Customer success managers are tour guides for the customers. They understand customer needs and pave the way to maximize product engagement and customer satisfaction.
These managers play different roles in different companies depending on their needs and customer requirements. Most technology companies hire them to build relationships with clients and help them effectively exploit their products or services. The managers engage with the customers and act as representatives on the company's behalf. It becomes the bridge between customer and company to ensure a positive experience and foster long-term relationships.
A customer success manager plays a pivotal role in the company. They build relationships with the customers and refine the product's perceived value. A good CSM can be a key differentiator for business if s/he truly understands their job role and serves the clients. They can significantly cut costs by increasing renewals and enhancing revenue. By acting as a helping hand for the customers, they can reduce customer churn and elevate user experience.
But what do customer success managers even do?
Customer success managers play a lot of roles across various departments and disciplines. Let us map out their journey and understand their role in the company. Moreover, we will cover how you can hire a customer success manager for your business with a simple 4-step strategy.
Why Should We Hire A Customer Success Manager?
The customer success manager performs 4 tasks primarily:
- Understand business and customer needs
- Build relationships with customers
- Enhance product engagement and customer satisfaction
- Gain insights and act as a bridge between customer and company
Customer success managers understand the gap between customers and business. They build a relationship to act as a linking bridge between the two to share insights. They interact with customers on behalf of the company and communicate their problems with the internal team. Finally, they refine the customers' vision by strategically planning and tracking the performance.
Here are 10 reasons why a customer success manager is a must for businesses.
- Handle client relations, including onboarding, training, customer retention, product engagement, and customer satisfaction.
- Act as a strategic advisor for customers
- Curate and execute customer success strategies
- Understand customer needs and share insights with the internal team
- Monitor metrics while giving consistent results
- Identify opportunities for growth in the respective assigned accounts
- Share customer insights which help in future product development and other crucial decisions
- Enhance customer satisfaction while up-selling and renewing the accounts
- Educate customers to improve product engagement and business revenue
- Customer relation management
How to Hire A Customer Success Manager?
Hiring an ideal customer success manager can be difficult due to flexible and ambiguous job responsibilities. Their main focus is to ensure a positive customer experience, which could include a wide variety of skills and domain expertise.
The recruiters must weigh in on the candidates' performance, skills, and interview impression while making the decision. Moreover, they must assess if the person culturally fits into the organization. A cultural fit is vital as the manager needs to work across different departments and actively collaborate with different teams. So, what must a recruiter look for in a customer success manager?
Who Makes A Good Customer Success Manager?
A customer success manager's job isn't restricted to one department or domain. They deal with customers and act as a bridge between the customers and the company. So, what skills are required to foster healthy relationships with customers and strengthen a company's brand image?
- Problem-Solving- The manager must identify customer needs and solve problems/ complexities regarding product usage.
- Communication Skills- The manager must have good communication skills as they are the first point of contact for the customers and actively collaborate with different teams and departments.
- Relational Intelligence- One of the primary jobs of a customer success manager is to build relationships with customers to win their trust and act as an advisor to enhance the experience with the product.
- Team Orientation- The manager has to gather insights from the customers and provide information to the internal team. Hence, s/he must be able to communicate with all the teams and promote the collective effort.
- Confidence- The manager communicates with hundreds of customers and builds business rapport. They must be confident in their skill set and reflect that in their working style.
- Proactivity- The manager shouldn't wait around for customers to reach out and share problems. Instead, s/he must actively engage with them to understand their needs and refine their experience.
- Domain Expertise - A customer success manager performs various roles as s/he is the business representative. Hence, it demands a blend of multiple domain expertise such as account management, sales, marketing, project management, etc.
- Technological Soundness- Often, a customer success manager is appointed with technical products which need constant support. Hence, a CSM must be technologically sound.
- Product Knowledge- Customer success managers work in close relationships with customers to explain the product and enhance product engagement. This demands complete product knowledge regarding its features, benefits, premium offerings, etc.
- Strategic Planning- A manager's job is more than just helping customers with product complexities and boosting product engagement. They must aim to cross-sell or up-sell to drive revenue. Hence, they must strategically plan their steps to convert customers into a high-tier product offering.
Further, based on the job requirements and business needs, the same skill set will vary from firm to firm.
For instance, if the company is looking to fill a senior position, it would benefit from consulting experience. Similarly, if they are looking for a manager to handle client relationships, they would want someone with a PR or sales background.
A recruiter must analyze the role and business needs before initiating the hiring process. Once they decide the skill set required and which skills matter the most, recruiters can start the hiring process.
4-Step Guide To Hiring a Customer Success Manager
The entire hiring process of a customer success manager can be visualized into 4 steps:
- Outlining Role Requirements
- Sourcing Candidates
- Conducting Collaborative Interviews
- Hiring and On-boarding
Outlining Role Requirements
Recruiters' first task for hiring a customer success manager is to understand business needs and map out the responsibilities/ role of the manager in the organization. They must use data to clarify job requirements, responsibilities, qualifications, and other background information required.
The process starts by understanding the firm's product complexity and types of accounts. For instance, if the product is highly technical, the CSM must be technically sound and have a technical background. However, a marketing and sales background is more relevant if the product is simple and the business requires someone to manage relationships.
It all narrows down to business requirements. Some examples of varied business needs are:
- Product Engagement
- Expand Accounts (up-sell or cross-sell)
- Customer Retention
- Gather Customer Testimonials
- Manage Revenue
There are much more business pain points that a CSM can target and work upon. The recruiters must outline their roles and responsibilities based on the business needs. Moreover, they can look into data to make an informed and data-driven decision. Some of the data to look for are:
- Customer Feedback- Recruiters can use customer feedback to reverse engineer the attributes required for an effective customer success manager. For instance, if the customers find the product complex, you will need a manager who understands the product and simplifies it for consumers.
- Customer Metrics- Customer satisfaction, renewal rate, churn rate, etc., can give recruiters insights about the consumers' pain points. This will help them to identify the core strengths required in a CSM. For instance, if the churn rate is high, CSM can build relationships and understand customer pain points to communicate them with the company. Alternatively, s/he can link the customer and the support team.
- Client On-boarding Trends- Use heat maps and other tools to identify loopholes in the onboarding process and product engagement. These can act as a starting point for improvement and focus areas for CSM.
This data helps recruiters to map out the CSM job role requirements efficiently. The next step is to source qualified candidates to meet these skill requirements.
Sourcing Candidates
Sourcing candidates is more than just posting about vacancies on job boards. The job market is evolving, and restricting traditional ways of hiring will not get you the top talents in the industry. Businesses must invest in a multi-channel approach for sourcing and engaging with candidates.
Recruiters must tap multiple sources in addition to job boards such as social media, websites, communities, referrals, networks, etc. They must deploy a mix of inbound and outbound channels to build a healthy work talent pipeline.
But does this mean dealing with many platforms and tools, which can be overwhelming and might not give the best result?
We at Nurturebox make recruiters' jobs easy by helping them with a multi-channel approach to finding their desired candidate without making the hiring process a hassle! We integrate with the existing HR tech stack and take over all the admin tasks of maintaining records and recording past conversations to ease the hiring process. A dedicated tool, especially which can easily be downloaded from the Chrome store as a plugin, can make sourcing effective and effortless.
Conducting Collaborative Interviews
Hiring a customer success manager differs from regular hiring as the role covers a wide area and requires active collaboration. The hiring team must also include people from diverse domains of expertise who will directly work or collaborate with the CSM.
The next crucial part of the interview is to choose questions wisely to assess their abilities like upselling, communication, cross-selling, project management, etc. Here are some questions to ask your customer success manager candidates.
- Which are the critical metrics for customer success?
- How do you track multiple customers?
- How do you measure customer success?
- What is your definition of customer success?
- What are some vital tools and technologies for customer success?
- How did you handle any of the customer's churn experience?
- How to avoid customer overturn?
- How would you deal with (or dealt) with a changing/ dynamic customer project scope?
- What type of environment do you foster in your team?
- Share an experience when you felt hostile or angry at a customer; how did you deal with it?
- Share an experience where you went above and beyond for a customer.
- How do you deal with different opinions in a group?
To ensure no bias in the interview process, deploy tools for blind screening and interviews. Moreover, recruiters can use various tools to automate and scale the entire hiring process.
Hiring & On-boarding
The final step after finding the desired candidate is hiring and onboarding them. Evaluate the candidates to fit your business needs and provide a balance of performance and soft skills. Once chosen, ensure an effective onboarding process, which can improve employee motivation and retention. Here are 3 ways to provide a positive onboarding experience.
- Discuss the scope of work & communicate responsibilities to give clarity to the new employee about their roles and responsibilities.
- Set communication channels and specific POCs for easy collaboration with the internal team without hassle.
- Implement comprehensive training programs, especially for work-from-home managers, to ensure improved performance.
Hiring A Customer Success Manager Successfully with Nurturebox
The best way to hire effortlessly and get a desired candidate is by standardizing the hiring process. This will help recruiters to hire a good customer success manager and fill any vacant role with qualified candidates.
We at Nurturebox help companies automate and scale their hiring process to ease out the sourcing and engaging process.
- Download our Nurturebox plugin from the Chrome store and integrate it with your current HR tech stack.
- Head to LinkedIn or Naukri.com to find the desired candidates. Now let Nurturebox do its job of maintaining records and data for each candidate that you want. You focus on engaging, and we take over all the admin tasks.
- Engage easily with candidates using Nurturebox to manage multi-channel approaches effortlessly.
- Finally, interview the desired candidates and hire your ideal employee!
Amidst today’s noisy digital world, brands find it challenging to create meaningful connections with their customer base and target audience. Getting the target consumer’s attention and persuading them to buy from you gets even trickier. Hence, content marketing has become more crucial than ever for brands to attract, educate, and retain customers.
Content creation is a top priority for 80% of marketers, and there is no reason it shouldn’t be. Consistent, high-quality, and engaging content impacts your audience’s decisions through education and persuasion.
Depending on your business goals and requirements, the role of Content Marketers you hire will vary. The primary responsibilities revolve around forming consistent brand messaging and deciding upon a unique and identifiable voice, style, and pitch across various distribution channels.
From raising brand awareness to attracting a relevant audience to your website, boosting social media presence and engagement, generating leads, and building brand loyalty – content marketing drives all the growth efforts for your brand. When done effectively, it can help you:
- Build positive brand awareness
- Make your audience stick around for longer
- Get better traction on social media
- Gain more trust of your audience than ever
- Generate qualified leads
- Improve conversion rates
- Boost business visibility with SEO
- Position your brand as an authority
- Cultivate loyal brand fans
While content marketing is a broad role with numerous areas of expertise involved, it’s vital to thoroughly understand your company’s current marketing goals and the related requirements. In this blog, we will dive deep into the step-by-step approach to hiring a Content Marketer.
What is The Role of a Content Marketer?
A Content Marketer must be deeply passionate about telling your brand’s story to the world. The objective is to educate and nurture the target audience to establish brand authority using thought-leadership and drive more people to buy from you.
As a candidate is expected to be a mediator between the brand and the target audience, they are primarily responsible for planning, creating, and sharing valuable content to grow their company’s awareness and engagement to bring more business.
To be more specific, the role of a Content Marketer requires a perfect blend of creativity and attention to detail in an individual. It’s a balancing role, as they need to ensure creating content that resonates and strengthens business relationships, using strategies that position your business as authentic and problem-solving.
Take a look at the core responsibilities of a Content Marketer that most businesses expect them to take over:
- Research and Competitor Analysis: The first and foremost step to creating a content marketing strategy is effective initial research. It not only helps a Content Marketer understand the nuances of the industry through competitor analysis but also study and understand the target audience thoroughly.
- Building Content Marketing Plans: Once the competitor research and target audience analysis is done, a Content Marketer needs to work on the different plans for all the business objectives, targeted channels, segments of the audience, and the bigger marketing strategy. A content marketing plan typically consists of:
- Specific goals along with a pre-decided timeline
- Various channels to be targeted for content distribution
- Types of content to be created
- Budget for the entire staff, outsourced services, and paid promotion (Collabs and Ads)
- Creating Editorial Calendar: Creating, managing, and maintaining a content calendar is one of the most crucial responsibilities of a Content Marketer. It is a centralized visual document that enables effective collaboration among the marketing team and helps Content Marketers ensure on-time production and delivery.
- Content Creation: Once the strategy and calendar have been approved by relevant stakeholders, Content Marketers need to do the on-ground work. This task usually depends on the scale of your company and content marketing strategy. Suppose an organization already has a set of writers, then the Content Marketer doesn’t need to create content by themselves.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Producing quality content that educates your target audience and resonates with them, isn’t enough. You need to optimize your content creation to make it search engine-friendly. While most companies need a dedicated SEO specialist for keyword research and planning, Content Marketers need to closely collaborate with them and should be well-versed in the basics of SEO.
While the practices discussed above are primary responsibilities of a Content Marketer, they also need to be proactive with
- Content editing and ensuring adherence to a certain style guide
- Continous publishing and distributing content
- Measuring and analyzing performance
How to Hire a Content Marketer: Step-By-Step?
Content marketing has become the key to driving growth for businesses. Unlike a few years ago, it’s not possible now to get away with a one-person team for content marketing. You need deeply trained individuals for specialist roles.
Let’s now dive into the step-by-step approach of hiring a Content Marketer. But before you even source your first candidate, you should have a clear expectation of the skillset and experience to look out for top content marketing candidates.
Top Must-Have Skills in a Content Marketer
Apart from having relevant industry experience, a good Content Marketer must possess the following skills.
- Excellent Writing Skills
A Content Marketer’s prior skillset should be writing excellent attention-grabbing content. From long-form blog posts to website copy, ad copies, social media content, video scripts, emails, newsletters, e-books, whitepapers, and more – a Content Marketer should be able to adapt to the business’s specific requirements and create quality content.
- Audience Research
Identifying user behavior is vital for framing the story in the right direction. So a Content Marketer must know how to identify and analyze the needs and pain points to develop a buyer persona. User research can be performed through social listening, relevant communities, in-person calls with customers, analyzing sales call recordings, and more.
- Keyword Research
Creating valuable thought-leadership content isn’t enough. Researching the right set of keywords is an essential skill to further educate your target audience on the Whys, Hows and Whats of your business, and have your website rank on Google.
- Data-oriented Content
Content that’s not backed by relevant data points does not build enough trust. Experienced content marketing professionals would always prefer data over hollow claims. No doubt that only data doesn’t help a content piece succeed, but it’s essential..
- Project Management, Planning, and Publishing –
A Content Marketer is also expected to break down and analyze the pain points to turn keyword research into content ideas. So a professional must be able to identify and solve content gaps.
Further, they must know how to create a content calendar, decide the different types of content, and choose relevant platforms to publish and schedule marketing campaigns.
- Content Promotion
Creating a valuable content piece, for example - an ebook, isn’t enough. Your content marketing team needs to promote it proactively for bringing enough attention and engagement.
- Performance Analysis
Setting up goals and plans is one thing, but continuously executing, measuring, and analyzing content performance is another. A Content Marketer should always be monitoring key performance parameters to figure out the upcoming plans with the necessary updates required.
Not to forget - stakeholders and marketing heads need the performance reports regularly. So Content Marketers must be able to collect and comprehend all the data to make it worth presenting.
Step 1: Create a Candidate Persona
Let’s sort out the priorities first, and decide the type of content marketing candidates you want to recruit. From exceptional research skills to storytelling, communication skills, relationship building, audience engagement, and more capabilities must be comprehensively considered. Identify and break down the skill requirements for Content Marketers:
- What are the educational qualification criteria for the role?
- How many years and what type of work experience do you want in candidates?
- What are the specific skill sets you’re looking for?
- Which industry experience would you primarily prefer?
- Are there any tools your candidates should be hands-on with?
- What are some personality traits that will fit your company?
- Where do they look for a new job?
- What are their career and life goals?
Forming a candidate persona by answering all these questions would ensure you are not shooting in the dark while sourcing candidates. Further, it helps you determine the traits of the ideal candidate, and plan your sourcing and recruitment strategy further.
Step 2: Document the Role Requirements and Decide on Your Recruiting Process
Next step is determining your role requirements suiting primarily to organizational needs and business goals. A content marketing professional is expected to own the entire content strategy, creation, and distribution. But what about your business’s unique requirements?
You might need someone comfortable with frequently creating long-form content pieces like blogs, ebooks, or whitepapers, or creating engaging video content based on your industry trends.
Talk to various relevant stakeholders for seeking the complete detailed company requirements for the role.
Before you enter the recruitment funnel, outline your talent acquisition process. Identify various strategies, channels, and other informational insights you would need – and maintain a collaborative document.
As you update the tactics and tweak your recruitment process for meeting hiring requirements optimally – keep your document up to date.
Step 3: Prepare a Content Marketing Job Description
Once you have finalized the role requirements with respect to your current content marketing goals and team, you can start sourcing candidates. Preparing the job description is the first task you’ll need to do.
Here are the necessary components you must have in your job description:
- Job Title: The position you’re looking to fill. For example - Content Marketing Specialist or Content Marketing Manager.
- Roles & Responsibilities: An outline of the candidate’s day-to-day activities. From ideation to implementation and the impact on the organization, everything should be covered.
- Skill Requirements: Skills and abilities a candidate must have to perform the job successfully.
- Perks and Benefits: The compensation details, perks of the job, and any other benefits.
- About the Company: Why should a candidate consider working with your company?
Content Marketer Job Description Template
Role
The job of a Content Marketer is to perform competitor research, create user persona, and write plagiarism-free content for blog articles, social media, and the company website. They need to stay updated on the latest SEO techniques.
Responsibilities
- Develop, write and deliver persuasive copy for the website, email marketing campaigns, sales collateral, videos, and blogs
- Build and manage an editorial calendar; coordinate with other content crafters to ensure standards
- Measure impact and perform analysis to improve KPIs
- Include and optimize all content for SEO
- Contribute to the localization of processes and content to ensure consistency across regions
- Review and implement process changes to drive operational excellence
Requirements
- Proven content marketing, copywriting, or SEO experience
- Working knowledge of content management systems like WordPress
- A well-maintained portfolio of published articles, blogs, copy, etc
- Proven experience of working under pressure to deliver high quality output in a short span of time
- Proficiency in all Microsoft Office applications, Google Suite
- Fluency in English or any other required language
Soft Skills
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills
- Excellent writing and editing skills
- The ability to work in a fast-paced environment
- The ability to handle multiple projects concurrently
- Strong attention to detail and the ability to multi-task projects and deliverables
Step 4: Source Candidates
Once you have the tailored job description in hand, it’s now time to do the groundwork and source candidates. Create an attractive job post to promote your job across job boards and social channels.
- Begin with what to expect from the role at your company?
- Why should candidates apply for the position?
- Highlight the growth opportunities
- State the company vision and mission
- Briefly describe the recruitment process
Prepare an impactful job post and also execute paid job ad campaigns if required. The next step would be promoting your jobs on various job boards and hiring platforms. You can leverage the following platforms for hiring Content Marketers:
- LinkedIn
- Indeed
- Instahyre
- ZipRecruiter
- Monster
- GlassDoor
- CareerBuilder
Not to forget - almost 3/4th of the workforce includes passive candidates, so you cannot miss out on passive talent sourcing as well. Reach out to qualified candidates on communities, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Facebook to offer them suitable opportunities.
Step 5: Evaluate Candidates and Interview Shortlisted Ones
Once you have filtered candidates based on their experience and skills listed on their profile, it’s time to evaluate them deeply. Ask them to create a content strategy for your website, along with a value-adding content piece like a small blog. The topic of the article must fall within the scope of the strategy.
Interview the candidates whose profiles got shortlisted. Keep in mind the parameters covering skills, relevant experience, and personality traits of candidates.
Step 5: Make the Hire
Reach out to selected Content Marketers and communicate about the compensation.
Further, extend your offer letter to all the candidates who have been selected. In the case of passive sourcing, extend to only those who were aligned with you on the compensation and are willing to move forward.
Ensure having a deadline for the joining date and mention the necessary documents required by your recruiting team.
- Get the required documents and set up the offer agreements with candidates
- Organize an orientation session for the onboarded candidates
- Introduce them to the entire team and the marketing teams they will be working with
- Guide the new candidates about your company management tools and communication channels
- Provide candidates with forms for benefits and perks like Health Insurance.
Supercharge Your Hiring for Content Marketer with Nurturebox
Inbound candidate sourcing doesn’t work effectively anymore. Do you also find challenges in closing quality candidates through job posts even after spending on ads?
Don’t worry, passive candidate sourcing can be an optimal solution for hiring top content marketing candidates.
Nurturebox is a one-stop talent sourcing and engagement platform which is powered by automation. Here’s how you can source product managers from LinkedIn using Nurturebox:
- Install the Nurturebox Chrome plugin and sign up.
- On your LinkedIn profile, start sourcing Content Marketers with boolean searches stating the required experience from targeted locations and including other criteria
- Add the qualified candidates to your sourcing campaign pipeline with just a click
- Automate the candidate engagement through email, Whatsapp and LinkedIn direct messages for reaching out and nurturing candidates at scale.
