January 30, 2023
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.
The customer success manager performs 4 tasks primarily:
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.
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?
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?
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.
The entire hiring process of a customer success manager can be visualized into 4 steps:
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:
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:
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
While the practices discussed above are primary responsibilities of a Content Marketer, they also need to be proactive with
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.
Apart from having relevant industry experience, a good Content Marketer must possess the following 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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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
Requirements
Soft Skills
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
