This guide is aimed to help you calculate the average salary for customer success manager with basic or advanced experience. Feel free to leave your additional inputs in comments box.
Customer success managers are the ones who make sure your customers have everything they need, when they need it. They’re the ones who help ensure you get your money’s worth out of your product or service, and that your customers are happy with their experience.
If you’ve ever had a problem with an online purchase or an app, there’s a good chance a customer success manager was involved in resolving it. They’re also responsible for making sure that customers get the most bang for their buck from the products and services they’ve purchased—and if something does go wrong, they’ll be there to help figure out how to fix it.
For example: if you buy something on Amazon, you’ll be assigned a customer success manager who will check in with you via email and chat to see if there’s anything else they can do for you at any point during your purchase journey (such as recommending other products). If something goes wrong with your order (such as a delayed shipment), that person will contact Amazon on your behalf so they can correct it.
They’ll also answer questions like “how do I use this?” or “what is this feature?” so that you’re getting the most out of what you paid for.
Salary for customer success manager
Customer Success is a young profession, with 95% of people entering CS from different backgrounds (source: 2015 Totango report). Companies are still learning how to structure their Customer Success Manager salary offerings.
The Totango report does not tell us specifically how Customer Success Managers were rewarded, as they made up only a third of the survey participants. Other participants included CCOs (16%) and CS Directors (35%), who could skew the data in favour of a bonus.
So, when you read that the most popular pay structure for Customer Success professionals is a base salary with bonus (54%), followed by base salary only (26%), you can only guess whether this is true across all Customer Success roles.
Using an online salary estimator tool, let’s look at Customer Success Managers only.
Their annual median pay in the United States is around $69,000 with compensation packages ranging from $44,000 to $121,000. The packages include bonuses that peak near $25,000, profit sharing schemes that approach $20,000 and commissions as high as $50,000.
Although we cannot see a breakdown of the percentages of people who receive variable components, we can see they exist in the pay structure. Is there a right way to reward Customer Success Managers? Should you include bonus and commission elements, or simply offer a base salary?
Let’s look at the definition of the terms: commission means paying employees a percentage of the sales they bring to the company. A bonus is awarded when goals have been met and are used to compensate employees who are not directly responsible for selling.
Customer Success Managers own customer communication, the customer relationship and have a deep understanding of their customers’ needs.
Even if the sales guy has a relationship with the customer, the Customer Success Manager is usually more adept at tailoring the presentation of features outside of the basic package. The extended demo comes easily to them, and so they can help plant the seed of an upsell opportunity.
But if you offer Customer Success Managers a commission, they will hang on to the opportunity for dear life. They might neglect their other duties and end up going head-to-head with every other commission-based, customer-facing individual who sniffs a deal.
