I attended the fantastic Customer Success London Meetup on Wednesday.

First off, a big thanks to Marcel, Anika and Lauren for a fantastic day 🙌

As a recruiter in the CS space I feel it’s vital to learn as much about the discipline as possible and I walked away with greater insight and key trends for 2020.

The day was packed with great content; however, these were my top three brief takeaways.

1.    The demand for a dedicated Customer Success Operations resource is going to increase 2020……….if you can get budget for it : )

Customer Success teams are increasingly challenged to use unprecedented amounts of data to build more predictable outcomes and run more efficient operations.

Having a dedicated function to help define processes, build metrics and manage an increasing tech stack makes complete sense.

The role has existed and been seen as vital in many larger sales organisations for years and is set to be a more prominent hire for Customer Success leaders.

It will be interesting to see how companies tackle hiring for these roles and deciding what skills they need.

2.     KPI’s shifting towards expansion.

I’ve noticed for some time now that many companies are placing greater emphasis on growth, rather than just retention and renewals.

This was mentioned by a few of the presenters and came up in conversation with a few other attendees during conversation.

Some companies have a clear land and expand model and a greater emphasis is being placed on CS teams to expand those accounts rather than pass opportunities back to sales.

This will impact how companies hire and I personally feel you will see more sales professionals transitioning across to Customer Success in the coming months and years.

3.    Nail your metrics if your long-term goal is to be a Chief Customer Officer.

There are still a very limited number of Chief Customer Officer roles in the UK, but it is a growing theme.

There are only 363 people in the UK listed with that title on LinkedIn; however, this grew by 25% on the previous year and will continue to grow.

If this is your chosen career path the advice here was to gain as much varied experience as possible across different types of customers, SMB through to Enterprise, in different categories, and ideally different countries.

The more customer exposure you can gain the better.

Team management experience is also essential.

However, the number one skill you should develop is your use of metrics and data. Given you’ll be directly accountable for company-wide churn it will be on you to know the cause and the solution!

There is no doubt in my mind that2020 will see another year of amazing growth in the Customer Success profession. If you check out LinkedIn’s 2020 Emerging Jobs Report (this is the US version) you’ll see Customer Success featuring again.

The number of Customer Success roles in the UK grew by 30% last year – my best is the growth this year is even higher 🚀

It would be great to connect with any CS professionals if I can help in anyway.

Have a great weekend 😊