3 Questions to Ask a VP of Customer Success
The Right Leader Sets the Right Pace
As a SaaS founder or leader, you already know that hiring the right people is crucial to success — especially when you’re looking to scale up to the next stage of growth. It’s important when hiring leaders of existing functions within the business, but it’s even more critical when launching a new one. Hiring a leader for a new or growing customer success function, in particular, requires an extremely thoughtful approach. A VP hire at a SaaS company is even more complex (and often unsuccessful) – according to research, 75% of initial VP hires fail in the first 19 months.
There are a number of reasons for this, but asking the right questions upfront can help you improve the odds of success. Here, we’ll explore three questions to ask a VP of customer success during an interview — along with some bonus best practices you can use to ensure that a candidate is really the right one to lead your customer success team. Let’s dig in.
1. Assess Engagement Level
The first question to ask a VP of customer success is intended to help you assess how engaged the candidate is with the company, the role, and how it fits in with their career goals. The most effective customer success leaders come to every customer interaction with a premeditated goal. Thus, those most effective customer success leaders will be similarly goal-driven in their interviews. An engaged, focused candidate will come to the interview with a punch list of topics they want to learn about.
To identify your most goal-driven candidates, start the interview with this question:
“As much as we’re vetting you, I suspect you’re vetting us: the company, the role, me. With that in mind, what are the top items you’re hoping to learn about today? I’ll make sure we address your top items before we wrap up our interview.”
Note that if the candidate stumbles or defaults to asking about company culture, then it’s a strong sign that they haven’t prepared well for the interview (red flag!) and don’t appear to be hardwired to be goal-driven in their interactions with customers.
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2. Assess Talent Development and Retention
A customer success leader is only as strong as their team. The best leaders are constantly challenging and stretching their team members to develop the skills and accumulate the experiences that will positively impact customers’ abilities to achieve their desired outcomes using your platform. To that end, here’s another question to ask a VP of customer success candidate that should be on your list:
“Tell me about a time when your development and coaching of a person on your team led to that person achieving their goals.”
Listen for specific ways that the candidate systematically developed the team member. This should be a fairly detailed response as well — employee development is more than just executing a one-off task or undergoing some form of training. The candidate should explain the challenge, its impact, the solutions or processes they implemented for that employee, and the outcome. More details indicate greater thoughtfulness and attentiveness to how the employee performed.
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3. Assess Commercial Skills
Another question to ask a VP of customer success focuses on their revenue acumen. Remember, customer success for a B2B SaaS platform is at its heart a revenue function — especially when a land-and-expand opportunity exists (which, in SaaS, is typically the case). Drill in to understand the candidate’s track record with customer renewal and revenue expansion from existing accounts. The best candidates have an encyclopedic understanding of all of their organization’s success metrics, goals, and performance against those goals.
“We recently wrapped up a quarter here at our company. Tell me the results of your most recently completed quarter.”
The best candidates will be brief yet specific. Even if the results aren’t great, the best candidates will own up to the shortcoming and talk about what they’re doing to rectify that shortfall. Candidates that aren’t as experienced or driven will ramble, not have a good handle on the numbers, and attempt to push the blame elsewhere.
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Bonus — Two Interview Best Practices
- Spend at least 75% of the interview time asking the candidate to provide examples. To accomplish this, start a question like this: “Tell me about a time when you…” and, when ending your question to the candidate, say this: “I’d like to know not what you would do, but what you did do, including the outcome.”
- After the candidate provides an example that demonstrates an important skill or experience, always ask for a second example. Most candidates come prepared with one quality example, but the best customer success leader candidates — those who are deeply experienced — are ready with two or more relevant examples.
Hire in Customer Success with Confidence
Carema Consulting offers a Scalable Customer Success Framework for B2B SaaS companies looking to transform and grow this critical business function. Our support doesn’t just focus on what to do with customer success, however — we also partner with our SaaS clients’ HR and recruiting teams on who should be leading the way.
We help to define customer success job specifications, participate in candidate interviews, and of course, assist in implementing the solutions that companies need to achieve their goals. Learn more about our capabilities and how they’ve produced significant, meaningful results for our clients.
Ready to get hiring in customer success? Connect with our team today to discuss our scalable framework solutions and consultative support.
