Navigating unrealistic expectations for your CS team

When you lead a team of Customer Success Managers (CSMs), you’re walking a tightrope – balancing high (and sometimes unrealistic) expectations from organizational leaders while being fair to your team.

Too often, senior leaders set KPIs without fully understanding the bandwidth required to achieve them. Far too many managers struggle with advocating for their teams without coming across as making excuses or just complaining. 

When you lead a team of Customer Success Managers (CSMs), you’re walking a tightrope – balancing high (and sometimes unrealistic) expectations from organizational leaders while being fair to your team. Too often, senior leaders set KPIs without fully understanding the bandwidth required to achieve them.
Far too many managers struggle with advocating for their teams without coming across as making excuses or just complaining. 

In this article, we share insights from the Preflight community to help you navigate the delicate balance between leadership expectations and the realities your team faces.

1. Measure first, speak later

Alice from the Preflight community emphasizes the importance of quantifying the time CSMs spend on various tasks. Without concrete data, it’s hard to make a compelling case for adjustments or improvements.

To get accurate insights:

• Review CSMs' calendars to track daily activities and time allocations.
• Collect feedback from CSMs on the frequency and duration of their tasks.
• Consolidate this information into a clear report, focusing on resource utilization for each account.

2. Use an outcome-focuses framework to map tasks to outcomes

Mikael Blaisdell advocates an outcome-focused approach to tasks with a framework like this:

• Task: What the CSMs do
• Duration: How long it takes
• Frequency: How often it’s done
• Priority: How critical the task is
• Outcomes: The value or result generated

This approach provides not just a snapshot of the current workload but also a blueprint for future resource planning. 

3. Get visibility into daily operations through tools

From her experience, Alice highlights how small inefficiencies—like email correspondence, ticket response times, untracked internal meetings, or delays in finding solutions—can add up quickly. 

Alice offers a practical perspective, especially in cases where it can be challenging to measure everything a CSM does. She suggests that if you don’t have complete data on time spent per task, you could instead focus on cost estimates for platforms that can streamline operations and present these solutions to the leadership.

For instance:

• AI virtual assistants for reactive customer chats.
• AI ticket integrations linked to your knowledge base, email, and chat systems.
• Customer onboarding tools to streamline initial customer setups.

Alice also emphasizes the value of a project management tool to improve visibility into daily operations. This can help leadership better understand bandwidth constraints and why it may be tough to meet certain KPI initiatives without adjustments.

4. Highlight the operational nuances of your model(s)

Highlight the unique characteristics of your business’s operational model. For instance, while industry standards like Jason Lemkin’s recommendation of one CSM per $2M in ARR might work for enterprise clients, they don’t always translate to SMBs or high-touch B2C operations.

Studies by experts like Jeff Kushmerek from Infinite Renewals reveal that up to 70% of CSMs’ time is spent on support tasks. If implementation is part of their role, over half of CSMs report it reduces their capacity by 50%. Presenting such data will help contextualize your team’s challenges.

When advocating for realistic KPIs, highlight factors like:

• Product complexity: How challenging is it for customers to adopt and realize value?
• Customer size and churn rate: Larger or more at-risk accounts may demand more hands-on attention.
• CSM responsibilities: Many CSMs juggle multiple tasks, including product adoption, account management, implementation, retention, and customer satisfaction initiatives.
• Market readiness: As Jeff Kushmerek notes, CSMs in early-stage companies often bridge gaps until product-market fit is achieved, which significantly impacts workload.

5. Get external expertise to strengthen your case

Consider bringing in a consultant to conduct an independent assessment of how your CSMs spend their time on core activities. A fresh perspective can provide actionable insights into workload distribution and offer credible data to strengthen your argument.

Additionally, leverage industry reports, case studies, and benchmarks to enrich your case. These resources provide a framework for comparison and demonstrate that your observations align with broader industry trends.

6. Involve leadership in decision-making and emphasize trade-offs

Once you’ve gathered and presented your data, engage leadership in a collaborative discussion to prioritize tasks and align expectations. 

Mikael suggests reframing the conversation by asking:

• Which activities could be automated or deprioritized?
• What are the cost implications of specific tasks or processes?

As part of this conversation, illustrate trade-offs with "if-then" scenarios. Demonstrate the cause-and-effect relationship between competing priorities to keep the discussion solution-focused and grounded in data.

For example:
If leadership increases customer coverage, outline which existing tasks would need to be deprioritized or identify the additional resources—like new hires or tools—necessary to achieve the new goals. 

Lastly, propose a pilot program for new KPIs and use this to measure the impact on workload, efficiency, and outcomes. 

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