Customer Success Manager CV Examples & Writing Guide
A customer success manager CV gets shortlisted when the reader can see your book of business (accounts and annual recurring revenue), your segment, and your retention numbers: net revenue retention, gross retention, expansion sourced, churn saved. Without those figures, a CSM CV reads like a support CV.
Customer success manager CV example (mid-market SaaS, £3.8M book)
This CV belongs to a mid-market CSM who came up through support and an SMB pooled book. Notice that the retention numbers appear in the personal statement, not on page two. The person and companies are invented; the figures are the kind you can pull from your customer success platform and your renewal reports.
Elena Marchetti
Customer Success Manager, Mid-Market
Manchester · 07700 900193 · elena.marchetti.cs@email.com · linkedin.com/in/elenamarchetti
Summary
Customer success manager with seven years in B2B software, the last five in customer success. Owns a £3.8M book of 42 mid-market accounts, delivering 112% net revenue retention and 96% gross logo retention. Sourced £590K in expansion last year and cut time to first value from 61 days to 34.
Experience
Customer Success Manager, Mid-Market · B2B analytics SaaS company (260 employees), Manchester
Feb 2023 - Present
- Own 42 mid-market accounts worth £3.8M in annual recurring revenue, averaging £90K each, across retail and logistics customers.
- Delivered 112% net revenue retention and 96% gross logo retention in 2025, against team targets of 105% and 92%.
- Sourced £590K in expansion revenue through seat growth and two module attachments, partnering with sales on nine closed upsells.
- Cut time to first value from 61 days to 34 by rebuilding onboarding into a five-milestone plan that the whole team now uses.
- Run quarterly business reviews for the top 18 accounts, with a customer executive sponsor present in 14 of them.
- Identified six at-risk accounts through health scoring and saved five, protecting £490K in annual recurring revenue; the sixth downgraded rather than churning.
Customer Success Manager, SMB · Field service SaaS company (120 employees), Manchester
Aug 2021 - Jan 2023
- Managed a pooled book of 180 SMB accounts worth £1.8M through a one-to-many approach: webinars, in-app campaigns and weekly office hours.
- Lifted gross retention from 84% to 91% in 18 months by adding 30, 60 and 90-day adoption checks and rewriting 12 help centre articles.
- Closed about 40 renewals a quarter with a 93% on-time renewal rate and average discount held under 4%.
- Cut escalations to engineering 35% by building a triage checklist with the support team.
Customer Support Specialist · Payments provider (400 employees), Manchester
Jul 2019 - Jul 2021
- Handled 45 to 60 tickets a day from merchant customers with a 4.7 out of 5 satisfaction score.
- Became the escalation point for integration issues and resolved 80% without involving engineering.
- Wrote the onboarding documentation used by about 900 new merchants a year.
Education
BA (Hons) Media and Communication, 2:1
University in the North West of England, 2019
Certifications
- Certified Customer Success Manager (CCSM Level 2), SuccessCOACHING, 2023
- Gainsight Associate Certification, 2024
Skills
What customer success leaders check first
Customer success is a revenue function now, and it is hired like one. The screening questions are narrow and they are all about numbers.
- Your book. Number of accounts and annual recurring revenue, plus average account size. Forty accounts at £90K and 300 accounts at £5K are completely different jobs.
- Your segment. Enterprise, mid-market or SMB, and whether it was named accounts or a pooled digital programme. Companies hire for the segment they are struggling with.
- Retention numbers. Net revenue retention, gross retention, logo retention and churn, with the period and the target you were measured against.
- Whether you carry a number. If you owned renewals or an expansion target, say so and give the attainment. CSMs who have closed renewals are hired ahead of those who only advised on them.
“Give me book size, segment and net revenue retention in the first three lines and you are in my top pile. Half the CSM CVs I read describe relationship building and QBRs and never once say how much revenue they were responsible for. That is the whole job.”
The numbers a CS hiring manager looks for
Take them from your customer success platform, your renewal tracker and your quarterly business review deck before you resign, because you will not get access afterwards.
- Book of business: accounts, annual recurring revenue, average contract value, and the industries you covered.
- Net revenue retention and gross retention, with the measurement period and the company or team target beside them.
- Expansion sourced or influenced, in pounds, and how many upsells closed.
- Churn: logos lost, revenue lost, and any saves you can attribute to a specific action you took.
- Onboarding and adoption: time to first value, activation or licence utilisation rate, percentage of accounts on a current success plan.
- Customer sentiment: satisfaction scores, net promoter score, executive sponsor coverage, reference and case study customers you produced.
- Renewal execution: on-time renewal rate, average discount given, multi-year conversions.
Enterprise, mid-market or SMB: write for the segment
The daily work is different in each segment, and hiring managers screen for the right one. Move the matching evidence to the top.
| If the role is | Show |
|---|---|
| Enterprise CSM (5 to 20 accounts) | Contract values, multi-stakeholder maps, executive sponsorship, success plans tied to the customer's business goals, renewal negotiations with procurement, and complex implementations you steered. |
| Mid-market CSM (30 to 60 accounts) | Book size and annual recurring revenue, quarterly business review cadence, expansion sourced, health scoring and save plays, and how you prioritised across a book that is too big to touch weekly. |
| SMB or digital CSM (150+ accounts) | One-to-many programmes: webinars, in-app campaigns, lifecycle emails, office hours, help content you wrote, and the retention movement those programmes produced. |
| Technical or implementation-heavy CSM | Integrations supported, APIs and data models you understand, migration projects, technical escalations resolved, and any scripting or SQL you use for customer data work. |
| Customer success lead or manager of CSMs | Team size, total book under management, playbooks and segmentation you designed, hiring and ramp time, and the retention change across the team rather than one book. |
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CSM bullets: weak to strong
The common failure is describing activity. Meetings held are not results. Retention, expansion and adoption are.
| Activity | Outcome |
|---|---|
| Managed a portfolio of customer accounts. | Own 42 mid-market accounts worth £3.8M in annual recurring revenue, averaging £90K each. |
| Built strong relationships to drive customer retention. | Delivered 112% net revenue retention and 96% gross logo retention in 2025 against team targets of 105% and 92%. |
| Identified upsell and cross-sell opportunities. | Sourced £590K in expansion through seat growth and two module attachments, with nine upsells closed alongside sales. |
| Conducted regular business reviews with clients. | Run quarterly business reviews for the top 18 accounts, with a customer executive sponsor present in 14 of them. |
| Onboarded new customers onto the platform. | Cut time to first value from 61 days to 34 with a five-milestone onboarding plan the whole team adopted. |
| Monitored customer health and addressed risks. | Caught six at-risk accounts through health scoring and saved five, protecting £490K in annual recurring revenue. |
| Worked closely with product and support teams. | Turned 22 customer requests into three shipped features by writing usage-backed briefs for product; two of them closed known churn reasons. |
| Handled contract renewals for assigned accounts. | Closed about 40 renewals a quarter at a 93% on-time rate with average discount held under 4%. |
Customer success manager personal statement examples
Three lines. Segment, years, book size, retention. Everything else can wait until the bullets.
Customer success manager with five years in B2B SaaS owning a £3.8M book of 42 mid-market accounts. Delivered 112% net revenue retention and 96% logo retention in 2025, sourced £590K in expansion, and cut onboarding time to value from 61 days to 34.
Enterprise customer success manager for 11 accounts worth £10M, including three of the vendor's top ten customers. Renewed all 11 in 2025 with two multi-year conversions, and led a 14-month platform migration for a 9,000-seat customer with no service interruption.
Digital customer success manager running a one-to-many programme across 320 SMB accounts worth £2.1M. Lifted gross retention from 84% to 91% through lifecycle campaigns, monthly office hours and a rewritten onboarding series now completed by 74% of new customers.
Technical support lead moving into customer success after four years as the escalation point for 200 business customers. Resolves 80% of integration issues without engineering, wrote the onboarding documentation used by 900 new accounts a year, and completed a CSM certification in 2025.
Customer success lead managing five CSMs and a £15M book across mid-market and SMB. Rebuilt segmentation and health scoring, lifted team net revenue retention from 98% to 109% in six quarters, and cut new starter ramp time from 90 days to 55.
Customer success manager CV with no CSM experience
This is one of the most searched versions of this CV, and the move is common: support, account management, sales development, implementation, teaching, hospitality and recruitment all feed into customer success. The trick is to translate what you already do into retention language honestly.
- 1Find your book. Even in support, you covered a set of customers. Say how many, how big, and what happened to them: renewals you influenced, escalations you resolved, accounts that stayed.
- 2Find your revenue link. Renewals processed, upgrades you flagged, cancellations you prevented, expansion you passed to sales. Any revenue figure you can defend is worth more than five soft skills.
- 3Show that you can run a plan, not just answer a queue. Onboarding sessions delivered, training you built, documentation you wrote, a process you changed and what improved.
- 4Learn the vocabulary properly. Net revenue retention, gross retention, churn, time to value, health score, quarterly business review, expansion. Use them correctly, because using them wrong is worse than not using them.
- 5Get hands-on with one platform. Gainsight, Totango, ChurnZero or Catalyst all have training material, and naming one you have actually used clears a common filter.
- 6Target the segment that hires career changers: SMB and digital CS teams take people from support and hospitality far more often than enterprise teams do.
Format, keywords and length
Two pages at most; one is enough if you have under five years' experience. Plain single column, no photo, no date of birth, no graphics. SaaS companies use hiring software heavily and often screen on exact phrases.
- Mirror the advert's own words: "net revenue retention", "gross retention", "churn", "book of business", "onboarding", "adoption", "expansion", "executive business review", "customer health".
- Write acronyms both ways once: "annual recurring revenue (ARR)", "net revenue retention (NRR)", "quarterly business review (QBR)".
- Name your platforms. Gainsight, Totango, ChurnZero, Catalyst, Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk, Pendo and Looker are all common screening filters.
- Give each employer a one-line descriptor: what the product does, headcount or funding stage. "Company name (field service SaaS, 120 employees)" places you instantly.
- Put numbers in figures rather than words so they stand out when the page is skimmed.
- Send a PDF named Lastname-Firstname-CSM.pdf, and keep contact details in the body rather than a header.
Frequently asked questions
What should a customer success manager CV include?
Book size in accounts and annual recurring revenue, your segment, net revenue retention and gross retention with the targets you were measured against, expansion sourced, churn saved, onboarding time to value, and the customer success platform you use. Put the top two numbers in the personal statement.
What are the best bullet points for a CSM CV?
Ones that pair a customer action with a revenue or adoption result. For example: caught six at-risk accounts through health scoring and saved five, protecting £490K in annual recurring revenue. Avoid bullets that only describe meetings, relationships or check-ins.
How do I write a customer success manager CV with no experience?
Translate your current role into retention terms. Give the number of customers you cover, any renewals or upgrades you influenced, escalations resolved, and training or documentation you produced. Learn the metric vocabulary properly, get familiar with one CS platform, and target SMB or digital CS teams first.
What keywords do customer success CVs need?
Net revenue retention, gross retention, churn, renewals, expansion, upsell, onboarding, adoption, time to value, customer health score, quarterly business review, escalation management, and your platform names. Match the advert's exact phrasing rather than a synonym.
Should a CSM CV show a target or quota?
Yes, if you carried one. A renewal or expansion target and your attainment percentage move you ahead of candidates who only advised. If you did not carry a target, say what you influenced and how, rather than implying ownership you did not have.
Is a customer success certification worth listing?
It helps most when you are moving into the field, and it is close to neutral once you have a book and retention numbers. A platform certification such as Gainsight is the more useful of the two, because it clears a real screening filter at companies running that tool.
How long should a customer success manager CV be?
One page if you have under five years' experience, two pages beyond that. Keep the last two roles detailed with book size and retention, and compress support or coordinator roles into one line each. Do not repeat the same onboarding and business review duties in every job.
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How this page was made: a first draft was written with AI assistance from cvplex's example library, then edited and fact-checked by the cvplex Careers Team. Examples are fictional composites; numbers are illustrative. Report an error via the editorial policy page.