Why and When to hire Project Managers for B2B SaaS Implementation Teams

There comes a time for many B2B SaaS companies when they will need to hire project managers for their Customer Onboarding teams. This is an excellent way to not only solidify your customer implementations but to also scale your team.

Scaling

Often times when I work with new customers, they have one resource that does all of the post-sale customer journey work. This eventually gets solved with more specialization. Support teams are hired, and there might even be solution engineers that do a lot of the complexity like data cleansing, ETL, and product configuring. However, some teams still need to roll lean and have CSM’s do a majority of the tasks. In my experience, bringing in a project manager can help remove some of the lower value work to free up your CSM’s to get the customer implemented and onboarded. I sometimes view this in the classic developer/project manager context. Don’t waste your developers’ time having to chase down items and send emails to customers. I think that this applies here as well.

Here are a few tasks that your Project Managers can do that will free up your CSM’s to focus on higher-value tasks:

• Meeting notes

• Status reports

• Chasing down files

• Running a project status meeting

• Asking product when features will be released

• Setting up internal and external meetings

• Updating project plans (yes, you will eventually need to start using a tool for projects)

Your enterprise clients will expect a structured approach to onboarding, and will most likely be part of the pre-sales qualification process

Getting ready for Enterprise

There is no doubt that having project managers will give your team more credibility when starting to sell into large enterprises. These organizations are used to working with other vendors that use PM’s to be more efficient and complete their projects more efficiently.

Do’s and Don’ts

Now that we have established that Project Managers might be a good hire for your team, here are some suggestions about what to do and not do.

• Do not hire Project “Coordinators”. They will not get respect from your customers, or your internal teams. Your new customer just signed up and committed to $100k per year (or more), and you are ensuring confidence by putting a junior-level resource as the lead? Make sure they are actual Project Managers.

• In general, for SaaS B2B companies, I do not suggest hiring people that rely heavily on incredibly disciplined methodologies like PMP. I am not saying do not hire PMPs, but make sure when you are screening them that they can roll with the changes. The most important thing is protecting the ARR, and PMP-type disciplines will be very process-oriented and focus on penalizing customers when they miss deadlines. A good PM will need to be able to bend but not break

• Don’t ask your PMs to suddenly become CSM’s if you are short on resources. Although this is a good idea for a career path, they are very different skill sets.

• Do make sure that you still have executive sponsors for your larger projects. Your PMs should not be asked to deal with peer + 2 or more levels above when there is bad news to be brought.
  

As always, comment below, and if any of this sounds like a topic that you want to discuss more, send me an email at jeff@jeffkushmerek.com, or schedule a call.