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From an interview with:
In many companies, “Customer Marketing” is a new concept. Even Marketing teams don’t always get it right, which may be because they tend to be more oriented around acquisition and conversion rather than retention and expansion. That’s why at Typeform we have a Customer Marketing team that lives within Customer Success (it’s called “Lifecycle Marketing”).
Because the Success group is closest to the customer and is entirely focused on helping customers achieve their desired outcomes, having a Customer Marketing team sit within our organization ensures that the campaigns that team creates are centered around engagement and retention.
For others interested in building Customer Marketing within their Success group, here are a few key elements of our structure:
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EDUCATION
Your Guide to Successfully Training Customers Remotely
Customer Success consultants Donna Weber and Lauren Thibodeau share a step-by-step plan for designing and implementing an online training program.
PROCESS
Measuring Customer Success Relationships
“There’s not enough clarity about how valuable relationships are, for any SaaS company.” Here’s Ziv Peled, CCO at AppsFlyer, with a presentation on his high-level vision for measuring customer relationships.
HIRING
(Unstructured) Job Interviews Don't Work
This piece names some of the issues with unstructured job interviews and offers ways to make interviews more effective. For example, I’ve heard of interviewers over-emphasizing activities like “whether the interviewee followed-up on LinkedIn,” and this piece calls that out directly, saying this “is not a representative situation in terms of how the person will perform in the actual interview.” Some better approaches: blind auditions, competency-related evaluations, and more.
TEAM BUILDING
The Secrets to Our (Customer) Success
Daphe Saragosti, Global VP of Customer Success at Centrical, breaks down some key changes they’ve made to their team’s processes and culture that helped reduce churn and drive growth.
From an interview with
Directors and VPs in Customer Success tend to quickly learn how important it is to coach and develop their CSMs. In some companies, Success manages less budget and therefore needs to hire ambitious, junior CSMs and then grow them into senior CSMs. But another major reason why this pattern exists is that companies don’t tend to clearly define the Customer Success Manager role. It can serve as a catchall bucket, which forces the CSM role to play second fiddle to other functions.
The best way for Directors and VPs to up-level their CSMs is to clarify the role of the CSM. And the best way to do that is to answer these five questions:
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COVID-19
6 Ways to Drive Revenue Performance in a Downturn
Here’s a list from Brex’s CCO Roli Saxena and Operator Collective Founder Mallun Yen with ways to drive revenue in the midst of an economic recession. Here’s some of the advice they share: 1. Make sure you’re aligning your product to areas of immediate customer need, 2. “Creating champions is more difficult in a virtual environment,” so strive for executive alignment early in the sales cycle, and 3. Track an updated set of leading indicators. “Understand the outcomes your customers strive for, and measure your team’s success against those goals.”
STRUCTURE
Evolution of the Customer Success Org
Russ Drury, Manager - Strategic Customer Success at InVision, offers a model to help visualize how the responsibilities of CSMs change as a company moves through the stages of maturity.
SERVICES
Why You Should Eliminate the Title "Implementation Consultant" From Your Startup
Dave Kellogg, enterprise software startup consultant, makes the case for eliminating the job title implementation consultant in favor of consultant. He says, “What do implementation consultants think they do? Well, implementations.” And “what customer equates implementation with success? None.”
COMPENSATION
Policy: How to Structure Compensation for a Customer Success Team
Here’s an example compensation plan from Tomasz Tunguz (Partner at Redpoint Ventures). While I don’t agree with the objectives he’s selected to evaluate CSMs on (e.g., Product Adoption is a lagging metric, so we should measure the leading indicators of that outcome), I like the format—outlining the comp plan in this way can help set expectations and drive focus.
An excerpt from:
Everyone says they value customer success. These 9 questions verify if it's true
Customer Success understands the customer better than any other function in the organization. And yet, in many companies, the team doesn’t have the strategic influence to help customers be truly successful.
One of my greatest frustrations is when a company says they value their customers, but their actions say otherwise.
So we created a scorecard that Success leaders can use to see how much their companies really value their customers—and the Customer Success function specifically. The “poor, average, excellent” scales provide a path for leaders to advocate for their group and to put the customer at the center of the business.
Click on the image to expand in a new window
Here’s the TL;DR on 3 of the 9 questions:
1. Who does the top Success leader report to?
If the top Success leader is a VP (or below VP in smaller companies), if they report to anyone but the CEO, or if the role doesn’t exist at all, this is the first indication that a company might not prize the opinion of the customer to the fullest extent.
In excellent companies, the top Success leader reports to the CEO and is equal to their peers on the executive team. Here, these leaders can bring their deep insights about the customer to influence strategic decisions across the company.
2. Who is responsible for retention?
The best SaaS companies are documenting the customer’s desired outcomes, and there are company-level, department-level, and team-level goals to help the customer achieve those outcomes.
In contrast, many organizations have a company-level retention goal but only Customer Success is expected to deliver the results. When the customer journey includes touchpoints across Marketing, Sales, and Product, but these groups aren’t being held accountable for the experience they’re providing, that indicates the company isn’t focused on investing in their customers.
3. How often is feedback reviewed by execs?
Executive team culture around customer feedback is often a defining characteristic of a company’s culture and whether or not they follow through on their “Customer comes first” core value.
Poor companies have a leadership team that reviews feedback every 3-6 months. In great companies, they review customer feedback daily.
You can read the full framework here. Many thanks to Jay Nathan and Jeff Breunsbach of Customer Imperative for collaborating on this piece.
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COVID-19
Tales & Trends of Startup Resilience
Here’s a report based on interviews with 60+ founders and VCs on the strategies they’ve employed to survive and grow during this time. One of the takeaways: “Customers are now dictating the Product roadmap.” Product teams need to “move from ‘push’ to ‘pull’” and “respond to the highest need first.”
If you enjoyed reading the report from Will Reed, see Openview’s annual SaaS Product Benchmarks Report which was released this week.
STRUCTURE
Where's the Best Place for Upsells to Live?
A LinkedIn post from the Gain Grow Retain team that offers starting points for creating engagement models for SMB, mixed, and enterprise customer tiers.
WORKFLOW
4 Laws of Customer Success
Russ Drury, Manager - Strategic Customer Success at InVision, explains how four well-known theories apply to Customer Success. He calls out Miller’s Law, for example, which suggests that the average person can only keep ~7 items in their working memory at a time—and then explains how CSMs ought to prioritize their time with that in mind.
MANAGEMENT
The Manager's Guide to Inclusive Leadership—Small Habits That Make a Big Impact
“You can’t just assume inclusion will sprout organically once you’ve introduced more diversity.” This piece breaks down the “four essential habits” of inclusive leadership. It’s packed with immediately-actionable advice and tactics, like encouraging team members who are remote or more introverted to participate in discussion by 1. creating thinking time, 2. doing a timed round-robin, and 3. ending meetings with ritual questions.
An interview with:
When advocating for budget with your peer in Finance, the data should speak for itself. Finance doesn’t care about your stories; you have to come with a work breakdown structure and capacity plan.
Here’s an overview on how to do that:
And a final note: People often talk about the difference between Customer Success and Sales—they say Sales has a methodology, they have funnels, the revenue engine is defined and mature... But Customer Success is no different. There are frameworks we can use in Customer Success for journey mapping, breaking down experience tiers, creating capacity plans, and measuring the velocity of how customers move from one phase to the next. I expect we’ll see more and more Customer Success leaders think this way in the next few years.
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CULTURE
Lucidworks' CCO on Building Teams, Processes, and Culture Around the Customer
Jess Jurva, CCO at Lucidworks, shares the changes she made to help the Customer Excellence group provide world-class experiences—and how she grew her organization's prominence in the company as a whole.
HIRING
9 Questions to Ask Candidates for Your First Head of Customer Success
A list of questions that can be used to understand how a candidate thinks about the role of a top Customer Success leader in a company. Two of my favorites include “How do you think Customer Success should work with the Sales and Product teams?” and “If we are on a tight budget, how should we staff the CS team?”
LEADERSHIP
Marc Andreesen on Productivity, Goals, and Motivation
Here’s an interview with Marc Andreesen highlighting his perspective on a wide range of topics. I found the section on “process, outcomes, and bets” especially interesting: “The craft of investing [or in many cases, strategic decision making] is a process of separating process and outcome.”
SCALING
Why Efficiency, Not Just Effectiveness, is Key to Scaling Customer Success
Nicole Rashied, Customer Success Manager at Intercom, with 5 tips to increase efficiency in Customer Success (or “getting customers to their desired outcome without wasting effort or resources”). Among the list, she suggests “streamlining the pre-sale to post-sale handoff” and “focus on providing solutions, not explaining features.”
An excerpt from:
Why aren’t we measuring if customers are successful?
Our customers don’t come to us because they want a “product.” They want a solution to their problem. But many companies don’t try to measure whether or not the customer problem has been solved, and the ones that do typically focus on how frequently the product is used (an internal metric that has nothing to do with the customer’s success).
Success teams go through several phases of getting more sophisticated in how they track and measure the value received by customers. Here’s a summary of those phases and how Success teams can move from one level to the next (you can read the full post for more):
Level 1: Pitch features and use cases
The Success team solely focuses their time with customers on explaining features and use cases. The company is essentially saying, “here’s the product! Go use it.” The customer is “on their own” to figure out how to adopt the product in a way that fits their needs.
Level 2: Incorporate usage metrics
Here, the Success team still focuses on pitching features and use cases (level 1) but they’re also leveraging product usage metrics to evaluate whether customers are getting value out of the product. They’re saying, “Here’s the product, go use it,” and then tracking usage data to see whether customers are receiving value.
Most companies land here, at level 2. They can move up to level 3 by connecting usage data to an outcome that matters to customers.
Level 3: Connect usage to the customer's goals
Instead of focusing on features and use cases, Success teams at Level 3 anticipate 3-4 high-level objectives that customers will have when buying their product and then create playbooks for helping customers achieve those goals with their product.
Teams at level 3 are still using product usage as the main indicator of whether the customer received value. They can move to the next level by 1. acknowledging that their product alone won’t help customers reach their goals, and then map out what role their product plays in the ecosystem, and by 2. using more sophisticated metrics to understand whether customers are getting value out of the product.
Level 4: Understand the ecosystem of products required to achieve customer goals
There are no products that own the entire ecosystem of people, tools, and services required to hit a company’s objective. If your customer wants to increase revenue by 3%, your product is only one part of that story. The key to moving to level 4 is understanding where the product fits in that ecosystem and then being able to coach customers to leverage all the moving parts required to hit the customer’s goal.
Success teams in Level 4 have also moved beyond relying on product usage as the main indicator that the customer is receiving value, and are now tracking earlier indicators of customer health.
Here’s what’s missing in Level 4. Level 4 assumes the question of whether the customer “received value” is binary: either the customer received value, or they didn’t. But in reality that’s rarely the case. Customers can realize some value from a product, but not get everything they were expecting. Companies at Level 5 are able to detect and record when customers have received partial value.
Level 5: Total focus on customer goals and value received
Level 5 is where the Customer Success team not only understands the customer’s goal, the ecosystem of products required to meet that goal, and is tracking early indicators of customer health, but they’re also able to record and detect whether the customer received partial value.
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PROCESS
Creating a Feature Request Process for B2B Product and Customer Success Teams
Nuffsaid’s Co-founder and VP of Product, Nick Paranomos, explains why Success should play a much larger role in how feature requests are prioritized and breaks down the core elements of a feedback process.
RETENTION
You Aren't Doing Enough Customer Marketing
If Customer Success doesn’t own Customer Marketing in your company, consider making a case with the group that does own that responsibility to set goals around advocacy or retention. As Jason Lempkin says in this post, “If you don’t come up with clear quantitative goals for Customer Marketing, it will never get enough attention.”
GOALS
Why Isn't the Entire Company Measured on Retention?
Chris Walker, CEO at Refine Labs, points out (in a 37-second audio clip) that in order to retain customers, everyone in the organization should be held accountable for a retention metric. Here’s the quick audio clip, or listen to the full episode here.
ALLYSHIP
What Does Sponsorship Look Like?
Here’s a timeless piece from Lara Hogan, Leadership coach at Wherewithall, on how we can be better sponsors and mentors of minoritized people.
From an interview with:
I fundamentally believe that a product is nothing without the users and customers who are willing to pay for it. Therefore, the group that’s the closest to the customer—most often Customer Success—should hold an equal level of power at the executive level to Sales, Product, and Marketing.
I’ve seen too many organizations make the mistake of moving their Customer Success unit where it doesn’t have a voice at the executive level. Or, they turn it into something of a servant of the Sales team or a servant of the Product team. It’s such a mistake, particularly in SaaS: leaders in tech have a plethora of products with overlapping features to choose from, and they’re under great pressure to pick the right products and make sure they’re not overpaying or double paying. Companies need to make sure their products are being used by their customers and are being seen as valuable in order to survive.
Customer Success is the “how”—and it needs to report to the CEO in order for the CEO to have a pulse on the experience customers are receiving.
But if you’re not yet convinced, here are a few other reasons why Success should be reporting to the CEO:
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SELF-REFLECTION
Anti-Racist Management Practices
“Holding structural power means you have an opportunity to make sure that those structures are supporting your current and future employees equitably.” This piece gives a concise explanation of what it means to be an anti-racist, specifically at work, and how to get started.
COMMUNICATION
How to Talk About Racism at Work
Valerie Williams, former Global Head of Diversity & Inclusion at Stripe, shares a guide to having a virtual team discussion around social justice and human rights. It includes an email script and meeting agenda you can copy and paste. Note: This piece is published on Almanac. You may need an account to read the piece (it’s free).
SOCIAL JUSTICE
How to Be an Ally if You Are a Person With Privilege
“One of the most effective ways to use our privilege is to become the ally of those on the other side of the privilege seesaw.” Here’s an insightful and thorough explanation on what it looks like to be an ally.
LEGISLATION
Check the Police
This resource was particularly eye-opening. It shows how police union contracts protect officers from being held accountable for misconduct. I shared this resource in our company all-hands as a place to learn more.
From an interview with:
Many Sales orgs can be resistant to bringing in Customer Success before the deal is closed. It’s only natural; Sales wants to be in control of every aspect of the deal, so bringing in an additional person to talk to the customer can add a level of uncertainty.
Since I joined Lucidworks, we’ve evolved our process from having a distinct handoff between Sales and CS to one where the AE brings in the CSM when they’re around 70% to closing the deal. This provides a much better experience for the customer for two reasons:
Evolving this process requires a cultural shift and it doesn’t happen overnight. Here’s some of my advice for others looking to make this transition:
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STRATEGY
GitLab's Customer Success Vision
GitLab is uniquely thorough and transparent with their internal documentation. Here’s how they’ve mapped out their customer journey, where they see Success headed in terms of responsibility, their KPIs, how they specify churn, and more.
COMMUNICATION
Why Does Writing Matter in Remote Work?
Here’s an insightful take on why using writing as your main communication channel makes teams more efficient and inclusive.
PROCESS
50 Top Tips to Take Friction Out of Your Sales Cycle
Here’s a list of tips and techniques from founders, CEOs, and CROs at companies like Brex and Shopify on reducing friction in sales cycles—but much of the advice listed are applicable for CS teams as well.
INDUSTRY
10 Years in Tech
Geoff Roberts, Co-founder of Outseta, provides candid observations from his 10 years of work within the tech industry. He attempts to give “an objective look at the world of technology start-ups—the good, the bad, and the ugly.”
An excerpt from:
Gauging customer health during the pandemic
The burning question among Success leaders right now is, “How do I check in with my customers to gauge churn risk without sounding tone-deaf?”
Emails to customers asking “whether they’d recommend the company to a friend,” talking contract terms, or blindly pushing recent product updates can risk the company sounding too vendor-focused or insensitive. But there are no guidebooks or frameworks on assessing churn risk during a global pandemic, so for lack of tested alternatives it’s only natural that Success teams are leaning on tools like NPS.
Here's an alternative way to assess churn risk amid COVID-19:
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CULTURE
A Bias to Action
“Many CEOs face similar challenges of keeping a growing organization executing with the same relentless and risk-taking spirit of the early days.” Here, Henry Ward, CEO at Carta, shares an internal memo he wrote in February 2020 to get the company back to their core values.
SCALING
The CCO's Guide to Scaling Customer Success
Jennifer Dearman (Pendo’s CCO) offers her best advice on evolving a Customer Success org for scale—with detailed strategies for setting team structure, segmenting customers, and more.
STRATEGY
Executing a Successful Executive Sponsor Program
Losing a customer due to “weak executive sponsorship” shouldn’t be an acceptable cause—this problem occurs when CSMs don’t have a playbook to build the right level of champions in an account. Here, Jeff Breunsbach of Customer Imperative teams up with Alejandro Sanchez of Adzerk to give the critical steps to build an effective Executive Sponsor program complete with aligning, designing, and following-up.
LEADERSHIP
A Great Team Does Not Make You a Great Manager
“Far too many managers prefer to be reporters instead of investors.” This timeless (and concise) piece makes the case that managers should be able to make deep connections with their team and create individualized plans for improvement.
From an interview with:
One of the first pieces of thought leadership around Customer Success that came out was that “you can’t treat all customers the same.” You have to segment on something.
That’s true of course, but unfortunately some companies focus solely on the high-touch experience. And frankly, I get it. It’s easier. Fewer customers; more love. It’s much harder to touch customers at scale.
I’m a proponent of creating a model that affects all customers at the same time, instead of just focusing on or starting with one segment. I also don’t believe that customers should be segmented solely based on ARR—when I joined Pendo, we created a segmentation strategy that has an ARR threshold but also heavily accounts for customer preferences (some customers prefer self-service and don’t want a regular 1:1 with a CSM) and growth potential (some customers, even enterprise, aren’t expected to expand).
That’s how Pendo Neighborhood was born. It’s a fully digital experience for customers to get the resources they need, stay close to the product, and be part of a community. One notable difference between ours and most customer communities: the Neighborhood has CSMs specifically dedicated to support customers in this experience.
The Neighborhood delivers a high-quality experience for customers and continues to maintain far above average renewal rates. That’s true whatever the customer size, but the experience is particularly impactful for small customers. Small customers are unique in that they can get a lot of synergy from each other in terms of how to leverage your product. Putting those customers together and creating a forum for them is important.
Creating a scale program that retains high renewal rates isn’t just a nice-to-have either. It’s table stakes for a customer success program. Small customers tend to be the first to churn.
So, how can others create a scale program like the Pendo Neighborhood? Here’s some advice:
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CAPACITY PLANNING
Customer Success Capacity Planning Calculator
If you’ve ever asked, “How many CSMs do we need to give our customers their Appropriate Experience (AX)?” You’ll find this calculator and framework from Lincoln Murphy of Sixteen Ventures helpful as a starting point for managing a team’s workload.
LEADERSHIP
4 Ways for Leaders to Build Resilience
Here’s Alex Shootman, CEO at Workfront, with a concise but powerful piece on responding to the current crisis with empathy and vulnerability. It’s peppered with wisdom such as, “You need to see yourself on the other side of this crisis,” “take the time to reflect and hold a debrief... There will be lessons to learn from your organization’s response to Covid-19,” and more.
STRATEGY
COVID-19 Causing Sales to Oversell? It's the Success Leader's Problem to Fix
When “bad deals” are being closed, it’s easy to point a finger at sales and say they're lying and overselling. But the reality is, if bad deals are happening, it's the Customer Success leader’s responsibility to solve. Here’s how to diagnose and repair the problems that lead to bad deals.
CAREER
9 Leadership Mistakes New Managers Often Make
Here’s a quick list of “don’ts” from Claire Lew, CEO at Know Your Team—written for new managers but applicable to leaders at any level. See timely reminders such as, “You think your team members generally know what’s going on,” “You think you communicate the vision in your team well,” and “You sort of prepare for your one-on-ones.”
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