hired our first non-technical CSM. he was a clinical pharmacist for 11 years.
Quick context. We're a B2B SaaS doing audit and compliance workflows for primary care and procurement teams in germany. Wrote last batch about the procurement director who told us our PDF quarterly report got us renewed.
Needed a third CSM in spring. Existing two are excellent but stretched across 74 customers. Hiring profile we'd been writing for two years was "experienced CSM from a B2B SaaS, ideally with healthcare or compliance context."
After eleven weeks of interviews i couldn't find that person at our budget. Final two candidates wanted 78k to 92k EUR plus equity. Above our band.
In april one of our existing CSMs forwarded me a profile of a former clinical pharmacist looking to leave clinical practice. Lukas. 41. Eleven years as a hospital pharmacist in north germany. Zero SaaS experience. Zero customer success experience.
Hired him at 58k EUR after a three-week paid trial.
What i'd been overweighting was SaaS context. What mattered for our customers was clinical and procurement context. Lukas understood our customers' workflows before he had seen our product because their workflows were ones he had operated inside for a decade.
He picked up the SaaS side in maybe six weeks. Retention metrics on his accounts have been better than our other two CSMs in his first six months.
We opened a second hire with the same profile. Ex-clinical or ex-procurement, no SaaS background needed, willing to train.
The hire we should have made in 2023 was sitting in the wrong section of LinkedIn the whole time.