B2B startups should hire more services professionals

Startups that sell B2B products often need a post-sales CS team around the time their customer base is starting to grow rapidly. Usually when the customer base hits 20 accounts or $10M in revenue, a need for a focused and dedicated team to help those accounts grow and secure renewals is key. Most startups will secure a hiring budget and start looking for CS professionals who will likely come from similar companies so the talent pool can be limited and competitive. Thanks to a creative recruiting agency and an open-minded hiring manager who was willing to look beyond the typical candidate pool, I was able to make a career change from IT Services to a B2B product startup when I joined Vercel in 2022. Here are a few reasons why I think this is a good idea that can yield great results.

Transferable skills

Many teams in Services and Consulting companies are dedicated to account management, delivery, and client success. These teams are responsible for ensuring the success of the accounts post-sales and delivering amazing results for clients/customers and the business. They are great at:

• Understanding new deals, capturing business objectives, and sometimes even designing the solutions that the client is hiring.
• Planning project kickoffs, onboarding delivery (development) teams, and coordinating the interplay and collaboration between the client and the company.
• Keep project delivery on track, provide detailed metrics and project status, and continuously improve quality over iterations.
• They nurture stakeholder relations and create new ones across different client seniority levels (Managers, Directors, VPs, C-level).
• Can scope expansion whitespace by leveraging organic growth or through sales/marketing campaigns.
• Are incentivized to be creative and innovative to improve operations, delivery, efficiency, etc both by the client and the business.

All of these can be easily transferred to a B2B startup product or platform as long as the candidate is given enough time to ramp up in product knowledge to learn all the ins-n-outs in detail; this is an area where services individuals tend to fall short as ultimately the client owns the product IP.

Attract candidates looking for a career change

If a startup is looking for an individual with 10+ years of experience, chances are that professionals in the services or consulting industries who are also looking for a career change might be interested in trying out a startup. In my personal experience, after I hit the 12-year mark in Services, I wanted to explore a company with more end-to-end product ownership and a tighter grasp on product success. Vercel offered this when they were expanding their CS team and needed a CSM leader, they had a clear and attainable quota and needed to improve their VoC (Voice of the Customer) program to help shape the product. As long as startups can offer compelling opportunities like these, they will attract great talent that can quickly adapt to the startup world.

Boost partnership deals

When Services and Consulting companies sell development teams that code solutions for customers, they have a lot of sway and influence on the dev tooling and products that clients should use. Assuming that services and consulting professionals who join startups also bring in their stakeholder contact network with them, they can boost partnership deals by working with dev agencies, consulting firms, and services companies to re-sell the B2B products and platforms. There's also an opportunity to create certifications specifically for partnerships that resell and give the customer assurance that these products and platforms will be used and implemented in the best way possible.

They know how the enterprise customer journey works

If the startup starts taking on larger enterprise and strategic deals, it's useful to bring in talent who knows the nuances of managing big deals. It's not the same to offer customer support for a B2C product as opposed to a 1000-user base for a Fortune 500 company. The complexity and interconnection of multiple business units, cost centers, architectures, and legal and compliance requirements are the bread and butter of Services and Consulting deals. These will come second nature to professionals in this field and they will be able to navigate these quicker than a CS professional that never had to worry about this before.

Context switching and multitasking is an innate talent

easily Services and Consulting professionals have built high resiliency and adaptability over the years as they have worked with a diverse set of clients and industries. Every time a new deal comes in, it's almost as if they are starting a new job. This makes them develop quick learning skills and capable of context switching. As startups are expanding their customer base and chasing bigger deals, they will benefit from these qualities as opposed to CS professionals who come from a product-focused startup with a product that has evolved in the same space and vertical.

What are the growth opportunities?

It's worth noting that there are many things that Services and Consulting candidates need to learn and adapt to besides the product and platform:

• More accountability and ownership over the revenue
• Learning how product planning and design work and how to couple into it to shape product roadmaps
• How to make the most out of the innate autonomy and self-governance over processes, playbooks, and outcomes; how to not crash without any guardrails
• A direct involvement in product support; sometimes these have strict SLAs that require being on-call and available during non-work hours
• Pivoting efficiently as landscapes suddenly change
• A crash course into board management, funding, a path to acquisition, etc can help navigate the unique intricacies of a startup journey