Almost every customer success manager I've met shares one defining trait: we're driven to win. We thrive on the gratification that comes from knowing our efforts helped something or someone succeed.

While this often translates to celebrating our customers' closed-won deals, pipeline growth, or revenue milestones, it also drives our individual career progression, both as individual contributors and as future team leaders.

But here's the challenge: due to the multifaceted nature of what we do—relationship management, churn prevention, internal coordination, support activities, and more—it can be difficult to identify which specific skills or activities truly move the needle in demonstrating we're ready to grow.

While countless professional coaches online offer varying perspectives (and some are certainly valuable), I wanted to share what a current, active CS practitioner knows actually drives career advancement.

3 Critical Skills Every CSM Should Invest Time In Mastering

Rather than overwhelming you with an endless list, let's focus on the three fundamental skills every CSM needs to master for career progression:

1. Closing Renewals

2. Risk Identification and Mitigation

3. Extreme Ownership

Closing Renewals

This might seem obvious, as CSMs, we're undoubtedly the front line for renewals and revenue retention. Yet many still feel lost when it comes to navigating and, more importantly, closing renewals.

Successful renewal management requires understanding several key components across a strategic timeline:

The key insight? Closing a renewal starts months before the actual renewal date. Ideally, you're beginning this process 8-12 months early. The more time you have to understand someone's renewal sentiment, the more opportunity you have to positively influence that sentiment.

8+ Months Before Renewal

We spend countless hours with our customers, often deep in the weeds: building use cases, solving tickets, conducting trainings. All that "heads down, hands on keyboard" time can make it an afterthought to actually gauge how they feel about the platform.

Take time for temperature checks. Ask the pointed question: "Would you renew if your renewal was today?"

Be prepared for negative responses, they will happen. When they do, ask follow-up questions. Then ask more. Keep digging until you understand the "why" behind their sentiment, whether negative or positive.

By the end of this phase, you should know:

• Whether they would renew right now

• Who will be involved in the renewal process (Legal, Procurement, Finance, etc.)

• How to develop an action plan addressing any concerns

4 Months Before Renewal

You've been executing your action plan, and ideally, your customer is seeing positive results. Now pricing discussions typically begin and this is where things get challenging.

To excel as a CSM, you must handle commercial conversations confidently, especially around renewals. This has been an area I continuously work to improve.

Strategy: Position longer-term commitments as better value. With time on your side, you can incentivize longer contracts, something many SaaS organizations have embraced.

Example Pricing Structure:

The positioning: "We want to continue partnering with you to grow your business. We've achieved so much together, and because of that success and our commitment to you, I was able to secure these terms for a two-year commitment."

Know your pricing levers and product inclusion options. Use them strategically to secure longer commitments, every business appreciates long-term customers.

3 Months or Less

This is crunch time. Ideally, you secure signatures 3+ months before renewal—it provides peace of mind, demonstrates your contract negotiation skills, and shows you've built beneficial customer relationships.

If signature hasn't happened yet, realign on:

• Why signature hasn't occurred

• What needs to happen to secure it

• Who owns which parts of the process

Finding and working with a Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) from your customer is absolute gold.

Risk Identification and Mitigation

I passionately advocate for this as a core CSM skill. While closing renewals is important, identifying and mitigating risk forms the foundation of what we do. Risk impacts your individual goals, your team, and your business. If a customer is at-risk and you don't identify it, you appear out of touch with your portfolio—career death for a CSM.

Despite its importance, CSMs often struggle with risk assessment. Some accounts exist in gray areas—not performing great but still engaged, lacking results but maintaining executive responsiveness, having good relationships but poor sales outcomes.

The solution? Simplify risk classification.

Red Alert Customers

These should be obvious: minimal communication, low platform usage, no visible ROI. All unfortunately negative indicators.

These customers can be both the hardest and easiest to turn around. If you've been knocking on the same door with the same pitch, change your door and change your pitch. Find new points of contact, understand how your product impacts their daily responsibilities, and send targeted outreach focused on specific value propositions.

Key strategy: Find someone willing to listen, help them see the opportunity, and make engagement easy.

Growth Potential Customers

These are among the most rewarding customers—they want to succeed and trust you to help them get there. The critical task is identifying the root cause of their ROI gap.

Is it poor campaign conversion? Inadequate sales follow-up? Broken automation? Find the disconnect between Point A and Point B.

I spend entire sessions with these customers deep-diving their product setup, team usage patterns, and gap analysis. Usually, gaps exist in follow-up processes—once filled, success follows quickly.

Risk warning: These customers can become deflated just as quickly as they become engaged. Without rapid wins and ROI, their renewal likelihood plummets. Ensure you have a strong, executable action plan.

Auto-Pilot Customers

Sometimes frustrating, often pleasant—these self-sufficient customers juggle multiple priorities. They reach out when needed, then disappear for weeks.

Strategy for auto-pilot customers: Every conversation should incorporate value proof. Ask about tool perception regularly. At the slightest hint of concern, immediately align on what's happening and why.

Recommended approach:

• Semi-annual business reviews with executive leadership

• Monthly check-ins with admin contacts

• Consistent highlighting of wins and achievements

(Check out our podcast episode on Running Successful Business Reviews.)

Extreme Ownership

Simple concept, profound impact: You own the entire process and its results. Whatever happens, good or bad, happens because of you.

This doesn't mean shouldering 100% of the workload, but it does mean being the quarterback of the operation. Master when to engage additional resources, when to have executive-level versus admin-level conversations, and how to coordinate with internal teams like Product or Support.

You become the puppet master pulling strings behind the scenes to ensure smooth customer experiences.

Initially, taking extreme ownership can feel uncomfortable. We often view delegating work as load-lightening opportunities. Instead, view it as a chance to influence both your business and your customers. When you help develop new processes or features benefiting customers and the organization, you demonstrate the leadership qualities businesses want from CSMs.

Story Time: Extreme Ownership in Action

At a former employer, I had a customer trying to use a list sync feature to exclude target contacts rather than include them, an atypical use case. The feature wasn't working correctly, and after our support team's initial response, the customer pushed for deeper investigation.

This launched a two-month journey involving Support, Product, and Engineering teams. I attended multiple weekly meetings with developers, PMs, engineering leadership, and support engineers. I needed to:

• Concisely explain the issue and desired outcome

• Document what we'd already attempted

• Map out timeline and ownership for next steps

Through persistent quarterbacking across teams, we discovered the feature had never actually worked as promoted, impacting not just my customer, but every customer using our product.

The result? Our team fixed it. More importantly, this experience showed my CS leadership that I could:

• Lead complex, cross-functional initiatives

• Drive issues to resolution at scale

• Unite internal and external teams toward common goals

Your Path Forward

Mastering these three skills will position you optimally for promotion and CS career growth.

These aren't just theoretical concepts; they're practical, battle-tested skills that demonstrate your readiness for increased responsibility and leadership roles.

This article is part of CSin15's series “Level Up”.