Best Practices Request: International Expansion
Has anyone expanded their CS org from one central office to several different locations, either domestically or internationally? How have you structured your team to better manage geographically dispersed offices?
Userlevel 7
+2
Hi Elena,
At my previous company we grew the customer success team from ~8 CSMs to over 30 in about 4 years time. Included in that growth was expansions across domestic and international regions/offices. We had a core group of CSMs in our corporate offices in Boston, but also had remote CSMs in a number of cities across the US as well as CSMs in India, Australia and the UK for region specific coverage.
As the manager responsible for team forecasting and planning every 6 months I would work with the regional sales leadership in the non-US geographies to get a sense for their sales pipeline and would use this to forecast headcount requirements. Growth was more predictable in the US, and we would review that forecast annually.
There are unique aspects to international coverage that must be considered. In some countries the CSMs only dotted line reported to me, as there were legal requirements that dictated that they have local managers (from an HR perspective) but that was more of a formality as I set their objectives and measured their success.
Some other considerations came into play with team meetings and ensuring that non-US based CSMs felt included as it was impossible to pick a time for any single team meeting that everyone could attend, since we had a true 'follow the sun' model.
If you have any other specific questions related to the challenges and solutions involved, let me know!
Thanks,
Dan
At my previous company we grew the customer success team from ~8 CSMs to over 30 in about 4 years time. Included in that growth was expansions across domestic and international regions/offices. We had a core group of CSMs in our corporate offices in Boston, but also had remote CSMs in a number of cities across the US as well as CSMs in India, Australia and the UK for region specific coverage.
As the manager responsible for team forecasting and planning every 6 months I would work with the regional sales leadership in the non-US geographies to get a sense for their sales pipeline and would use this to forecast headcount requirements. Growth was more predictable in the US, and we would review that forecast annually.
There are unique aspects to international coverage that must be considered. In some countries the CSMs only dotted line reported to me, as there were legal requirements that dictated that they have local managers (from an HR perspective) but that was more of a formality as I set their objectives and measured their success.
Some other considerations came into play with team meetings and ensuring that non-US based CSMs felt included as it was impossible to pick a time for any single team meeting that everyone could attend, since we had a true 'follow the sun' model.
If you have any other specific questions related to the challenges and solutions involved, let me know!
Thanks,
Dan
Thanks Dan!
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