How to Hire a Customer Success Manager: A Guide for Startups

Replacing a client can cost up to 25 times more than keeping an existing one.

Let that sink in: you can build the flashiest product, pack it with the coolest features, and execute brilliant marketing, but if customers don’t stick around, none of it matters.

This is where a Customer Success Manager (CSM) comes in. A CSM ensures your clients get the maximum value from your product or service, helping them succeed so they always come back and keep paying.

Get this role wrong, and you’ll spend your time chasing lost revenue while retention slips through the cracks.

This guide is your playbook for making a smart CSM hire. You’ll learn how this role works with both clients and your internal teams, and how to run a hiring process that sets your startup up for long-term success.

 

How a Customer Success Manager Adds Value to Your Startup

Startups are chaotic, high-stakes environments. The pace can be relentless, leaving little time to catch your breath. When you’re in this intense frenzy, you may think customer success is a problem for another day.

This is a trap.

Keeping customers happy, heard, and paying isn’t just important; it’s mission-critical for survival.

As you grow your startup, a CSM can help with the following early-stage priorities:

• Supporting your first clients: A CSM serves as the primary point of contact for your customers, providing support, ensuring they derive value from your product or service, and handling renewals. Depending on your industry and customer size, CSMs can support customers in a number of ways:
  • Lower-priced and mid-range software products will have low-touch CSMs who manage 50–100 accounts – or more! These types of CSMs will deliver customer success at scale to ensure your customers get the support and attention they need.
  • Enterprise software and products will require high-touch CSMs who provide white glove service in the form of dedicated support, regular check-ins, strategic guidance, and even custom integrations and features to meet client needs.
• Building customer success from the ground up: At an early-stage startup, a CSM sets the tone for how you work with customers. They lay the groundwork, building onboarding processes and engagement practices that create a repeatable framework as you scale. Just as important, they champion the customer internally.
• Upselling new products: A CSM drives upsells by using customer feedback to push upgrades and add-ons that clearly improve the experience, so they feel like solutions — not sales pitches. They also know the right moment to make the ask, growing accounts while feeding product teams insights on trends and gaps
• Improving retention and cutting churn: CSMs protect retention by staying close to customers. CSMs hold check-ins, run trainings, examine usage trends, and jump in before small issues snowball into cancellations. By consistently proving value and acting as trusted partners, they keep customers confident, engaged, and far less likely to churn.

Now that we’ve covered the advantages of hiring a CSM at a startup, let’s explore when to hire for this role!

 

When to Hire a Customer Success Manager

Should a CSM be one of your startup’s first hires? Does timing depend on the number of clients, the amount of revenue, or something else entirely?

While some say you should hire a CSM as soon as you can, I recommend taking a more thoughtful approach. Remember that while CSMs oversee a variety of client-facing and business-critical tasks, their primary purpose is to be a strategic partner to your customers.

That alone tells us a lot about when it’s time to hire your first CSM.

The ideal moment to bring on a CSM is when your startup is ready to do more than just respond to support requests. The real shift comes when you’re prepared to actively invest in customer success as a growth lever. At this point, client relationships evolve from reactive problem-solving into proactive partnerships that help clients extract the maximum value from your product.

That said, waiting until you’re already overwhelmed with high-value clients is a mistake. The longer you delay, the greater the urgency to build a customer success infrastructure.

Be on the lookout for other signs that you’re ready to invest in a CSM, like:

• You’re adding major clients: Landing a big client, or several high-value ones, should be the trigger to invest in customer success, not the point where you realize you’re already underwater.
• You’ve hit a revenue milestone: Revenue growth provides the budget to invest in a dedicated customer success role without straining other critical operations.
• You’re struggling with onboarding or account management: When new customers aren’t getting up to speed quickly, or existing accounts feel neglected, it creates friction that slows growth.
• Churn is through the roof: Customers leaving faster than you can replace them is a clear sign that accounts aren’t being nurtured properly.

Taking a temperature check of your startup’s growth is just the first step. Let’s look at the key indicators and strategies for scaling your customer success team — from adding a second CSM to bringing on additional team members.

 

When Should Startups Hire Two (or more) Customer Success Managers?

When is one CSM no longer enough? I suggest two strategies for answering this question:

1. Adopting a trigger-based approach using Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)
2. Determining the right CSM-to-account ratio

As revenue grows, customer needs expand. Setting an ARR milestone means having a financial signal that tells you when to hire. The ARR threshold that’s right for your startup depends on industry, team size, client makeup, and the type of service you provide.

Your CSM-to-account ratio is just as important. Some startups need one person dedicated to each high-value client. At other startups, CSMs can support dozens of clients.

Tracking both ARR and the CSM-to-account ratio keeps hiring decisions grounded in data and how your business actually functions, not guesswork.

But who’s to say there’s only one type of CSM role you should be hiring? Read on to learn more about the different types of customer success roles.

The Types of Customer Success Roles

Customer success roles range from executives driving company-wide strategy to specialists ensuring clients achieve value at every stage. For startups, it’s about knowing how each role fits into scaling your business sustainably.

Here’s a snapshot of the most common roles you’ll encounter:

• Customer Success Manager: The “all-purpose” CSM acts as the main relationship owner, guiding customers through the lifecycle from onboarding to renewals, proactively solving problems, and helping customers achieve measurable outcomes.
• Scaled Customer Success Manager: Think of this as a CSM that specializes in serving a large number of lower-ticket customers. You can extend the reach of the CS team by using automation, AI, and scaled programs to engage and support large volumes of customers in a low-touch model.
• Customer Success Analyst: These hires collect and interpret usage data, metrics, and customer feedback to uncover trends, identify risks, and provide insights that inform product and strategy decisions.
• Customer Success Operations Manager: An Ops manager designs and maintains the systems, processes, and tools that keep teams running efficiently, removing bottlenecks and supporting growth.
• Renewal Manager: Some companies split out renewals into a specialized role. Renewal managers lead renewal conversations, identify upsell opportunities, and build the long-term trust needed to keep customer accounts growing year after year.

Do you need to arm your company with every role? No. Building a customer success team isn’t about being everything, everywhere, all at once.

Early-stage startups usually begin with a CSM, then layer in leadership and operations as the team scales. We’ll explore this in more detail next!

 

How and When to Scale a Customer Success Team

Building your customer success team isn’t about headcount, it’s about knowing when to add the right roles. The two biggest factors are the number of clients and ARR.

Let’s break a potential growth plan for your CS team into stages:

• Pre-product-market stage: Founders handle most, if not all, customer interactions. The goal is to gather feedback, refine the product, and ensure early adopters stick.
• Growth stage: Your startup is focused on expansion and retention. Hire a CSM first, then an Account Manager (AM). These are two distinct yet complementary roles:
  • The CSM ensures clients get the most out of your products and achieve their desired outcomes.
  • Hire an AM once you have a stable client base to provide clients with additional support. AMs focus on revenue growth and contracting, complementing CSMs by turning customer success into long-term revenue.
• Maturation stage: As you scale, offer more complex services, or bring on a higher volume of clients, layer in specialization to serve different customer segments, or offer service tiers. Consider:
  • Hiring managers who can oversee accounts by industry or region.
  • Reserving more consultative CSMs for high-value clients.
  • Building out dedicated teams to handle onboarding, support, and pre-sales.
  • Formalizing customer success as a full team with different levels of seniority.

In short: hire CSMs first to protect retention, bring in AMs to support growth, and layer in specialists once you reach scale.

As with any new hire, the process for bringing on a CSM can’t be rushed. Read on for details on creating an effective job posting and preparing for the interview process.

 

How to Write a Customer Success Manager Job Posting

Your job posting will dictate the type of candidate that you attract and bring into your hiring funnel. Bland or generic job postings may appeal to a broader audience, but they won’t necessarily appeal to the right hire that your team needs.

A good job posting begins with a job description that covers the responsibilities and duties of the role. Start by describing the role, challenges the hire will work on, and skills they will need. Then move on to write your job posting, which you will use to market the role and attract ideal candidates.

When writing a job posting, I like to start with the following three things:

• Assess the needs of my team
• Define the ideal candidate profile I want to hire
• Note the responsibilities and roles of the job

And from there, the basic job posting template I use includes the following:

• A company description: Go beyond the basics and use clear, descriptive language to give your prospective candidates a taste of what your company culture is like.
• Summarize the role: Make sure to include a brief description of the role, key responsibilities, and required experience. Define success for the role, too, and the team structure.
• Skills: Specify the technical capabilities and the level of experience you need in the role.
• Benefits and location: Include where the job is (if it’s not remote), in-office expectations, and benefits that come with the job.
• Compensation: I’m an advocate for being upfront about compensation. Pay will depend on location and experience. According to PayScale, the average salary for a Customer Success Manager in the United States is $78,000. However, the range is wide ($54,000-$117,000). Compensation packages also include bonuses for upsells and retention rates, or percentage splits between mitigated churn and client expansion.

Once your job posting is written, it’s time to attract the best candidates for the role. Check out my guide on strategic places to publish job postings so you can maximize quality applications.

Let’s dive into the hiring process for CSM candidates next!

 

The Process for Hiring a Customer Success Manager: What to Expect

Interviewing is a key step in any hiring process, but many companies aren’t using their interviews strategically.

This especially goes for CSM interviews. These interviews provide an opportunity to assess whether a candidate is the ideal fit for your company or just sounds good on paper.

When interviewing Customer Success Managers, I recommend involving multiple team members in the process so you get diverse, informed perspectives on each candidate. Whenever you interview a candidate, I find it’s helpful to bear the following in mind:

• Develop a process and stick with it. Don’t add/remove steps as you go, or you’ll end up frustrating candidates.
• Define a clear purpose for each step. Don’t do something “just because.” Every step you take should have a clear purpose that allows you to effectively evaluate each candidate. If you can’t clearly say why you’re doing something, cut it.
• And don’t cut corners! Hiring is one of the most important tasks for any fast-growing company, so don’t skip important steps for the sake of speed. As the name implies, Customer Success Managers spend A LOT of time with the buyers and users of your product. A great CSM is both a client advocate and an asset for your startup’s growth trajectory. Rushing through the hiring process could lead to disaster for your sales, brand, reputation, and customer acquisition strategy.

At a high level, the typical CSM interview process looks like this:

• A recruiter screen: As with any other hire, make sure the candidate meets the role’s minimum requirements and is likely to be a fit for the organization. Focus on their expectations for the job, basic skill questions, personality fit, and their interview timelines.
• A hiring manager screen: Make sure there is a strong chance that the candidate fits the role. Focus on getting to know the candidate at both a technical and personal level to ascertain whether they match the role needs and your internal culture.
• A take-home project: Hiring screens can be effective at judging how a candidate interacts with your team, but a take-home project lets you see their process in action (and the results they can generate). When hiring a CSM, this also gives you an opportunity to review a candidate’s savviness around sales, presentation, and communication skills. The task could be analyzing a client scenario or case study, preparing a presentation or executive business review, or designing a customer lifecycle or onboarding process.
• A “meet the team” interview: This could be a full-day or a half-day, depending on the size of your company. This is typically composed of a few parts:
  • A product deep dive with your senior team and the stakeholders involved in client-facing or product roles to gauge their grasp of the product and customer.
  • Sales and growth strategy discussion with relevant stakeholders, including members of the sales, product, and marketing teams.
  • 1:1 interviews with potential colleagues to assess the candidate’s skills, thought processes, and leadership approach.
• Following this, you will review the candidate’s performance with your team to make a final hiring decision. You may want to include the following as you evaluate and compare candidates:
• A post-interview panel to discuss the candidate, followed by a decision by the hiring manager.
• Reference checks to ensure the candidate has good character and standing, and to make sure you haven’t missed anything across the hiring process.
• Make an offer!

Now that we’ve explained the interview process at a macro level, we need to specify how to engage candidates through specific questions, skill-based assessments, and team needs.

The devil is always in the details!

How to Interview a Customer Success Manager

Customer Success Managers are highly specialized and play a key role in your company’s growth. Keep this in mind as you evaluate candidates.

I like to split the CSM interview into two parts:

• Seeking out the required skills (again, these should be based on your company’s needs)
• Specific questions to assess those skills and competencies

You want to invite the candidate to share real-world examples that reveal their technical skills, ability to drive growth, sales mindset, client-centricity, and communication style.

Let’s walk through each one.

 

Skills to Look For When Hiring a CSM

When hiring a customer success manager, it’s important to look for the following key skills:

• Client management: Builds and maintains strong relationships, anticipates client needs, and guides accounts toward long-term success.
• Technical problem-solving: Understands and explains complex products, tools, or platforms to clients and internal teams; quickly identifies issues, diagnoses root causes, and coordinates solutions.
• Sales mindset: Identifies upsell and cross-sell opportunities, engages high-level clients, targets key stakeholders, and strategically influences buying decisions.
• Product expertise: Deeply understands product features, use cases, and value, translating that knowledge to drive adoption, solve problems, and uncover growth opportunities.
• Communication: Skilled at presenting, onboarding, and facilitating conversations that educate, influence, and align both clients and internal teams.
• Customer obsession: Puts clients first by proactively advocating for their success; anticipates a client’s potential challenges and opportunities before they arise.
• Data-centricity: Uses metrics and insights to monitor account health, spot trends, and make informed, strategic decisions.

 

Interview Questions to Ask a Customer Success Manager

The exact questions you ask during the interview process depend on the specific role. As a general rule, you can break questions down into the following categories:

• Technical and sales skills
• Client-centricity and advocacy
• Startup culture fit
• Collaboration and team dynamics

Whenever asking questions, no matter the scope, I focus on outcomes rather than inputs in earlier-stage companies and startups. Each employee can have an outsized impact on your success; therefore, prioritizing outcomes over “just getting the work done” needs to be a priority.

 

Technical and Sales Skills

In a startup, a CSM needs to be comfortable with technical details, product workflows, and data to help customers succeed and influence product decisions.

To determine a candidate’s technical and sales skills, ask questions like:

• What projects or initiatives have you led while in a customer success role that you’re most proud of?
• How do you stay updated on industry trends and best practices in customer success?
• Talk me through a time you upsold a client to a higher service tier or product offering.

 

Client-centricity and Advocacy

A strong CSM champions customer success while aligning client needs with business goals, balancing advocacy, realistic expectations, and strategic guidance. They also identify opportunities to drive revenue through upsells and expanded engagement.

You’ll get a sense of a candidate’s approach to handling clients by asking questions like:

• Can you tell me about a time when you’ve had to deliver bad news to a customer?
• Let’s say you have a customer with dozens of feature requests. How do you set expectations and prioritize what to act on? How did you relay that feedback to the appropriate team?
• How do you measure customer satisfaction and track customer success? How do you handle customer churn, and what strategies do you employ to retain customers?

 

Startup Culture Fit

Startup environments are fast-moving, so it’s important that a CSM thrives under uncertainty and brings a proactive, can-do attitude.

Ask questions like these to assess whether your candidate is meant for a startup role:

• How do you handle situations when priorities shift rapidly or resources are limited?
• Tell me about a time you had to take initiative without much guidance, and what was the outcome?
• How do you ensure communication and alignment across multiple teams when managing high-value accounts? Please explain with an example.

 

Collaboration and Team Dynamics

A CSM must work cross-functionally, aligning with internal teams while advocating for the customer.

I like to ask questions that simulate how teams handle customer feedback or internal friction. For example:

• Can you tell me about a time when a top customer requested something that conflicted with your product team’s priorities? How did you handle the situation, and what was the outcome?
• What does client-centricity mean to you? Describe how you advocate for clients internally when there isn’t an active sales opportunity.
• Can you share an example of how you’ve responded to constructive feedback or criticism from a colleague or manager, and what you did as a result?

 

What Makes Someone a Good Fit for a Startup Customer Success Manager Role?

Almost every SaaS company claims to be “agile and fast-paced,” but this is especially true for early- to mid-stage startups.

A startup CSM isn’t just managing accounts, they’re fully in the trenches with their clients and ensure customers experience the full value of your product. Success in this role also requires extensive cross-functional collaboration. A CSM will partner with multiple internal teams across sales, marketing, and product, while maintaining direct relationships with clients.

That said, even the most seasoned CSMs may not thrive in an early-stage startup environment — it takes someone adaptable, resourceful, and ready to navigate the fast-moving, often ambiguous world of a growing company.

Beyond the core skills listed above, look for someone who:

• Doesn’t mind rolling up their sleeves: Look for candidates who love to get their hands dirty and take on different tasks.
• Keeps the big picture in mind: Balances day-to-day priorities with an eye on where the customer’s needs and your product are headed. This is especially the case for CSMs who handle a large number of accounts.
• Stays curious and resourceful: Look for candidates who will ask good questions of customers and your internal teams. They dig for solutions and bring fresh ideas that uncover new opportunities to shape your Customer Success org.
• Builds trust naturally: Customer success is a difficult job that requires balancing the internal pressures of your team with the external needs of your customers. Look for a CSM who excels in building trust in both areas.

 

Hiring is Just One Part of HR: Download the Startup HR Survival Guide For the Rest

Hiring is a key piece of your startup’s success, but it’s only one element of a robust and effective HR strategy.

The most successful startups know that their path to scaling from seven to nine figures will be made possible by the practices they follow to attract and retain top performers in their company.

I mapped out this and more in my Startup HR Survival Guide.

In this free guide, you will learn:

• How HR can drive growth
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