Who does CS report to in the org?

Customer Success is a powerhouse in the customer facing organisation, but can feel like a hot potato with an identity crisis. Depending on where it sits and who it reports to, CS can be a catalyst or a burden.

Organisation design is no small task. There are some obvious organisational design principles that we all come to accept; Sales reports to a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) or VP of Sales and Marketing reports to a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) or VP of Marketing. Generally. Burrow one level deeper than the headline functions and C-suite, there are further teams that suffer identity crisis which can some times feel like trying to wedge a square peg into a round hole i.e. it fits, but there are gaps. You might see this in your own company; Business Development, Ops, Design... and Customer Success. Who is the top line leader, and where do they naturally fit to give them the most effective leadership and purpose?

Getting it right will depend on many different factors, and those will be unique to your organisation. In that respect, there is no one correct way to structure an organisation, especially when it comes to finding the best place for Customer Success to report to. There are, however, general considerations that will steer you in a better direction. The intent in diving into the following is to give you ideas for consideration, not to necessarily give you a definitive answer.

The TL:DR

If you don't have time to read the whole post, here's the top line... when figuring out who CS should report to, consider:

• The approach to customer success you want to take

• The technical nature of the product

• Size of the company, be that revenue or employee headcount

• The org structure you currently have, which C-suite seats you have filled

The answer to 'where does the CS org and CS leader report to in the company?' then leads you to one of the following:

• CRO

• VP of Sales

• CCO or CXO

• CEO

For an over-simplified visual that represents the thought process, see the decision tree below. For a deeper consideration and explanation, read on...

The Approach to Customer Success

In a previous blog post I wrote in greater depth about the The Different Flavours of Customer Success because it deserves a deeper look. Essentially your Customer Success will take on one of three main and dominant flavours; product orientated customer success, commercial customer success, or strategic customer success. You may have a dominant flavour, with other flavours as toppings, but there will always be a strategic driver that leads with one of those.

Commercial

If you are a Commercial Customers Success led team, theres really only one way to go, and that is to have CS report into the Sales leader. This aligns all teams to a revenue number, and a person who will drive one strategy, where the outcome is to maximise revenue, be that net new, renewal or expansion revenue.

For companies with a CRO, CS will report there as a top line leader. If there isn't a CRO then a VP of Sales, and cascading for there you would have your CS leader who would most likely be a VP or Director of CS.

It's uncommon to have a CS team with a strong revenue focus report to someone who is not in Sales. It happens, but just know that the CS leader (who would likely report up through the CCO/CXO/CEO instead) has to have very clear numbers, objectives, relationship and alignment with the Sales leader, and autonomy to lead the CS org in their way. I've seen it happen, it's probably the least effective.

Product

A Product Customer Success team is a team that is hand's-on with the product, starting with the onboarding, and potentially setup, of the tool, through activation and focusing on long term adoption and feature usage. In the approach the CS team will have strong product knowledge, rather than commercial experience.

In this approach the CS team will likely report through a CS leader, either into a CCO/CXO, or directly into a CEO. This will depend somewhat on the size of the company and technical nature of the product, which is discussed further on.

Strategic

A Strategic Customer Success team is the holy grail for a lot of companies, but how seriously they lean into this will depend on whether you think of strategic with a capital 'S' or a lowercase 's'. In other words is the structure, approach, methodology and activity of the team truly Strategic (consulting, advisory, Challenger/SPIN/MEDDPIC, etc) or are they strategic by virtue of a segmentation, desire, wavy-hand "be more strategic in your approach".

In this approach, if the team truly is Strategic then you're likely to have a large org, more complex or technical product, with supporting functions, larger revenues and financial goals, and in this case will likely report to a dedicated CXO, or CCO, who drives the Strategic approach with focused enablement, playbooks, and expectations.

The Technical Nature of the Product

If the product your company sells is highly technical or complex in nature (think: AI, infrastructure, developer tools, integrations to other systems, deep or lengthy implementations) then your CS team are less likely to be hands on with the product, but will represent the company and be the face of the relationship with the customer. In this case, the CS team, along with all of the supporting functions (Technical Account Management, Solutions Architects, Professional Services, Developers), will likely be lead by a dedicated top line leader with a 'Customer Experience', 'Field' or 'Customer Success' senior title, who then reports into the CEO.

In smaller companies this may still happen, but in a more condensed fashion, with fewer heads in each role, the leader is still likely to be a non-Sales leader. The reason I suggest this will unlikely be a Sales leader structure, is because technical products require so much supporting function that they become a distraction to a Sales leader should they report under them. Revenue and sales numbers will always take priority, and you will likely need a leader with technical specific knowledge to lead those functions.

For simple, light, PLG type companies, that have self-service sign-up, I would say a CS leader would be the best top line leader for the org, but it would not feel entirely out of place if, in a smaller company, this ultimately reported into a Sales leader since at this stage you are probably trying to achieve rapid growth and customer acquisition, and so you're commercially led.

Company Size

When I think about company size, I tend to think of how much revenue and how many employees. Companies can remain relatively lean even at high revenues, but when the revenue is high there is more at stake and its definitely worth investing in internal headcount to ensure (a) you safeguard that future renewal and (b) you accelrate the rate of growth even faster.

I'm not a fan of create tall organisation structures. The most effective and efficient companies I have worked in and with have always tried to avoid adding unnecessary layers. This is fairly obvious to most companies and you'll quickly feel icky about the idea of adding a layer if you don't have the size.

It's not a hard a fast rule but I would say that somewhere around the 100-150 employee mark, and/or the $5m-$10m ARR range, you'll want to move away from having the top line leader being the CEO. Up until that point you can get away with having the Manager/Director of CS report into the CEO. But as you grow beyond that point the CEO will be less hands on with the day to day customer side of things, as they will have more strategic or deeper company matters to manage. Thats not to say that you can't have a more senior Director or VP reporting to the CEO, but they will have more autonomy and control over the org.

As you grow beyond that size, structure will become a natural by-product of size. You should have a senior leader at VP or Senior Director level who can lead through the CS team through the next phase of growth and is comfortable and capable of leading in a company that is $10m-$80m+. This person can remain your top line leader for quite some time, as they will be building out teams and management layers beneath them to handle the various functions or activities within your growing CS org. At the lower end of the range, the VP could also report into a Sales leader (depending on the CS focus), but when you get towards aiming at $100m+ you should have long considered a CCO role.

Some smaller start-ups will have a CCO right from day 1, knowing that the company growth will be rapid. That person will be charged with building out a structure for long term growth and explosive scale and whilst the role title might look a big janky in a small company, will very quickly become an obvious and shrewd long term investment.

Current Structure

The current org structure and the roles where you already have 'bums on seats' might determine, to some extent, where Customer Success reports to. Aspirationally you may want to have top lines leaders that just don't exist in the org today, and so for that case CS will report into who you have in the org. At the very least you are likely to have at least one of a a Sales Leader, a post-Sales Leader, or a strong CEO who knows the product well. Failing all else, CS should report to one of those. Over time, the Executives and C-Suite will change, you may have exists, or incomings, and the people in those roles will have different experience, strategies, and drivers that lead the reporting line of CS in one direction or another.

It's also important who CS should not report to. In my opinion, CS should never report to a Support org leader, a Marketing leader, or a Product team leader. I have heard of all 3 being the case, and it simply doesn't work. If you squint, you could probably just about argue that a Support leader and CS team have a customer-focus in common, but the reason why that doesn't work is because the nature, velocity, and profile of the two roles are very very different. Have the Customer Success team report into Support and you will struggle to correctly and accurately set the expectation of what Customer Success does, and what Support does. CS will always lose. Marketing and Product are so fundamentally different from Customer Success is about, that when a CS team becomes embedded beneath those leaders, they will be suffocated, and reduced to a claustrophobic appendage who lacks the scope or empowerment to do what they do best.

In Closing

There are factors that haven't been written about here that you might be wondering about...

• What about if you are a multi-product company?

• Does it differ in public, private, VC or PE back companies?

• What about segmentation of customers or companies that do tech-touch CS?

• How do you handle global orgs with local autonomy, or decentralised companies?

All of these, and many more considerations, will need to be thought about in the context of your own company.

My thoughts and comments in this post are conversation starters and directions based on my own experiences and impressions of what I've seen work, or not. By no means do I believe there is one and only way.