Mastering Your First 90 Days in a Customer Success Leadership Role
Stepping into a new Customer Success leadership role can be both exciting and daunting. Your first 90 days are critical for setting the tone, understanding the business, and laying the foundation for success. But where do you start?
This structured 90-day plan will help you maximise impact while ensuring a smooth transition into your role.
Days 1–30: Listen, Learn, and Build Relationships
Your first month should be all about understanding the business, people, and customers. This is not the time to make big changes—instead, focus on gathering insights and developing relationships.
Key Areas of Focus:
Understand the business – What are the company’s goals, vision, and success metrics?
Meet with key stakeholders & customers– Talk to executives, cross-functional teams, CSMs and customers.
Review customer data – What do retention, churn, and expansion numbers look like?
Assess existing processes – How does the team currently manage onboarding, renewals, and escalations?
Experience the product firsthand – Understand its strengths, weaknesses, and customer pain points.
Actions to Take:
Set up 1:1 meetings with your team to understand their challenges and aspirations.
Listen to customer calls or join meetings to hear their feedback directly.
Shadow existing customer interactions to see how your team handles different scenarios.
Map out the customer journey to spot friction points and opportunities.
Assess internal tools and data – Do you have the right systems in place to track success?
📌 Takeaway: Your goal is not to fix everything immediately but to learn as much as possible and build trust with your team.
Days 31–60: Define Your Strategy and Start Making Changes
Now that you understand the landscape, it’s time to set a strategy and make small but meaningful improvements.
Key Areas of Focus:
Define a Customer Success vision – Align your strategy with company goals.
Identify quick wins – Where can you make an immediate impact?
Refine team processes – Address onboarding, renewals, or customer engagement inefficiencies.
Strengthen collaboration – Work closely with Sales, Product, and Marketing.
Start measuring progress – Identify key metrics to track improvements.
Actions to Take:
Create a 90-day action plan and share it with your team and leadership for team and cross-functional alignment.
Develop key success metrics (e.g., time-to-value/impact (TTV), Recurring impact, retention rate (GRR), expansion revenue (NRR)).
Optimise the onboarding process to help customers see value faster.
Introduce regular customer health checks to identify risks proactively.
Enhance team enablement – Are your CSMs trained and equipped with the right tools?
📌 Takeaway: Start showing your value by implementing small but strategic changes that drive customer success forward.
Days 61–90: Implement, Optimise, and Scale
By now, you have a strategy in place and initial improvements underway. The final stretch is about execution, optimisation, and preparing for long-term success.
Key Areas of Focus:
Execute on the strategy – Roll out key initiatives.
Monitor and iterate – Gather feedback and adjust as needed.
Strengthen customer relationships – Deepen engagement and advocacy efforts.
Refine team performance – Improve CSM workflows and training.
Align with executive leadership – Showcase early wins and secure buy-in for future investments.
Actions to Take:
Launch a customer advocacy program to turn happy customers into champions.
Automate repetitive tasks (e.g., renewal reminders and customer touchpoints) to free up CSM time.
Improve customer engagement strategies – Can you introduce more personalised and proactive outreach?
Create a reporting dashboard to track CS performance in real time.
Run a team retrospective – What’s working? What needs to be improved? Adjust accordingly.
📌 Takeaway: This is when you start seeing tangible results. Keep a close eye on metrics, customer feedback, and team performance to ensure long-term success.
Final Thoughts: Your First 90 Days Define Your Leadership
The first 90 days in a Customer Success leadership role can differentiate between thriving and struggling. Focus on listening first, strategising second, and executing third, Though if the expectation is clearly for you to move quicker than outlined, then do it, the ball is always in your court for the first 90 days!
🚀 If you build strong relationships, show early wins, and create a solid strategy, you’ll set yourself—and your team—up for long-term success.
