TheySaid Newsletter

Before you can build a great customer experience, you must have a strong Sales <> Success handoff. If Sales oversells the product or sets the wrong expectations around implementation and support, you’re setting the customer up for an uphill battle from the start. 
 
You can’t provide an impactful customer experience if the customer purchases the product with the wrong expectations. 
 
But the problem isn’t just on Sales—it’s more often due to a lack of regular communication and a strong partnership between Sales and Success. To solve this, identify the main points of friction in the handoff and then work with your peers in Sals to resolve those. 
 
Here are the four most common points of friction between the two departments, and how to overcome them: 

1. There’s misalignment around what you’re selling and how Success delivers on that promise. Too often, the way Sales and Customer Success go through training is very different. So the result is what Sales is selling and what Success is delivering are two very different experiences. You have to get alignment at the top around what the product delivers for customers and how Success is delivering it first, and then you can begin training Sales and CS and regularly reinforcing those messages in a variety of channels. The answers to “what the product delivers” and “how Success delivers it” can be written in the statement of work, and it should also be incorporated in weekly meetings between Sales and CS. Team members from Success should attend the weekly Sales meeting to understand how they’re selling the product and give updates on how Success is delivering. (Sales should be part of the weekly CS meeting, too.) 
2. There’s not a clear understanding of what it takes to onboard a customer. If Sales tells a customer it’ll take 30 days to get set up and it actually takes 60, you can imagine what the customer experience is like. Success needs to clearly share what is involved in implementing the product and onboarding the customer: what roles are required (technical people, project managers, etc.), how long it typically takes for different product implementations, and anything else the Success team knows is important for Sales to set expectations around.
3. There’s miscommunication about what the CSM does for the customer and what work the customer needs to do. In almost every company I’ve worked for, I’ve put together a one-pager on what the CSM is responsible for and what the client is responsible for. Sales needs to set expectations around how long it takes the company to implement a product and onboard the customer (#2) and what work the customer needs to do on their own to be successful with the product.
4. There’s not a shared understanding of the roles within a customer account. By the time Success is introduced to a customer, Sales has probably built relationships with different people within the organization that have helped them move the deal forward. Sales and Success need to communicate about who the executive sponsor is, and whether Sales has built relationships with the buyer, champions, or potential power users. I’ve seen many examples where Sales sold to an executive sponsor but the CSM never speaks to them or invites them to the kickoff or onboarding review. The end result can be a product delivery that is not what the sponsor asked for. So it’s critical for the Sales leader and Success leader to collaborate on creating a customer journey that requires the sponsor to be part of the experience after they sign the dotted line.

The top articles this week: 

This week's newsletter features posts on: 

• Insist on Focus - Keith Rabois
• Five Step Formula for Strategic Account Plans for Customers
• The Antiracist Leader: Education
• Uncovering Your Customer's Business Outcomes

WORKFLOW

Insist on Focus - Keith Rabois (Video)

“Most people tend to substitute A+ problems, which are problems that are very difficult to solve, with B+ problems—problems you know a solution to. So if you imagine a daily checklist; most people have an A+ problem but they don’t know the solution so they procrastinate and work on their B+ problems. The problem is if your entire organization is always solving the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th most important things, you never solve the 1st. So [Peter Thiel’s] technique of forcing people to only work on one thing at a time meant everyone had to work on the A+ problems.”

Listen to the 3-Minute Audio Clip

PROCESS

Five Step Formula for Strategic Account Plans for Customers

Here’s Megan Bowen (CCO at Refine Labs) with a simple framework for creating a strategic account plan for customers.

Read the Post

LEADERSHIP

The Antiracist Leader: Education

“One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist. There is no in-between safe space of ‘not racist.’” – Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

In Part 1 of a series on antiracist actions for leaders, Jill Wetzler, Head of Engineering at Pilot, offers ways to educate yourself to better understand Black employees’ experiences.

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COMMUNICATION

Uncovering Your Customer's Business Outcomes

This post shares a list of ways CSMs can get customers to answer the question, “What goals are you looking to achieve with this product?” without directly asking them. The questions Chad Horenfeldt (Director of Customer Success at Kustomer) offers in this post may also shed light on future opportunities for additional use cases (and upsells) beyond their current objectives.

Read the Full Post

An excerpt from Face it, your champion strategy is weak. Use this scorecard to get it right.

Written in collaboration with Kristina Valkanoff, Ziv Peled, Kristi Faltorusso, David Ginsburg, Emilia D'Anzica, Jeff Breunsbach, and Jay Nathan. 

There are three steps to creating a relationship coverage strategy: 1. Define the roles CSMs need to build within each account, 2. Understand and track the relationship strength needed with each role, and then 3. Create a coverage plan that’s specific to the product you’re selling and the segments you’re selling into. 

Here, we’ll cover Part 3: Creating a coverage plan.

When we spoke to companies about their champion coverage strategy, we heard consistent problem trends:

1. The influence that Power Users have on Champions is undervalued
2. The number of Champions required is insufficient to reduce risk
3. The named Champion in the sales cycle isn’t acting like a Champion post-sale
4. Unclear definitions of user types (Influencers, Important Contacts, Advocates, etc) leads to poor/incomplete tracking

The model below addresses these problems with verified definitions and strategy that can be applied to any business to reduce champion risk. 

For example, if a company-wide product (Slack, Gmail, Zoom, Box) is trying to sell into SMBs, they’ll likely focus on a large number of influential Power Users to reduce churn risk.  But if a Workgroup product (Tableau, UserTesting, Qualtrics, Google Analytics) is trying to sell into the Enterprise, they’ll instead develop strong champions in other departments who are consumers of the Workgroup’s output.

This model can help your team build the right number of relationships with the right roles within each account. Directors and VPs of Success can use it to detect when accounts are at risk from not having the right amount of relationships with power users, champions, and buyers. 

See more on how to read the table below.

Click the image to expand in a new window

Here’s how to read the table:

• Product Breadth is shown vertically—it divides products into 3 categories based on who the primary users will be: a workgroup, the whole department, or the entire company
• Segment is shown horizontally—it divides target buyers into company size (SMB, Mid Market, and Enterprise)

Then in each of the 9 cross-sections, we show how many champions, power users, and buyers you need to reduce customer churn risk. As you’ll see in the table, buyers are further broken down into three types:

• An Advocate buyer is someone who endorses the product. This is the most valuable kind of buyer.
• If you can’t get an Advocate buyer, get the head of the department you’re selling to (in the graph, we call this the Department Leader buyer).
• A Check-signer is a buyer who isn’t in the department you’re selling to, but they’re in a budget approval role (e.g., CFO, COO, Procurement).

Read the full article here, and join the discussion here. 

The top articles this week: 

This week's newsletter features posts on: 

• Why Customer Success is Critical to Building a Valuable Company
• How to Quantify Bad-Fit Customers
• How to Onboard Someone Remotely
• Don't Give Feedback on Personality

ALIGNMENT

[Podcast] Rav Dhaliwal on Why Customer Success is Critical to Building a Valuable Business

Rav Dhaliwal, Investor and Venture Partner at Crane (former Head of Customer Success at Slack), talks about how Customer Success can build a better partnership with Sales and gain alignment with the entire executive team as a whole. One of my favorite quotes: “Sales is not about driving revenue, it’s about driving value. Revenue is the outcome.” When you get Sales and Success thinking this way, then you’re in a better place. 

Listen to the Full Episode

EXECUTIVE REPORTING

How to Quantify the Impact of Bad-Fit Customers

Here’s Lincoln Murphy with a 7-step process for quantifying the cost of bad-fit customers in a way that your executive leadership peers will understand. 

Read the Full Post

ONBOARDING

How to Successfully Onboard Someone Remotely

This post shares an overview of what the first few days of onboarding a new hire might include (written for engineers but applicable to any team). While it’s not all that different from onboarding someone in person, it’s helpful to see how other teams are setting their employees up for success. 

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COMMUNICATION

Don't Give Feedback About Personality

Radical Candor author Kim Scott with a reminder to give feedback about “the specifics of the work” and not about someone’s personal attributes. An example: “You’re sloppy” could be reframed as, “You did sloppy work.” Kim says, “Focus on helping the person fix the problem by providing specifics they can act on, rather than criticizing personality traits that they can’t alter.”

Read the Full Post

By Brian Lafaille, Global Head - Customer Success Strategic Programs at Google (Looker)

An excerpt (with added notes) from his post, Drive Action in Mitigating Risk

The first steps to creating a Risk Management framework are to 1. Truly understand why your customers leave, and then 2. Define the risk types and build a framework for action. Once you’ve done those two, you can operationalize the framework by 1. flagging risk, and 2. taking action. 

Flagging risk

The following is an example of how you might lay out your Risk Management Framework to others in your company. 

* Controllable risk are the categories that Customer Success is able to influence or impact

Now, I’d note that we created the Macro risk type prior to Covid being a major impact to our customer base. What we decided to do was have a nested taxonomy with three sub-types of risk within Macro: 

• Macro → Covid
• Macro → Acquisition
• Macro → Business Viability

We have playbooks established for each of those subtypes. For instance, the actions a CS person takes for a customer being acquired is going to look different than a customer acutely impacted by Covid.

With regards to handling customers impacted by Covid asking for a commercial concession:

• If a customer is asking for a commercial concession, we've found it useful to recap the value this customer has seen throughout the partnership. That said, if it comes time to process a reduction, seek to understand the drive behind that concession ask—is it truly because the customer has some form of business viability impacting their business? Or, is it due to a lack of value realization? That'll be great insight to guide your response.
• If it's the former, process the concession with ease. Make this process simple for the customer and accommodate in whatever economic terms your financial team can stomach. Your goal here is to accommodate the request and build a fan for life.
• And if it's the latter, understand if there are ways the customer could be driving additional and expanded value from the price they're paying today. Can you "discount up" to provide additional resources that'll better establish value realization for this company, while maintaining your ARR? I'd argue that any finance team would rather give free concessions and maintain ARR, than process an ARR reduction. 

Taking action

Flagging risk is only good if you’re taking action on that risk. We’ll break that down into 3 actionable steps below: 

• Analytics: How are we going to track these at-risk customers? 
• Playbooks: How will the field (CSMs) know the best practices for addressing this risk?
• Operations: How will we hold ourselves (CS Management) accountable to these customers in need? 

1. Risk Analytics

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”

Arguably one of the better quotes in business by Peter Drucker applies to our Risk Management Framework. It’s great to have the Risk Types, the Risk Arcs, the leading metrics, and the descriptions for your customer risk types so your CSMs know how to qualify risk. The next phase of maturity is building the tracking to quantifiably measure the following metrics: 

• # of customers at-risk (In total + broken down by risk type) 
• ARR at-risk (In total + broken down by risk type) 
• % of customers at-risk 
• % of ARR at-risk 
• Avg. days customer is “in risk” 

There are a number of platforms out there that have the ability to measure these metrics. Building dashboards to measure your at-risk customers allows your team to measure the impact they’re having after flagging a customer that’s at-risk. Focus on building your analytics strategy either within your CS Ops/Analytics team, or your central data team. This is step one in driving action and operations towards mitigating risk. Again, you can’t improve what you can’t measure. 

2. Risk Playbooks

The concept of playbooks stems from sports where teams run plays after noticing a behavior from their opponent. For Success, this means providing your team with a “play” when they run into a customer in one of your risk types. After building your Risk Management Framework, it’s up to you and your team to build the common play each CSM should run when approached with a customer that exhibits a certain type of risk, say, Relationship. 

If your key champion leaves their role, your playbook might answer the following questions: 

• What is the intended outcome of this playbook? 
• What are the questions the CSM needs to ask both internally and to the customer? 
• What data points must a CSM collect & analyze?  
• What teams should the CSM inform / collaborate with on this risk? 
• What are the actions that CSM should take?  

This list above is by no means comprehensive. Every company’s playbook will be unique, but the questions above are a good starting point.

Note: Each risk type should have it’s own risk playbook, and playbooks are an ever evolving document. 

3. Operations

The operations surrounding risk speaks to the actions we can take to hold the company accountable to remedy customers who have veered off track in receiving value. Operations may encompass the following elements: 

• Meetings: some text
  • Consider scheduling an operational meeting (weekly/bi-weekly) that reviews the customers that are at-risk. If you have different segments, also consider grouping by those various segments. The meeting should encompass CS Leadership with a defined agenda that highlights the key customers at-risk, the actions being taken, the asks of any leaders or other departments, and next steps.  
• Readouts / Newsletters: some text
  • Evangelizing the wins of CS is a key component of the Risk Management Framework. Consider adding a section to your weekly newsletter, internal site, slack post, or your comms tool of choice that highlights the recent wins of customers who have moved out of risk, and puts the metrics front and center to the rest of the company as to how the business is doing in driving risk mitigation across the customer base. This should be shared as broadly and widely as possible. Risk Mitigation is a company-wide sport. 
• Office Hours:some text
  • Sometimes CSMs need more collaborative brainstorming with leadership to identify next steps with a particularly tricky customer account. Establishing office hours for CSMs to drop-in and get some collaborative brainstorming done can make a tremendous impact on those tricky customer scenarios. 

For more on this topic, read the full Risk Management series here.

The top articles this week: 

This week's newsletter features posts on: 

• Deliver on the Trusted Partner Promise
• Executive Communication
• How to Manage Customers by Value
• Should CSMs get Compensated by "Uncontrollable Churn"?

TEAM BUILDING

"Deliver on the Trusted Partner Promise" and Other Advice for Founding a Customer Success Team

David Ginsburg draws from his experiences at companies like Box, Mixpanel, UserTesting, and now WorkBoard to share the four foundational elements of an effective Customer Success team.

Read the Full Post

COMMUNICATION

Executive Communication

A powerful talk by Michael Dearing on how to communicate clearly as a leader. If you’re short on time, check out the section on Minto’s Pyramid Principle.

Read the Full Post

SEGMENTATION

How Do You Manage Customers by Value?

Here’s a LinkedIn post from Gain, Grow, Retain where they offer a framework for segmenting the customer experience to maximize value.

Read the Full Post

RESEARCH

Should CSMs Get Compensated by "Uncontrollable Churn"? 

Or Guz, Director of Customer Success at PerimeterX, opens an interesting discussion on whether CSMs should get compensated on “uncontrollable churn”. I enjoyed reading through the comments to hear different perspectives.

Read the Full Post

Many of us recall the “old days” when software was sold on a CD or DVD. Post-sale activities were managed by Account Management, “renewals” were new versions of the software, and buying roles were much simpler and easier to understand:  

• Vice Presidents had the power to buy products.
• Directors had influence in the buying decision.
• Individual contributors were the end users and didn’t have an important role.  

But as software transitioned to the cloud, and as product-led growth became a more popular way for companies to adopt new software, these definitions fell short. They failed to capture new factors in buying processes like levels of authority, influence in decision making, and product usage.

What emerged were 3 new roles:

• Buyers
• Champions
• Power Users 

These new names captured factors in modern buying processes, but for those of us that didn’t grow our careers through Account Management, made it harder to understand what each role means. 

Clarifying what each new modern role means

To get a better understanding of what these terms mean, it’s helpful to compare them to each other. The graphic below helps visualize how the Champion, Buyer, and Power User roles are different by looking at their Influence and Authority, and their Product Importance. 

Influence and Authority defined (x-axis) 

Influence is the weight of a person’s opinion in the mind of the decision maker. Influence often comes from a small number of high ranking people, or a large number of low ranking people. 

Authority is the power to make final decisions without approval from someone else.

Product Importance defined (y-axis)

This measures how critical the product is to accomplish the user’s job. If the product is of low importance, the user can replace or work around the product.   If the product is of high importance, the user requires the product to perform their core job.

This quadrant does not include...: 

We opted against using Advocacy, Budget, and Volume of Usage as factors for this quadrant because they don’t help define the difference between user types: 

1. Advocacy is a measurement of endorsement , and anyone could be an advocate 
2. Only one user has budget authority, so it’s not a meaningful differentiator.
3. Frequent Usage has minimal correlation to value received for many products, and any role could have high or low frequency usage

What you can detect using these definitions

Using these definitions with your team will allow you to:

1. Detect when a user is not a power user. When looking at product usage, power users and users appear the same. But there’s risk in counting them the same: for a user, who doesn’t need the product to get their core job done, the product could easily be replaced. By focusing on building users into power users, CSMs reduce churn risk. Identifying the power users in an account can also guide product decisions: if the product is missing a feature that’s needed for the power user to reach their desired outcome, that feature needs to be prioritized. 
2. Determine whether an advocate is a champion. To be a champion, an advocate needs to have Influence over the buying decision and Authority over the process. If they don’t have those two attributes, they won’t be very helpful in purchasing, upgrading, or implementing your product. 

• Know where to focus your time to build more fruitful relationships. These definitions should help CSMs identify good candidates for power users and champions. 

The top articles this week: 

This week's newsletter features posts on: 

• Stop Calling Churn a Customer Success Problem
• Customer Experience Isn't Just Tech Jargon
• Four Ways Good Leaders Become Great Ones
• Words and Phrases Top Success Reps Use

STRATEGY

Let's Stop Calling Churn a Customer Success Problem

Kyle Poyar, VP - Market Strategy at OpenView, with 8 things that Sales, Marketing, and Product can do, with the help of Customer Success, to move the needle on churn.

Read the Full Post

CULTURE

Customer Experience Isn't Just Tech Jargon

Emilia D’Anzica, Customer Success Consultant (former CCO at Copper), shares advice on building a customer-centric business.

Read the Full Post

LEADERSHIP

Four Ways Good Leaders Become Great Ones

Ed Batista, Executive Coach, with a concise piece on four attributes that differentiate good leaders from great ones. Of the four, I’d call out “Understand the symbolism of leadership.” He says, “People join organizations and feel committed to them to a certain extent because of the feeling of community... and because of the leader's commitment to invest in the health, development, and growth of that community… it’s important to recognize that a leader bears a unique responsibility to help the community feel a sense of collective identity and growth.”

Read the Full Post

RESEARCH

Words and Phrases That Top Sales and Success Reps Use 

Gong analyzed over 500k sales calls to share the words and phrases top performers regularly use. Worth sharing this with the team to try out.

Read the Full Post

There are 3 key moments along the customer journey where it makes sense to make the introduction; Pre-Sale, Point of Sale, and Implementation or Go-Live.

None are wrong, but the best moment to make an introduction will depend on the commercial value of the customer (i.e. where they fit into your segmentation model) and what responsibilities the Customer Success Manager has in scope for their role.

The diagram below plots the ideal time for introduction based on the value of the customer on the Y-axis (typically measured in $ ARR) and time, or phase of the customer journey, measured on the X-axis. The shaded overlay represents the segmentation model, indicating the high touch segment covering the higher value customers and a low touch or tech touch segment for low value customers.

Click the link to expand the image

1. High-touch customers: Introduce the CSM Pre-Sale

In high value Sales opportunities you generally have good visibility in advance to know how and when the deal is going to close. This gives you a great opportunity to introduce the concept of Customer Success to the customer, and start to lay the foundations of understanding which will later develop into recognizing the value you offer them with the CSM role.

At a company I worked at previously, myself, or a Senior Customer Success Manager, would be brought into the Sales cycle towards the end, where there was an 80% chance or higher of closing, to position what their post-sale experience would look like. Professional Services would have their opportunity to discuss implementation, scoping and sizing the appropriate services, and Customer Success would be given an opportunity to talk about how we would help the customer achieve their desired outcomes, over the long term.

Our discussion would be accompanied by a ‘pitch deck’ where we would talk about Customer Success as a differentiated and crucial accompaniment as part of the account team. 

2. Medium-touch customers: Introduce the CSM Post-Sale

As part of your medium touch tier you should aim to introduce the CSM at a natural point, ideally as close to the point of sale as possible. Depending on the volume of medium touch customers you acquire, it might be possible to introduce CS in the pre-sale, however the most common time to introduce the team is post-sale.

It’s a good idea to establish an internal SLA between Sales and Success where you can ensure an internal debrief and handover takes place within 48 hours of the deal closing, and an introduction call with the customer within 5 days of the deal closing. If it is measured and tracked, it can be improved over time. Establishing this discipline at such a crucial point of the relationship, where so often the ball is dropped, will create an impactful experience at a key point in the customer journey.

The point of sale often experiences an interesting gear shift. Up until that point, the conversation has been very strategic. Following the agreement, it quickly moves into tactics and execution. The introduction of the CSM should include a mix of both strategy and tactics, but too far skewed towards tactics and execution and it will be difficult to move back to strategy.

Considerations:

• Ensure CSMs are conscious of the potential for relationship fatigue. After the sale is agreed, the number of touch points a customer might have will likely increase beyond those which have already existed (unless the CSM is also managing implementation and training), so it’s good for them to set expectations on who will be around the customer’s account and why. 
• Consider also establishing some internal stage gating into your handover process, such that Sales needs to document key information, about the customer, in the CRM before a deal is closed or as part of the next steps. 

3. Low-touch customers: Introduce the CSM Post-Go Live

In a high or medium touch model, waiting until after the implementation is complete is quite possibly the worst time to wait to introduce the CSM. For a customer of such high value or worth to you, why would you ever want to wait that long.

In a low touch model, it’s not uncommon, however, to introduce the CSM later in the journey. That’s because the customer is unlikely to get much time with the CSM as it is, due to the economics of your segmentation model. Your low touch model will still warrant a relationship and CS point of contact, but it is likely to be on a reactive or infrequent (perhaps quarterly) basis. Utilizing other forms of technology, like end user surveys or in-product capture of information, can be a good way to transfer the knowledge at scale from Sales to CS.

Call to action:

1. Map out all of the people that interact with your customers and at what points they are introduced for the first time. Use this to identify when the most impactful and valuable time would be for a CSM introduction for each tier. 
2. Make an agreement with Sales on how, when, and what information will be handed over from Sales to CS in relation to the acquisition of a new customer. 
3. Coach CSMs on their pitch to potential customers about the value they bring to the customer.

The top articles this week: 

This week's newsletter features posts on: 

• A User Guide to Working With You
• Establish Your Risk Management Framework
• A Leader's Guide to Writing Well
• Customer Success is Taking Over

LEADERSHIP

A User Guide to Working With You [Template]

At Nuffsaid, one of our core values is “we share our strengths and weaknesses openly”—which means we have these documented for the team to see. Here’s a similar approach from Julie Zhuo, author of The Making of a Manager, who makes a case for outlining “how you view success,” “what gains and loses your trust,” and more for your team.

Read the Full Post

RETENTION

Establish Your Risk Management Framework

This post breaks down the process of creating a risk management framework into four steps. Step 2 (“define your risk types”) is especially interesting as the author emphasizes the importance of determining whether risk is chronic or acute.

Read the Full Post

COMMUNICATION

A Leader's Guide to Writing Well

“The bigger your company becomes, the more writing is a skill worth having.” Here’s Dave Girouard, CEO of Upstart, with writing tips you can incorporate immediately.

Read the Full Post

INDUSTRY

Customer Success is Taking Over

Blake Bartlett, VC at OpenView, with a 20-second video illustrating the evolution of the customer journey and how Customer Success is “taking over” all stages by using customer insights to “steadily redefine each stage.”

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At Box, I’d consider ourselves "lucky" in that delivering value to customers is a company-wide focus. But in truth, it’s a result of how we’ve structured our teams and created our culture. 
Here are three ways we continue to build customer-centricity:

1: Success is part of the sales cycle. 
There are two important parts of how our Success and Sales teams work together that help foster a customer-centric mindset: 1. Our Consulting Services team is embedded in the sales cycle, and 2. Sales owns renewals. 

To the former point, since salespeople tend to want to be in control of every aspect of their deal, there can be tension when trying to bring Consulting ("Services") into the sales cycle. To navigate that, we constantly reinforce the value of bringing Consulting in the sales cycle. Our Consulting leaders frequently remind their peers in Sales about how incorporating their team in the sales cycle helps the customer feel more comfortable—when they sign the deal they’ll be in good hands—and it also brings in a perspective from someone who’s seen how different customers use our products.  
And as for the latter, Sales leaders often don’t care about renewals. It’s not in their DNA. But in our company, our Sales leader sees renewals as a core part of his sales strategy—in fact, we’ve made changes to the sales compensation model to reflect that. This has also helped us bring Consulting into the sales cycle since services help renewals and renewals are part of the Sales team’s job. 

2: Customer-centricity is part of our company values.

Our first company value is “Blow our customers’ minds.” This means its a company-wide objective to create excellent products and services for our customers.

But what about the specialized roles that are internally-focused? A payroll administrator, for example, is thinking about how employees are getting paid, they’re not thinking about the customer. So one of the ways we’ve brought the customer-centric mindset to everyone in the company is to send out a weekly email to all employees that highlights one customer story. We share an example of how one customer is benefitting from our products and services. And we try to tie it to something that’s going on in the world; if there’s a big movie coming out and our products were used in the process of producing the movie, we’ll highlight that. It helps people instantly connect with the story and feel proud of what we’re doing.

3: Our CEO is constantly thinking about the customer. 
For the customer to have “a seat at the table,” it matters who the CEO is. For us, our CEO deeply understands the value of Success and it's apparent in everything from our company values to he talks about the company in general. So for others, here's how to identify a CEO that values Customer Success:

1. Look at how much they’re investing in Customer Success. What’s the size of the CS team as a percentage of your company, and how does that investment level look relative to Sales, Engineering, Marketing, and Product? Also, what percentage of revenue is spent retaining customers compared to acquiring new ones? The answers to these questions will help you see how the company values its customers. 
2. Does the CEO understand the customer’s mindshare? Aaron continues to speak about how CIOs are busy: every CIO has 50+ vendors trying to get their attention. The way you stand out is by constantly being present and adding value at every touchpoint. When your executives speak about customers in that way and explain how that influences the company’s strategy, then it's clear they value the customer experience. 
3. How does the CEO articulate what the company is about? You often hear CEOs say “we care about the customer” and then when asked what the company does, they focus on the product features and not on the benefits to the customer. But if they instead talk about how the company solves specific problems for customers, that’s a strong indicator of how much the customer has a “seat at the table.”
   

The top articles this week: 

This week's newsletter features posts on: 

• A Sales-to-CSM Handoff That Actually Works
• Turning Economic Headwinds Into a Growth Opportunity
• The Appropriate CSM to Manager Ratio
• Ways to Encourage Feedback Between Others

PROCESS

Designing a Sales-to-CSM Handoff That Actually Works

Here’s Lincoln Murphy with another helpful template—this time for ensuring the customer is set up for success right off the bat.

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COVID-19

Clearbit's VP of Customer Success on Turning Economic Headwinds Into a Growth Opportunity

An interview with Luke Diaz on how he’s leveraging automation to protect the company’s revenue. He discusses personalization, predicting churn with data, and why his Success team holds “red account” meetings where they strategize to secure their at-risk customers.  

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STRUCTURE

What's an Appropriate CSM to Manager Ratio?

The rule of thumb, “7 reports to 1 manager” is used across departments, but in this post Brooke Goodbary (Manager - Customer Success at Roku) draws from various studies to show that the company’s maturity should influence the decision of how many CSMs a single manager oversees.

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CULTURE

5 Ways to Encourage Feedback From Others

Kim Scott, author of Radical Candor, explains how leaders can get their team members to share open and direct feedback with each other. She says, “don’t triangulate; you’re a boss, not a diplomat. Shuttle diplomacy won’t work for you.”

Read the Full Post

Written by:

These days, buyers have more choices, are better informed, and expect a superior customer experience.

As Customer Success Managers, we have a narrow margin to bring value to a customer, or else we risk losing them. So, it’s not surprising that many Customer Success teams spend tremendous energy on keeping customers “happy” or doing whatever they can to adapt to customer desires.

The problem with this approach is that it assumes customers know what’s best. In reality, Customer Success Managers are the authority on best practices with their tool / service. If CSMs always bow to the requirements of the customer (who isn’t the product expert), the result is often a lack of success.

Have you had a customer churn because they refused to use your product in the manner that would produce the best results?  

Sometimes, a customer’s habits are the biggest hurdle to their success. This is why “challenging” your customers can have a positive impact on retention and growth.

The Challenger Concept

The “challenger” concept was popularized as a sales strategy by Matthew Dixon & Brent Adamson in their book, The Challenger Sale. In their view, the sales landscape had fundamentally shifted, and prospects were now too busy, too well informed, and had too many options for a long-term relationship strategy to work. Instead, Dixon and Adamson proposed consultative selling that wasn’t afraid to challenge the customer’s assumptions.

They broke the model into three steps:

• Teach: Teach prospects how their product solves common industry challenges.
• Tailor: Tailor the solution to the potential customer’s specific needs.
• Take Control: Push the prospect by challenging their assumptions.

Although the challenger model was originally designed for sales, it also has a lot of application in Customer Success!

How to leverage the Challenger Concept for Customer Success

Today, customers increasingly expect that Customer Success will help them not only achieve value with a product but also impact their business as a whole.

As mentioned before, a customer’s habits can often be the roadblock to achieving success. So, if that expected impact is what customers truly want (and for the most part it is), then we need to challenge them to modify their behavior and enact true change management. Using the Challenger Sale strategies are a great place to start.

What does this mean in practice? “Challenging” the customer comes down to getting them to change. It may involve changing their processes, goals, preconceived notions, strategy, or anything you feel is currently inhibiting their success. Some examples of areas to challenge customers are:

• Pushing against their success criteria – Some customer’s expectations of your product can either be unrealistic or lacking enough detail to give you measurable ROI.
• Scrutinizing bad workflows – Are customers using your product in a way you think fails to deliver value? Be candid and let them know how their behavior will decrease the potential value they receive. Give examples of the success other customers have seen following your best practices.
• Addressing low engagement or usage – A customer who has low engagement has a low likelihood of success. Be upfront and let them know that you are worried that they are not heading for success based on their engagement. Confirm their expectations and compare that to their current path.

Then, you need to convince them to change. This is the most difficult part as it requires asking tough questions or voicing concerns that may produce some friction. It’s important to conduct this part with respect and with the goal of helping them and their business.

Some examples of the types of questions or statements you can use are:

• “You mentioned you want to be able to improve X, but how will you quantify and measure it? In what time frame?"
• “I understand your workflow is to do X, then Z, then Y, but from my experience, when customers have done that in the past they end up seeing less value.”
• “You signed up to achieve X, but your team hasn’t logged in regularly since the beginning. Most customers who don’t make our product a habit from the start won’t see an improvement in X. Will you be able to work with me to get them engaged?”
• “I’ve recently been working with customer X who is in a similar industry, and they’ve been successful in increasing Y. You haven’t mentioned that as one of your criteria for success, but I think you should consider it as a future goal.”
• "I understand you want us to prioritize a new feature but it’s outside the scope of our product’s intended workflow. What is the fundamental business problem you are trying to address?"

While it isn’t easy, “challenging” customers is a powerful tool in a CSMs arsenal to help customers whose biggest hurdle is their own behavior.

Note: Alex also runs a newsletter for Success leaders. Check it out.

The top articles this week: 

This week's newsletter features posts on: 

• Remote Happiness, How to Create It
• Slick B2B SaaS Onboarding and Fantastic User Adoption
• How to Take Personal Development Off the Backburner
• 21 Questions to Help You Understand Your Customer

REMOTE WORK

Remote Happiness, How to Create It

“Humans need 4 things to feel mentally balanced: connection to nature, connection to tribe, blood flow, and uninterrupted work space. Pre-COVID, we could each achieve these to some degree simply by going to an office.” It’s challenging for some of us to adjust to remote working. Matt Mochary (CEO coach to companies like Coinbase, Opendoor, Clearbit, and more) offers some tips on how we can achieve those four elements, and encourage others to do so, in a work-from-home environment.

Read the Full Post

PROCESS

The Key to Slick B2B SaaS Onboarding and Fantastic User Adoption

Where Alex Bakula-Davis (above) explains how to use the “Challenging” concept to get a customer to change, Dean Colegate (Customer Success Consultant) offers a high-level blueprint for creating a Change Management Plan in this post.

Read the Full Post

CAREER

How to Take Personal Development Off the Backburner

Here’s a compilation of sound advice on how to approach personal development, meaning the ongoing work of up-leveling yourself in pursuit of your longer-term goals.

Read the Full Post

COMMUNICATION

21 Questions to Help You Understand Your Customer

Here’s a solid list of questions you can use to unpack your customers’ wants and needs, while increasing buy-in. Some examples include, “What’s working well right now?” and “What might happen if you do x/don’t do x?”

Read the Full Post

From an interview with:

Where Sales reps have traditionally been resistant to recording their calls, we've created a customer base that are not just “bought in” to the idea. They love it. They bring our product with them wherever they go. 

A significant part of the reason for that is due to one of our company’s operating principles, which is to “create raving fans.” That company-wide goal filters into every department. But it also has to do with how we’ve oriented our Customer Success team’s structure, metrics, and culture around the customer. 

So for others looking to borrow ideas on setting up a customer-centric organization, here’s how ours works:  

Structure:

• To start, our Customer Success team’s number one charter is “value delivery,” which supports our company’s operating principle of “create raving fans.” 
• Our Customer Success team includes CSMs, Customer Education (a team focused on helping customers adopt the product and how, why, and when to use the product), Customer Success Enablement (an internal team that serves as a central repository of content, assets, and other materials that help CSMs), and Customer Success Operations. We’ll be adding technical account managers soon as well, and we’re looking to peel some of the implementation and training responsibilities off the CSMs by hiring in those areas as well. Support is a specialized function that doesn’t live within CS.  
• Any time we want to change our setup or invest in something new, we look at two things: 1. Does this improve the customer journey? That’s the number one priority. And then, 2. If it does or doesn’t, does this improve our efficiency? For example, this could look like investing in initiatives or resources that help CSMs onboard more customers. 

Metrics:

• The Customer Success group has four main metrics, and they’re designed so there’s overlap with our counterparts in Sales. The first two are lagging indicators: 1. logo churn and 2. net dollar retention. The next two are leading indicators: 3. NPS, which we obsess over as a business (if we get an 8 or below, we have automation and messaging that goes out to get additional feedback) and 4. product utilization. This last one changes as the product changes, but we’re essentially looking to see usage in areas of the product that grow the value that customers are getting out of the product. 

Culture:

• The company’s operating principles: I mentioned one of our company’s operating principles above, “create raving fans,”—another one is “challenge conventional wisdom.” We work to empower people internally to think differently about everything they’re solving. One example of how this has benefited our customers is a couple years ago, our Head of Support came up with the Mastery Series—a program that gamifies onboarding—and onboarding wasn’t even in Support’s responsibilities. 
• Hiring: When you’re a scrappy startup, you need CSMs to be agile. Startups are in survival mode, in full learning mode—and the company’s strategy and positioning can change quickly. At Gong.io, we’ve made an effort to hire people who are both intellectually curious and okay with things changing on a dime. 
• Prominence at the executive level: I’ve always been an advocate for Success leaders to sign up for a number—to be tied to a dollar amount. That alone will give them more of a “seat at the table.” Ultimately, if you can’t show the ROI on an investment you want to make, you turn Success into the group that makes asks without substantive reasons for them. If you instead sign up for a revenue target and position Customer Success as a machine, just like how a Sales machine works, you build trust and credibility and you’ll be able to make the investments necessary to provide a great customer experience.  

The top articles this week: 

This week's newsletter features posts on: 

• There's No Such Thing as Post-Sales
• Avoiding Burnout on Your Customer Success Team
• The Best Three Pages on Leadership I've Come Across
• Feedback is Not a Gift

GO-TO-MARKET

There's No Such Thing As Post-Sales

Rav Dhaliwal, Venture Partner at Crane (and former Head of Customer Success at Slack), highlights three patterns seen amongst their portfolio companies in how they’re retaining customers. The most important, he says, is they believe that “success is everyone’s business.” “There is the first sale with a customer, the next sale with them and so on, and in order to maximize the conditions for this, Customer Success has to begin in the sales cycle.”

Read the post

WORKFLOW

Avoiding Burnout on Your Customer Success Team

Brooke Goodbary, Manager of Customer Success at Roku, explains how Success teams can decrease the chances of burnout during this time. She says, “Customer Success burnout in particular is tied to two factors: unrealistic expectations and an inability to imagine a time when things will improve.”

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LEADERSHIP

The Best Three Pages on Leadership I've Come Across

Zack Kanter, Founder/CEO at Stedi, pulls pages out of the book One From Many by Dee Hock, including this one: “True leaders are those who enable the unconscious values and beliefs of every member of the community to emerge.”

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COMMUNICATION

Feedback is Not a Gift

An insightful piece by Ed Batista (Executive Coach) that argues against thinking about feedback as a “gift,” and instead framing it as “data.” For one, feedback is filtered through the giver’s perceptions of reality—it should not necessarily be accepted as the truth (although we shouldn’t reject feedback outhand). He says the framing, “feedback is data allows us to be more judicious and intentional about whether and how we respond to it.”

Read the full post

From an interview with:

For many teams, the initial shock of moving to remote work is over. But, in the words of Fast Company, “remote work isn’t going away anytime soon,” and teams now need to invest in the systems, processes, and culture required to work remotely for the longterm. 

GitLab is 100% remote, and the company has been iterating and documenting how to work remotely for years. So for others who are now building a foundation for effective remote teams, here are the key elements of what makes our setup successful:

1. There’s always a doc. When people aren’t in a shared office, it’s especially important that they have a way to find the information they need at any time. GitLab is uniquely transparent; employees can simply Google search a question and find our documentation around that topic. Other companies may consider having an internal, searchable place (like Google Docs) where all documentation lives—then they can train new employees on how and where to find that information.
2. If there’s no agenda, there’s no meeting. It’s too easy to slip into the practice of booking a meeting by default. Obviously this can waste people’s time; it also allows collaboration and decisions (that could be helpful for another team member) to go undocumented. Some other notes about how we run meetings: 1. We aim to record all meetings, so anyone not present can get read-in at a later time, and 2. We strive to make meetings optional because people are in different timezones and synchronous meetings can be impractical. 
3. Culture drives the behaviors needed in a remote team. If you expect the team to document decisions and have agendas when booking meetings, your values need to support those behaviors. At GitLab, we have six values and each one helps us effectively work together as a remote company.  

The top articles this week: 

This week's newsletter features posts on: 

• Stop Calling Churn a Customer Success Problem
• How to Recognize Remote Employees 
• How Product and Success Can Define a Feature Request Process
• How Do You Manage Individuals Within Your Account?

EDUCATION

Your Guide to Successfully Training Customers Remotely

Kyle Poyar, VP of Growth at OpenView, shares “six things that can move the needle on churn” that tend to involve teams outside Customer Success. 

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PROCESS

Measuring Customer Success Relationships

Here’s a list of ideas for recognizing team members from Claire Lew (CEO at Know Your Team). Among the list, she recommends recognizing team members by sharing customer reviews—“use their words, not yours.”

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HIRING

(Unstructured) Job Interviews Don't Work

Ujval Bucha, Sr. Product Manager at Cornerstone OnDemand, makes the case that Customer Success should do more of the legwork in helping Product organize and triage customer feature requests.

Read the full post

TEAM BUILDING

The Secrets to Our (Customer) Success

A recap of a “CS Leadership Office Hours” discussion with a list of tips and advice from various Success leaders on how they measure and manage contacts within an account.

Read the full post