The Customer Success Management team at GitLab is a part of the Customer Success department, acting as trusted advisors to our customers and helping them realize value faster.
Customer Success Segments
Mission Statement
Accelerate customer success by aligning passionate CSMs with customers to:
Drive adoption aligned with business outcomes
Enable customers in current and future GitLab use cases
Expand ROI from GitLab
What is a Customer Success Manager (CSM) at GitLab?
CSMs are accountable for customer adoption, measurable outcomes, customer satisfaction, and creating true customer advocacy. We create successful customers by enabling, training, and nurturing them throughout their journey. The following areas incorporate the remit of a CSM:
Customer Adoption - Ensure the customer is working towards or adopting their desired use cases to maturity. Ensure the successful onboarding of all intended users. Identify areas of adoption risk and establish mitigating plays and programs.
Delivering Positive Business Outcomes - Ensure customers are meeting and exceeding their desired business outcomes so that customers can quantify and support their investment.
Trusted Advisor - Establish “trusted advisor” relationships with the management and technical teams on the customer side while working seamlessly with our account team to deliver a best-in-class customer experience.
Account Expansion - Lead adoption expansion beyond the customer’s desired use cases and further customer return on investment (ROI). Partner with Sales to identify expansion opportunities and ensure we realize the expansion potential of a customer account.
Leading Business Reviews - Review and celebrate progress towards, or achievement of, the customer’s desired business outcomes. Address challenges with a plan for mitigation, align on upcoming and future customer business objectives.
Mutually agreed (Customer | GitLab) adoption plans that outline desired outcomes (e.g., improve cycle time), technical milestones required (e.g., migrate to GitLab, overcome constraints), timelines and DRIs.
These plans enable us to be proactive and ensure progress towards the customer's goals. As trusted advisors, we understand what drives value for our customers and help them achieve it.
There are several onboarding steps in both the new and existing customer onboarding playbooks. The CSM's role is to ensure all of these topics and enablements have been covered and documented.
All customers are to be taken through the appropriate playbook (New, Existing Customer)
We hold the business review at month 6, giving enough time passed to celebrate milestones achieved and enough time remaining to get adoption back on track where needed.
The CSM is the DRI for scheduling, preparing for, presenting, and following up on the EBR, and partners with both the account team and the customer in the creation of the presentation.
A CSM actively manages risk in a customer account, quickly turning a customer to red when there is any potential risk of contraction or churn (even if this is unconfirmed)
In Customer Success Management, it is important to be continuously learning more about our product and related industry topics. The education and enablement handbook page provides a dashboard of aggregated resources that we encourage you to use to get up to speed.
SFDC useful reports
Tracking opportunities for your assigned Strategic Account Executive (SAEs)
To ensure that opportunities are listed with the correct Order Type, this Salesforce report shows you all of the opportunities that have closed, or are soon to close, with your SAEs. Tracking Order Type is important since CSM team quota and compensation depend on this. Please reference the latest Sales Compensation Plan information to know what is counted.
Next steps for you:
Customize this SFDC report where “Account Owner = your SAEs”; “CSM = You”
Save report
Subscribe to report when “Record Count Greater Than 0” and Frequency = Weekly (You’ll get a weekly email as a reminder to look at the report)
If you find an opp that is tagged incorrectly, chatter (@Sales-Support) in the opportunity and let them know there is a mistake (example)
Customer Success Managers will typically manage customer engagements via a GitLab project in the account-management group. This project will be based off the Enterprise or the Commercial Customer Success Plan Template and customized to match the customer’s needs as outlined above. The project is pre-loaded with milestones, issues, labels, and a README template to help kick off the project and outline a proof of concept, implementation, and customer onboarding. The following is a short introduction video on GitLab’s first iteration of the Customer Success Plan.
CSMs will need to occasionally transfer accounts they have been working with to another CSM (e.g. a CSM changes territories, a realignment occurs in Sales, a need to equalize books of business, etc.), and they should use this handbook page to help guide them through important questions and topics during the handoff.
Below are checkpoints during the account handoff process that CSMs can use to keep track of information they will need in order to successfully transition accounts. For the sake of this page, most of this guidance is directed towards the new CSM but is helpful information for everyone involved.
One of the primary tools CSMs have to become a trusted advisor and assess and improve account health is the customer cadence call. This is an opportunity for the CSM and the customer team to sync on business outcomes, priorities, progress on initiatives, and concerns, and it is a great opportunity to bring in other GitLab team members that the CSM feels should be included (for example, Product to review feature requests and the roadmap).
Define the process for how the CSM interacts with the systems and processes designed to provide customers with technical support.
Establishing Customers in Support Systems
During the onboarding process, the CSM will ensure that customers are correctly established in the support system. GitLab manages support requests through a system called Zendesk. GitLab has integrated the GitLab instance of Salesforce with Zendesk to facilitate the establishment of users in Zendesk. The integration synchronizes account-level data so that the Zendesk ticket has accurate information on the customers’ purchase of products that include support.
At GitLab, successful partnerships between our Customer Success Managers and their customer executives are crucial to the success of our customers and our business. As CSMs position themselves to be more strategic and reach Director, VP, and CISO personas, we have to adjust our communication styles and consider how to cater them to executives. This page provides guidance on how CSMs can effectively partner with executives to drive value for our customers.
Objective: Define the 3 ‘big rocks’ to take on in FY23 with the overall goal of moving our team forwards. These rocks need to move us forwards as a team and as individuals, enabling us to scale, be impactful, and be inspired/fulfilled in our roles.
What are ‘big rocks’?
As outlined in this article, they are our priorities, our mission-critical objectives that we need to solve for in the coming year. We arrived at this list through CSM leadership discussions and final input from individual contributors.
Internships are a great way for a GitLab team member to learn about being a Customer Success Manager at GitLab. Use this guide for planning and executing an internship under an IC CSM who acts as the ‘Intern Mentor’.
How to find a mentor in the CSM team
The first step you will need to take in order to start an internship in Customer Success is to find a mentor from the CSM team. Feel free to reach out to any CSMs, particularly ones who are in a similar timezone to you to discuss an internship, or to reach out to a CSM Manager for guidance.
Onboarding for Customer Success Managers is a guided, methodical process to ensure new team members have the knowledge they need to be effective.
There is a lot to learn to make you a great GitLab Customer Success Manager. It is important for new team members to gain competency on how our platform solutions provide customer value, and how we partner with customers to build a productive relationship. This handbook page will provide an overview of what can be expected during the onboarding journey including learning objectives, milestones, and ways in which a manager and onboarding buddy can support a new team member during their onboarding.
As part of GitLab’s paid time off policy, team members are encouraged to take time off. However, as customer-facing team members this can feel difficult, so this page is intended to help guide CSMs to ensure they can regularly take time off, avoid burnout, and keep their customers successful.
Before you go
To take PTO, please follow the guidelines in the PTO policy and be sure to enter your time off in Time Off by Deel.
There are various services a Customer Success Manager will provide to ensure that customers get the best value possible out of their relationship with GitLab.
A successful CSM is pulled into various tasks across multiple territories and accounts. It is critical for a CSM to manage time effectively and concentrate on tasks that have the most positive impact for GitLab and the customer.
The CSM Rhythm of Business has been designed to focus CSM efforts on the most fruitful daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly tasks.
This page covers the factors to consider for customer health, guidelines for selecting the appropriate rating, communication guidelines, CSM responsibilities and instructions for the account triage issue creation.
The customer onboarding phase is critical to getting a customer started on a successful journey with GitLab. This is our opportunity to ensure the customer achieves value and success from the start of their GitLab usage.
Support Ticket Attention Requests (STAR). This occurs when an open support ticket is deemed moving too slowly.
The purpose of this handbook entry is to describe the process for account escalations. Please see the Support Ticket Attention Requests for details on how to request a support ticket escalation. For a detailed walkthrough of the process, please login to GitLab Unfiltered and view this video.
The Customer Success team is distributed across different customer segments, depending on the customer’s Annual Recurring Revenue or the purchase of GitLab’s Success Plan Services (SPS).
The following Digital Programs constitute “Customer Success Services” as included with your Subscription to Software, governed by the GitLab Subscription Agreement available at: https://about.gitlab.com/terms.
Digital Programs
Programs are developed using input from CSMs, customers, and other GitLab resources. Our goal is to provide customers with useful ways to serve themselves. We provide the following:
Onboarding resources for customers
Survey results
Stage enablement email series
Newsletters
Webinar setup and insight
Education, best practices, and planning resources for customers and GitLab team members
Gainsight playbook setup and maintenance
For more information about Customer Programs, including how to request new or contribute to existing programs, or add contacts to Gainsight, see the Customer Programs page.
GitLab Partner team introduces CSM & SAE/AE to Partner - ideally before sale closes to not slow down post-sales implementation
CSM and SAE/AE connects with Partner to align on the role the Partner will play post-sale.
If the Partner has an ongoing engagement with the customer, CSM & Partner to align on post-sale Kick-Off call, collaborating on the Kick-Off deck content and ownership/roles for the call
An Executive Business Review (EBR) is a strategic meeting with stakeholders from both GitLab and the customer. It is an extension of the account planning process and part of the CSM’s regular business rhythm. The EBR aims to demonstrate to the Economic Buyer the value they are getting in their partnership with GitLab. It is interactive from both sides, discussing the customer’s desired business outcomes and related metrics, progress against these metrics and desired outcomes, and aligning on strategic next steps. The most crucial element in all EBRs is giving the customer stakeholders the time to speak about what matters to them, and creating a framework to enable them to do so.
FY24 Annual OKRs (Big Rocks)
Objective: The 3 ‘big rocks’ to take on in FY24 with the overall goal of moving our team forwards. These rocks need to move us forwards as a team and as individuals, enabling us to scale, be impactful, and be inspired/fulfilled in our roles.
What are ‘big rocks’? As outlined in this article, they are our priorities, our mission-critical objectives that we need to solve for in the coming year. We arrived at this list through CSM leadership discussions and final input from individual contributors.
The objective of this retrospective program is to facilitate a structured and collaborative process for reflecting on accounts where significant churn or risk is present, identify areas for improvement, implementing actionable changes to enhance future performance and share learnings across the organization.
Scope
As a part of our retrospective process, when there is significant churn or risk to a customer account, the Customer Success Manager should own the retrospective process and align with their sales (AE/ASM), Solutions Architect (SA), Professional Services (PS) or Renewals Manager (RM) partners throughout. The goal of the retrospective is to talk through what went well, what didn’t go well, and what can be improved for next time.
The Leadership Recurring Check-In call is a strategic discussion with customer leadership to ensure we are progressing toward our success plan objectives together. While an Executive Business Review (EBR) aims to establish business goals and report on progress annually, the Leadership Recurring Check-In allows for a more focused conversation with leadership to allow for progress checks, and review the prioritization of objectives. It is less granular than a cadence call, but more focused than an EBR, and still has the aims of being strategic and requiring company leadership, even if they are not at the executive level.
Oliver Falk, Manager, Customer Success Engineering, EMEA
This page is intended to help others understand what it might be like to work with me, especially people who haven’t worked with me before.
It’s also a well-intentioned effort at building some trust by being intentionally vulnerable, and to share my ideas of a good working relationship to reduce the anxiety of people who might be on my team.
This handbook page collects links to all roleplaying scenarios, for CSMs to utilize to improve their conversations and enable them to be audible-ready.
Service Ping generates customer analytics on self-managed instances that enable GitLab to collaborate with our customers to accelerate value attribution, achieve return-on-investment (ROI) goals, and accomplish business outcomes with the GitLab solution. Specifically, it helps GitLab understand product adoption to:
Ensure adoption is aligned to business outcomes (i.e., goals, timelines, etc).
Understand usage for industry and best practice recommendations
Recommend features or capabilities that maximize solution value based on:
Gaps in adoption
New features or capabilities that can be leveraged
Enable User Cohorts and GitLab DevOps Score that provides an overview of customers’ adoption of Concurrent DevOps from planning to monitoring
The approach described below is no longer in active use. The Use Case Adoption Scoring page should be referenced for thresholds and information on the methodology CSMs use for measuring adoption of use cases.
As part of the CSM’s mandate to drive stage adoption and expansion with customers, we need to define exactly what it means to adopt a stage at GitLab. For more information on how stage expansion is recorded and reported on, please visit this page
The detail below is a guide to defining what it takes to say a customer has adopted that stage within GitLab. We define stage adoption as >25% of the account using a stage as defined below. Less than 25% (roughly) is presumed to be a pilot or work in progress toward a significant foothold of a stage providing value within the company.
Best practices and setup guide for Customer Success Managers using Customer Collaboration Projects to manage customer data, requests, and collaborations.
The CSM team’s primary focus is to align with a customer’s desired business outcomes, enable the customer in their current use cases, and expand their platform adoption.
Customers who adopt additional DevOps use cases with GitLab see an increased return on investment (ROI). They receive this ROI by increasing operational efficiencies, delivering better products faster, and reducing security and compliance risks.
