Customer Success Manager: What It Is and How to Become One

Customer success managers nurture long-term customer relationships by ensuring customers are happy with their purchases and supporting them throughout their post-purchase customer journey. Customer success managers are integral to the success of a company's sales goals.

Learn more about customer success managers, including what they do, how much they earn, and how to become one. Afterward, develop your confidence working with one of the key customer success tools, Salesforce, with the Salesforce Sales Operations Professional Certificate.

What is a customer success manager?

A customer service manager (CSM) plays an important role in the final stages of the sales cycle. Once a sales representative successfully closes a sale, a CSM steps in to ensure the new customer's ongoing satisfaction with the product or service they purchased from the company.

The top issues impacting the customer journey include ease of problem resolution, ineffective use of customer data, poor omnichannel experience, and delayed contact between a customer and a business, according to Statista [1]. CSMs—sometimes called "client success managers," "customer service managers,” or “managers of customer success"—build long-term relationships with customers and help resolve some of these problems by helping onboard customers and ensure proper product adoption, among other responsibilities.

What does a customer success manager do?

CSMs build customer loyalty by ensuring that customers have a positive experience with the company through the product or service they've purchased. While working in this managerial position, you may be responsible for ensuring customer satisfaction, managing customer needs, and using customer service data to set and enforce customer service goals for the company.

Important tasks might include:

• Onboarding customers, including guiding customers through the initial set-up

• Creating onboarding plans and documents to ease customer experience

• Establishing regular check-ins with customers and building relationships

• Monitoring customer usage data and patterns

• Promote product features

• Identify risk factors to avoid customer churn

• Work collaboratively with other members of the sales team, as well as product and support

Learn more about the everyday tasks of a CSM from industry leaders at Salesforce:

Customer success manager salary

Customer success managers are critical to ensuring customers are happy and do not leave (churn). As a result, they're well-compensated for their efforts. According to Glassdoor, the median base salary customer success managers earn is $92,297 as of March 2025 [2]. Furthermore, you could earn additional compensation in the form of commissions, cash bonuses, tips, and profit sharing.

Because many customer success managers work on commission in addition to a base salary, the types of goods or services they sell can also greatly affect their income.  

Learn more: 8 High-Paying Sales Jobs

How to become a customer success manager

Customer success managers need to have a strong understanding of a business's products and services, including technical features. They must also have excellent customer service skills. Handling such an important aspect of a business means that most employers prefer candidates with the right education, experience, and skills.

Learn more about what you can expect to do on the path to becoming a customer success manager:

1. Get your degree.

In order to qualify for most customer success manager positions, you'll need to have a bachelor's degree. According to Zippia, 77.5 percent of customer success managers have a bachelor's degree, 12.3 percent have a master's degree, and 6.9 percent have an associate degree [3]. Top majors include business, marketing, communication, and political science.

2. Gain relevant work experience.

In order to become a customer success manager, you'll need to gain relevant work experience that prepares you for the job. In fact, according to Zippia, most employers ask that job applicants have between four and six years of work experience in a field related to the position, such as sales or marketing [3].

Some jobs you might consider pursuing in order to gain relevant work experience include customer service representative or sales associate.  

3. Develop the right skills.

The most effective managers will have the right balance of technical skills and people skills, needing knowledge of certain software and tools, as well as people management and communication. Some of the skills you can expect to use as a customer success manager include: 

4. Seek advancement.

Once you have the required experience and skills, begin your job search for customer success manager positions. Explore existing positions at your current place of work as well as elsewhere, focusing on areas you may have specialized in former positions. It can often take time to land a job, but by preparing appropriately and being proactive, you can do it.

5. Consider additional career advancement. 

As a customer success manager, you may choose to move into other management roles or change departments.

Most customer success managers follow the sales or marketing pathway within a company. This means that a customer success manager may step into the role of manager of other customer success managers, account executive/account manager, product sales/marketing manager, product management, or enterprise customer success manager. 

You may find yourself on the pathway to positions like vice president of sales or chief customer officer (CCO) if you stay with a company for a while and gain success and experience in your roles. 

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