadership style that work best here.
Once you understand the situation, place yourself inside it. Work out what’s expected of you to support them and what kind of leader they need you to be at this point.
Then comes the half most people skip. “Which elements of me work best here?” Stamps-Lafont asks. “And also important, which elements of me don’t work here?”
You’ve answered a version of this before. Every interview asks about your leadership style, and most of us can recite that answer on request. This one is harder, because the context decides it rather than you. Stamps-Lafont calls this forming your identity as a leader: choosing which parts of your leadership to lead with, given the situation you just read and the choices in front of you.
You already shape your approach with customers. Do the same internally.
3. Move: The action to take this week to build trust and show first value.
Or, as Stamps-Lafont puts it, deciding what you do about it.
At onboarding, the move is whatever builds trust now and gets them to the first value they were picturing when they extended the offer. That’s the thing you can point to at the end of the week.
Also note, in high-growth environments, a 30-60-90 plan is likely too slow.
“You really want to make sure you build that credibility fast; doing a check-in at the end of each week is the maximum interval that you should be using to see whether or not you’re making the right amount of progress,” Stamps-Lafont says.
How to know you’ve “landed the plane.”
Onboarding timelines are subjective, but if you don’t feel you’ve landed the plane in the first 90 days, you probably haven’t.
The signs are specific. You get invited to meetings before you ask. Your name starts appearing in rooms you weren’t formally added to. Colleagues seek your perspective without you raising your hand. “Are you the person that someone who hasn’t directly interacted with you knows is responsible for the very thing that’s on your job description?” Stamps-Lafont asks.
Watch the questions people bring you. Early on, they ask who you are. At some point that shifts.
“The biggest determinant of whether or not you’ve made it is when the questions have shifted from, who are you, to, what do you think?” Stamps-Lafont says. “Because that means that your words carry value.”
Building the case.
Stamps-Lafont worked with a client named Rachel (story shared with her permission) who did everything right: landed the plane, built credibility, delivered value. But when she pushed for promotion 18 months in, she was told: “Not yet.”
One of the gaps was data. Rachel couldn’t quantify her impact.
Naming your impact numbers is what clients struggle with most, Stamps-Lafont says. Buyers make decisions on both figures and emotion. The same applies to your promotion pitch.
In a new role, you need to be able to quantify the amount of churn you stabilized, the dollar impact of that retention, the number of at-risk accounts you saved, etc. These numbers may be company numbers, but they’re also your impact numbers.
If you haven’t been tracking them, it’s not too late to start. And track them yourself. Relying on other teams to record what you’re doing will never put you in a position of advantage, Stamps-Lafont says. Kept as your own portfolio of wins, that record works you into promotion conversations instead of leaving you to reconstruct the last two years from memory.
Once the numbers are down, you can talk about the rest. In CS terms, the rest is your CSAT and NPS: emotion-based measures nobody relies on alone, though a downward trend always earns attention. For your own case, it’s the trust you’ve built with your team and your customers. It shows up in the G2 reviews customers wrote about working with you, in what your team says about your leadership at performance review time, and in the culture you shaped, provided you can name the impact you had on it.
Numbers and feelings still leave you competing. What makes the biggest difference, inside the company and outside it, is someone who will vouch for you. But not everyone you get along with is an advocate who can help shape the decision.
“Advocacy without data is a favor, and advocacy with data is a case,” Stamps-Lafont says.
Rachel secured her promotion four months later, off-cycle from the annual review process.
When you know you’re ready to expand.
The first sign is the work nobody handed you. If you start naturally solving things outside your job description, that’s a sign you’re ready for expanded scope.
You’re also ready when your impact travels past you, and other people in your organization describe your wins when you’re not in the room. “If you put this simply, it would mean that others describe it even when you’re not in the room,” Stamps-Lafont says. That’s impact.
Quality and scope also matter, especially when they are repeatable. “I expanded an account. Amazing. And you repeat that every week, maybe every quarter, and you get the recognition for it. But at some point, it starts to feel a little bit routine,” Stamps-Lafont explains. When the wins turn routine, the next move may be an expanded scope that gives you a different flavor of win, or a different role entirely.
If you’re stuck.
If you’ve pushed for a promotion and haven’t gotten it, ask yourself a different question.
“If you have been pushing, and you’ve unfortunately been told ‘not yet,’ or keep your head down and keep doing the work, then it’s more of a question of asking yourself: Well… If not me, who?” Stamps-Lafont says. Look at who else got promoted and what they did differently. Then work out whether a path exists at this company at all.
She doesn’t see someone going up for promotion more than twice, missing it, and still having a path at that company that aligns with them. “At that point, your promotion packet becomes your value communication packet for your next role,” Stamps-Lafont says.
Your company not being ready to promote you says more about the company than about you. It might mean you need a new one.
The bottom line.
You are the CEO of your career, a concept Stamps-Lafont credits to ReDonna Rogers, founder of the Center for Teaching Entrepreneurship. Your job is one account in your book of business. But it’s not the only one.
Treat your new CS leadership role as you’d treat a complex customer account: Ask hard questions before you sign on. Apply a clear framework from day one. Build trust through visible value delivered in week one, not month three. And don’t wait to understand the data that proves your impact.
You build credibility on purpose. Start this week.
