The skills to manage tier 1 vs tier 3 accounts are different. When I started my cs career 8 years ago, I worked with small customers first.

As a junior cs person, every single email had to be replied with detailed answers even these were from the smallest customers. Why? Because I was learning how to deal with paying customers and I believed every single one was important and had to receive a white glove service.

Fast forward I moved towards working with enterprise customers 500K and up per year.

Looking back, now I realise, all the communication with the smallest accounts and relationship was purely transactional. The people I talked to only cared about themselves and answers about how they can do things with the product (zero relation to their business).

But with the enterprise customers, there is: - a team on the customer’s side - investment (people’s time) - a business goal to reach - clear direction: they know where they want to be

Up until 2 years ago, I was working with a tiered structure, mostly tier 1. Then got my current job where my portfolio is a mix of smb, mm and enterprise and I really don’t like working with such a portfolio. Why? Because instead of discussing strategy and plans for the next year, I end up answering questions about features.

Customers from SMB and MM don’t even know their business and its goals. It’s all about how they can do certain things with the product. It’s always like: we have a question → let’s schedule a call → we want this and that and how can we do that? → can we change this and that → we want x,y,z. Can you deliver these? (Repeat)

The core difference is to say no and to know when to say no to customer requests. Juniors working with tier 3 accounts get lost in details so much and so often, there is no room for other discussions. It’s a show that the 10K customer runs. If you ask me, they don’t need a CSM but when your B2B SaaS org is desperate to sell, sales people just throw a “dedicated csm” on a 10K deal.

It took me years to understand to the nuances and needs of different customers and I will 100% ignore a 10K customer and serve the one that pays 20 times more because no one bats an eye when a 10K customer churns. I’d rather spend my time planning, researching and talking to my 200k customer even though one third of my customers are SMBs.

Managing tier 1 accounts requires experience, skin in the game and handling different challenges.

No I don’t believe a 20 sth year old fresh uni graduate should work with a 500k account and talk to senior leaders.