When should I hire my first customer success person?

Direct answers to the timing question: first CS hire in your first 5 to 10 employees, full time once you have two big customers, $1M to $2M ARR per CSM once you scale.

Dear SaaStr: How Should Founders Build Their First Customer Success Team?

From SaaStr by Jason Lemkin 6 min read

• Hire your first full-time customer success person once you have two big customers to support.
• At least one of your first 5 to 10 employees should be a customer success hire.
• Target each CSM carrying 1 to 2 million dollars of ARR to keep the function economic.
• Do not hire an SMB-only background if your average contract value is 250,000 dollars or more.

Chargebee's customer success leader answering an Indian founder's question in the SaaSBoomi community. Eight points, starting with the one most Indian startups get wrong: treating CS as an extension of support.

Best Practices for Setting Customer Success in your SaaS start-up

From SaaSBoomi by Sri Maneru 8 min read

• A CS leader should fix data first, then processes, then people, in that order.
• Customer success is a proactive consulting role (adoption, QBRs, needs); support is reactive ticket work.
• Tag every exit as avoidable (low adoption) or unavoidable (wrong ICP, business shut down) before you act on it.
• Track onboarding turnaround time and percent of customers onboarded as leading indicators.

Lays out the three real ways to organise a CS team (by segment, by lifecycle stage, by engagement model) and what each one costs you, which is the actual decision a first-time CS leader faces.

Customer Success Team Structure: The Ultimate Guide

From Gainsight 16 min read

• Names three scalable structures: embedded digital experience team, centralised content with distributed strategy, and community hub with program satellites.
• Forrester's read is that most CS organisations struggle for lack of a clear charter and a segmentation framework.
• Tie each program to NRR, gross retention, time to value, renewal forecast accuracy, and health score accuracy.

The book that defined the function. Worth reading once if you are building the team, mostly for the ten laws and the argument that customer success is a company-wide operating model rather than a department.

Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue

From Wiley by Nick Mehta, Dan Steinman and Lincoln Murphy 256 pages

Short and direct on the exact worry behind this question, that customer success feels like a cost you cannot justify yet. Tiscornia argues the return compounds from the first hire, which is the case for going earlier than comfortable.

The Earlier, the Better: How Customer Success Compounds Your Growth | @churnzero CCO Alli Tiscornia

On More SaaStr by Alli Tiscornia 8 min