Building Collaboration Between Account Managers and Customer Success Managers

As more and more companies are transitioning to a subscription-based business model from a proprietary one, creating and growing a team of customer success managers is becoming more and more necessary. CSMs have become an additional touchpoint for customers in addition to account managers (AMs), who were previously solely responsible for managing client relationships. It’s obvious that, in order for both CSMs and AMs to achieve their customer goals, they need to work collaboratively and carefully plan their actions both on a strategic and tactical level. In this article, we’ll discuss how to establish that collaboration and highlight the common challenges of working as an account team and how to address them.

Before we dive into the discussion on collaboration, let’s first highlight the goals each role seeks to achieve. Obviously, specifics may vary from one organization to another, but in a nutshell, account managers are usually responsible for hitting their sales quota and bringing a certain amount of dollars to the table by the end of the month. They proactively seek opportunities for upselling to grow the cash streams coming from the clients. Customer success managers, however, are responsible for retaining as high a percentage of the customers as possible by helping them to uncover value from the product and making sure that the return on investment (ROI) is maximized.

This difference in goals can potentially create a conflict of interest in the following aspects:

• Both CSMs and AMs may engage the same customer and fight for their attention. When their actions are not aligned, the achievement of goals may become more challenging, and room for confusion is created for the customer (“why do I get so many messages from different people from this company?”)
• AMs are not evaluated based on retention. This can sometimes lead to situations where they may overpush the client (e.g., to try to get the deal closed by the end of the month) which harms the relationship with them in general, which may become a problem CSM would need to deal with later. The opposite is also valid — with not being responsible for bringing more dollars to the table, CSMs may take a consistent but relatively slow approach in leading the customer which may delay any upsell opportunities.

Now that we know the risks the lack of collaboration can bring, let’s discuss what could be done to avoid them.

One of the core ideas is that all the actions both AMs and CSMs take need to be aligned and that they should serve the customer together as an account team. It is the job of the account team to properly introduce each role to the customer and clearly communicate when to reach out to the account manager, when to contact a CSM, and when to go to other teams (e.g., support). Keep in mind that for many companies, the role of a customer success manager is new. Here at Wrike, we often find ourselves in a situation when, after both AMs and CSMs introduce themselves, we get a response like, “Can you please explain why I have several reps reaching out to me?”. Obviously, after the initial conversation, this question usually goes away, but in the beginning, clarifying the areas of responsibility of each role is critical.

But who should initiate the outreach in the beginning? What is the etiquette of communication with the customer when contact has been established and when is it each person’s turn to communicate? Having a clear process here is a good idea. For example, after the account becomes paid, a formal handover takes place from the account executive (AE) to the account manager, who, in due turn, introduces the customer success manager. But when certain team members are overloaded, or the client is unresponsive, things may not always go according to the plan.

When engaging the client, it’s important to leverage the strong sides of each role. AMs are usually more proactive with customer outreach. For example, in Wrike, we have daily standards for account managers for the number of client calls made, Zoom conversations conducted, etc. This naturally leads to a situation where, statistically, AMs have a higher probability of getting in touch with customers simply because the number of actions taken to schedule these conversations is higher. So, it would only make sense for them to leverage that advantage, be responsible for the initial outreach, and then introduce the CSM.

So, what is the strong side of a customer success manager? Their positive attributes include deep product knowledge, expertise, and understanding of best practices. CSMs (again, statistically) have a higher probability of uncovering move value from the product to the customer during their call, which may lead to additional upsell opportunities for the AMs later on. And, since the customers are eager to maximize the value they get from the product or service they’re paying for, it seems logical for a CSM to be responsible for ongoing touchpoints and for involving the AM every time there’s an opportunity for an upgrade.

But keep in mind that even after the initial engagement, the customer could still forget who in the account team is responsible for what. Reiterating who to contact and which role is responsible for what from time to time would be a good idea. Even if the client reaches out to the wrong person, they would be able to redirect the customer to the right person, and, as a result, the customer’s challenge would be addressed faster.

Now let’s discuss some specific tactics on building the collaboration between CSMs and AMs

• Not overstepping the boundaries of the role

Account managers and customer success managers need to be aligned on the fact that they should maintain their focus on their areas of responsibility and not try to cover each other’s roles. For example, when I was working as a CSM here at Wrike, and a customer brought up any commercial question, my immediate response was that this question falls under the responsibility of the account manager and that I would be happy to connect the client with them. Of course, in order for this approach to work, this needs to be a two-way street.

• Planning outreach together

One of the strangest situations for the client is when they already have a call scheduled with an account manager and suddenly receives an email from CSM saying something like: “Hello, we haven’t spoken for a while, so let’s do a quick call.” To avoid such situations, make sure that you check in with your colleague, whether they have been communicating with the client lately, whether any calls are already planned, etc. You may also find out some critical pieces of information, such as there’s a tough negotiation on renewal terms happening at the moment, and it would not be a good idea to reach out to the client at all for the moment.

• Inviting each other to the calls

Keep in mind that the end goal is for both CSM and AM to hit their targets — not to exhaust the customers with excessive communication. One of the best (and most simple) tactics of working collaboratively and staying in contact is building the habit of inviting each other to the scheduled calls. In some cases, one of the roles may not even be actively participating in the conversation and would be just sitting in the background. But should any question emerge, they would be there to address it. And the client would get another reminder about who is the right person to reach out to with this kind of issue.

• Working together on the sales funnel

Due to the fact that CSMs work closely with clients to help them to achieve the goals they set for the product or service, they usually have a good understanding of the current customers’ situations and can identify the opportunities for growth and expansion. It’s sometimes the case that they justify the need for an upgrade simply by demonstrating the advanced functionalities of a higher subscription tier or highlighting how adding more users would address the customers’ challenges. In such situations, the role of the AM in closing the deal would be as simple as preparing the paperwork. In other cases, additional effort may be required — especially when some contract-related questions arise, such as pricing, billing terms, or something else. If possible, consider introducing an incentive for CSMs to discover such opportunities, so their motivation to do it on a regular basis is increased.

• Involving each other in escalations

Obviously, customer-facing work is not all sugar and rainbows — both CSMs and AMs face tough client situations from time to time. It could be the case that a customer’s company has been acquired by another that’s already using a competitor’s solution, and a decision has to be made on whether to switch everyone to it for the sake of consistency. Or a price negotiation may go sideways, and the customer may be frustrated and consider leaving entirely. It’s critical that whoever encounters such a situation among the CSM and AM, informs the other of it, provides the details about what happened, what has been done, and what are the expected outcomes. That would guarantee that the situation, at a minimum, would not be a surprise for the members of the account team, and at a maximum, a solution would be developed collaboratively to fix the situation.

I hope that the recommendations presented will help you in building great collaboration between account managers and customer success managers in your team!