Quick summary: No CSM can compress a customer’s time to value before they understand that customer’s goals, workflows and obstacles, so start by shortening the time to understanding.
How to shorten your CS team’s time to understanding.
In customer success, we talk constantly about time to value and for good reason. The sooner a customer gets value from the product, the more likely they’ll stay. But no CSM can compress a customer’s time to value before they understand that customer’s goals, workflows, and obstacles the customer is trying to get around this quarter.
That understanding takes time to build. But if you invest in reducing your team’s time to understanding, the customer’s TTV will come down with it.
Product knowledge is no longer the hard part.
CSMs used to spend more time learning the product than learning the customer. Plenty of CS leaders hire people with no prior exposure to their software, so product fluency has to come first.
But a team that knows only features and functionality can fit the product to any customer who walks in the door and never has to understand the business behind them. That generally doesn’t deliver value.
While CSMs still need to know the product, what separates a partnership from a transaction is how well your CSMs understand a customer’s process, workflows, and goals. That is what lets them bring a solution to the customer instead of a demo.
Start improving time to understanding immediately.
Most CS leaders have some standard practices to get a CSM up to speed quickly:
Put a new CSM’s first two weeks in writing. Give them a schedule they can follow on their own, and you’ll cut out a week of guessing about where to be and who to ask.
Hand over written material. Playbooks, process docs, and account standards give a new CSM something to work through at their own pace rather than absorb everything in live sessions. If those documents don’t exist yet, write them now. It gets much harder once the team is scaling and nobody has an hour to spare.
Pick an experienced CSM to sit alongside the new hire for the first 90 days and instruct both of them on what the role involves.
Set the milestones before the new hire arrives. These can include when they take their first call, when the book transfers, and what you expect them to run alone by day 90.
What I find valuable is to put new CSMs on calls early. When a CSM can listen to how customers talk, they find out what matters to those customers faster than any curriculum will teach them.
Don’t leave commercial skills until later.
In this year’s CSM Confidential Report, 83% of CSMs told us they carry some form of revenue responsibility, whether a quota, a target or a shared informal one. Only 60% feel prepared to own it. Nearly half received no commercial training of any kind in the past 12 months, and 44% say their sales and negotiation skills are what’s holding them back.
If your new CSM is going to run a renewal conversation in month four, build the renewal and negotiation practice into month two. And again, listening to previous calls will help a lot here, since it teaches new CSMs to hear what customers need rather than how to sell them on features and functionality.
Be honest about the learning curve.
There is foundational product information every CSM should know. But in customer success, you don’t really know what you’re doing for the first six months, because it takes that long to learn about the customer and the product together. Most CSMs aren’t comfortable until around the one-year mark, and plenty still feel lost somewhere in year two.
However, if you give them customers, their knowledge will climb fast. Roughly 70% of the learning comes from doing the work, 20% from colleagues, and 10% from formal training.
That split also explains why you can’t give a new CSM a fixed path. The first customer through the door might only want to talk about journeys, and if you have focused only on product features, you may not have taught them that yet. Plan for those gaps instead of assuming training can prevent them.
Where AI can help.
ChurnZero’s AI cuts down time to understanding significantly. We offer agents and functionality that show a CSM an account’s stakeholders, what those people have been working on, where the account is stuck, recent support tickets, how one contact engages compared to another, and who to target next. The features that help the most with time to understanding are
- The handoff agents. These agents transfer information to address CSM-to-CSM switches, implementation-to-CS handoff, and sales-to-CX handovers.
- Snapshot AI. It reads call notes, surveys, health scores, and usage data, then writes a summary in seconds. New CSMs do not need to dig to understand the basics of a customer.
- Our AI data enrichment agents. Unlike generic AI, our risk and opportunity signals include type, urgency, and impact, plus supporting context and a prescriptive next step. For a new CSM, that offers some additional context that can be discussed with their manager.
Where AI stops.
I recommend that new CSMs ask AI to write a recommendation for the customer. But once they have this document, I want to walk through it with them so they can see what sounds right and what doesn’t, based on what we know about the customer. This also builds good habits and reinforces that the CSM knows the customer better than AI does.
Shorten your own time to understanding as well.
CS leaders should follow the same principles when it comes to their teams. Go into your one-on-ones with enough context to know their accounts and what’s important to them.
I use AI across every one of their customers. That way, I can start with the signals raised the prior week and ask whether there are any escalations or if they want VP support. I arrive with the situations and the talking points already in hand rather than waiting for the CSM to tell me what’s happening. This has much more impact than the typical “What are you working on?” conversation.
Don’t make assumptions. Ask them where you might be right or wrong. The same principle applies to your own CSMs. What can you do to help them succeed? Know them.
