Hire a Customer Success Manager
The hire that decides whether the customers you fought for stay.
Support and success are different jobs with the same job title
- Retained recruiters.
- LinkedIn Recruiter seats.
- Keyword-matched resumes.
- Templated InMails.
Support answers questions. Customer success owns whether the account renews and grows, which means understanding the customer's business, spotting trouble before they raise it, and having a commercial conversation when it matters.
At startups the two collapse into one person, and the hire gets judged on response time because that is easy to measure. Six months later renewals are wobbling and nobody saw it coming.
The other trap is hiring from a company with a mature success motion. Playbooks, health scores and a team to escalate to do not exist yet. The first CS hire writes them.
How the agent runs a customer success search
It reads for commercial ownership
Evidence of owning renewal or expansion numbers, not just satisfaction scores. That distinction predicts most of the outcome.
It finds the technical ones when you need them
For a technical product, the CS hire has to hold a real conversation with an engineer. The agent reads for that and says whether the evidence is there.
Outreach that names the accounts
Strong CS people choose by who the customers are and how much autonomy they get. The message says both.
Screening on the save
Your questions go out early: the account they saved and how they saw it coming, and one they lost and what the signal was in hindsight.
Questions.
Answered.
If customers mostly need technical help, hire support. If they need someone to own the relationship and the renewal, hire CS. Confusing the two is the most common early mistake.
Increasingly yes, at least on renewal and expansion. It changes who applies and is worth deciding before the search starts.
As technical as your customers. For a developer tool, they should be able to read your docs and debug an integration.
Before roughly ten paying customers, founders usually should not hand this over. You lose the signal that tells you what to build.
Hire a Solutions Engineer
The person who turns a sceptical technical buyer into a signed deal.
Hire a Founding Account Executive
Your first salesperson has no playbook, no brand and no pipeline. Most AEs have never worked without all three.
Hire a Head of Sales
The leader who turns founder-led sales into a repeatable motion.
Find your first CS hire.
Tell us who your customers are and the agent will find people who have kept accounts like them.