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If you read any recent article about creating a great onboarding experience for customers, you will undoubtedly hear about the importance of measuring Time To Value (TTV).
Measuring & reporting TTV is a status quo activity in Customer Success, and once something is a status quo, you know that ‘nuffsaid will question it!
In this week’s newsletter issue, we’re highlighting a variety of opinions from around the Customer Success space on the topic of whether TTV is just a vanity metric or gives us a valuable signal to track.
The following excerpt was copied from my recent LinkedIn post about TTV.
"Time to value" doesn't matter.
Hear me out. When a customer doesn't adopt your product right away it's probably because:
Time to implement is NOT the problem. It's a problem with Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), customer maturity, buy in, etc.
Instead, here's what you could measure that will actually impact your company:
Count the # of customers and contract value that didn't adopt within XX days.
And throw out the time to value number which doesn't help you actually understand why customers don't adopt the product.
The following content was copied from Ed Power’s LinkedIn post about his upcoming course on “Data-Driven Decision Making for CS”.
What we believe is true isn’t always.
I had assumed, like most working in Customer Success, that faster Time-to-Value would always produce lower churn. It’s intuitively obvious.
But data from one of my clients surprisingly said the opposite. While obtaining initial value was indeed predictive of renewals (increasing the odds by a factor of 5), the TIME it took for their customers to achieve it wasn’t. In fact, customers canceling actually met their goals a little sooner, on average, than those who renewed.
Why wasn’t time a factor? It’s unclear, but the finding raised interesting questions. Further study is warranted.
The lesson? Sometimes the truth is counter-intuitive. Testing your assumptions by analyzing data can lead to new insights.
Follow Monique on LinkedIn.
Chris Hicken posted on LinkedIn last week on the subject of why Time to Value (TTV) doesn't matter — it struck a chord with me because I have experienced some of the very things that Chris provoked us to think about.
He mentioned reasons why a product or service wouldn't be adopted immediately by a customer. My response was related to the TTV metric and how it would or would not influence adoption. I high-fived his thought by agreeing that TTV doesn’t matter when:
Now I'm responding from an individual contributor's point of view. Put yourself in my shoes for a second. Say I'm responsible for retaining and managing the implementation and adoption of the company's 1st ever major product purchase. When there's no champion or desire to promote success, it's insane. If you don't have buy-in from customers you sold the product to and no ownership for the lack of internal ICP vetting, you’ve got a major problem.
I don't believe that Sales is solely to blame, though that's where a CSM would most likely take the baton. Conversations between Sales and CS about TTV and ICP are imperative to have, but again, TTV doesn't matter if your customer didn't see the value before you even got started.
The following content was copied from Niclas’ recent LinkedIn post.
Time to value (TTV) is a very powerful metric. But it can also be a vanity metric if used incorrectly.
The reason why it’s often used incorrectly is that the definition of customer value, along with how value is being verified with customers, is not including customer voice - at all.
Customer value is rarely (never):
→ The tool has been activated/implemented
→ The customer got their user(s) setup
→ The customer logged in to the tool
→ The customer used [Feature_X]
Real customer value needs to be tied to real customer outcomes.
To verify these, a company must not just survey customers every now and then, but establish a seamless dialogue with them - throughout the entire customer journey.
After all, what value looks like the first 1-3 months of a partnership is usually very different from what value looks like after 12+ months of working together.
The following excerpt was copied from Arrows’ “Happy Customers Newsletter”.
Why Time To Value (TTV) Can Be a Deadly Onboarding Metric
Most onboarding teams measure their success based on the average Time To Value (TTV) of their customers. Some use onboarding completions. A handful explore the relationship between onboarding and specific product adoption metrics. Few however take into account this uncomfortable reality.
Your onboarding might fail before customers reach the average for any of those metrics.
Here’s the problem with using any simple measure of TTV, onboarding completion percentage, or time to adoption.
You could very well be solving the wrong problems and spending your time in the wrong place by looking at the average Time To Value. TTV is like trying to improve your lap time on a racetrack without knowing if you need to go faster in the corners or get a whole new car entirely.
For TTV to be actionable, you need to know how quickly different customers are making progress towards your definition of value. You can’t wait until months down the line — nor a tenth of that time. In onboarding, momentum is king.
Here’s the secret: Know the actual time it takes customers to complete each step on their journey through onboarding. Only then can you identify the blockers and strategically intervene at the right moment to improve your metrics. To do this you need a granular cohort based metric in place of TTV.
Why granular? Because understanding which specific steps in the journey are blocking and how blocking they are relative to others is the best way to prioritize effort.
Why cohort based? Because looking at onboarding performance by cohort allows us to establish a baseline and track our impact on that baseline over time. We can also create cohorts based on different parameters to deepen our understanding.
Cohort based measurement can do a lot for your onboarding. On the surface your new metric might look similar to TTV when looking at the aggregate data. But unlike TTV you can tailor it to explore questions about onboarding performance specific to your business.
A granular cohort metric lets you ask (and answer!) thorny cause-and-effect questions, about your onboarding like:
Follow Jan on LinkedIn.
Time to Value (TTV) is an important metric because it is the one your customer uses to evaluate your company and your product.
They may not have expressed it or shared their expectations with you. That will not stop them from judging your company and product.
Many companies confuse their customers’ goals with their own and assume that a customer perceives value at certain milestones. Those companies may assume that by communicating to the customer that they have achieved the company’s defined value milestone, it will convince them that they have received value.
Instead, to ensure that you are aligned with your customers’ expectations of value, discuss their goals that they expressed during the Sales process at your kickoff meeting.
When you follow up with the executive stakeholders, update them on the progress and any challenges to achieving their goals and expected value.
Next Steps:
Time to Value is probably not the most important metric to share with your board. Time To Value will not be the only indicator of an at risk or successful account.
But—if you assume that the customer has adopted your definition of Time To Value, or if you assume that the customer is not judging your company and your product based on their perception of value, you are exposing yourself to risk that could be easily avoided.
INDUSTRY
Your Guide to Growth Amid Uncertainty
“In the old world of… just a few months ago… software companies had plentiful access to cheap capital and were seeing extremely strong demand for their products [...] Well, things have changed.” In this piece Kyle Poyar, Partner at OpenView, shares 7 expert tips every leader should consider in the current climate.
VOICE OF CUSTOMER
Box’s Jeff Justice Williams on Building a VOC Program at Scale
If you haven’t heard, we’re running a podcast series focusing on how companies can mature their Voice of the Customer programs. In our latest episode, I sat down with Jeff Justice Williams, the Sr. Executive Director of Enterprise CS at Box, to learn about how VOC should operate at scale.
WISDOM
103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known
Here’s a list of learnings from legendary founding executive editor of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly. It’s an interesting 5 minute scan.
EVENT
Customer-Led Growth: From Buzzword to a Blossoming Business Strategy
I’m joining Lauren Costella, VP of CS for GoodTime, and Mark Pecoraro, CCO at Owl, on June 23rd for a deep dive conversation about Customer-Led Growth and why it’s a business strategy that’s here to stay.
Final Note
Join me and countless other Customer Success super fans at this year’s Gainsight Pulse Conference where I’ll be presenting “Customer-Led Growth: Why I should give a #&^%”.
Discounted tickets are still available!
When Nick Chang joined Palo Alto Networks in September 2021 as Global Head of Network Security CS, he saw a fast-moving company with an expanding employee base and growing product complexity.
Nick responded by building a highly-sophisticated Customer Success Enablement program which we’ll review in this newsletter issue including:
I’m tied to two facets of enablement at my company.
The Global Enablement & Training team (90 people):
Customer Success Employee Enablement Lead (1 person):
Two notes:
1) I see Enablement and training as two different things. If training is like learning how to turn the steering wheel of a car, Enablement is knowing how to drive from A to B.
2) At Palo Alto Networks, we chose to keep CS Ops and Enablement separate. We made this decision because it was important to create a distinct line between the responsibilities of CS Ops (like financials & analytics) and Enablement (the practical application of training).
There are five main qualities we wanted to be included in our CS Enablement program at Palo Alto Networks.
“Historically, Enablement has been about, ‘Hey, we're going to get together once a year, spend a week in class, and then run away.’ This never works.”
“CS Enablement means ensuring that each person at Palo Alto Networks feels that they are not only just doing a job but that they are on a career path that they can follow to improve themselves personally and professionally.”
Every CS employee at our company follows an Enablement framework that consists of seven universal CS knowledge areas they need to be skilled in.
1) Business-led outcome-driven approach
This capability covers how to translate business requirements and pain points in to a set of use cases that are measurable by the customer.
2) Industry and technology awareness
Our world is cybersecurity. To be trusted advisors to our customers, CSMs have to be in the know about what is occurring around the cybersecurity space.
3) Product knowledge
CSMs & CSEs need to be thoroughly trained on the products and solutions we sell. The more educated our teams are, the more skilled they are at relaying that knowledge to customers. And when customers have a deep understanding of our platform of products, it leads to a higher likelihood of adoption, more use cases, and better chances of renewal, expansion, cross-sell, and upsell opportunities.
4) Customer Surround
At our company, “Customer Surround” entails how CS team members can work effectively with other parts of the organization including Sales, Systems Engineering, Marketing, Product Management, Engineering, Partners, etc.
5) Customer behavior analytics
We want our CS team to have the ability to look at customer product usage data and tell a story based on those numbers. They should be able to determine customer use cases based on product usage and determine the most efficient approach to accelerate their adoption and value
6) Account management skills
It’s a requirement that every CSM has a handle on baseline account management skills. The best CSMs know how to listen, work through escalations, defuse situations, be a trusted advisor, etc.
7) Customer journey orchestration
This skill is about CSMs understanding every activity that occurs along the customer journey from onboarding, adoption, renewals, expansions, success planning, etc.
Beyond this universal CS Enablement program, as described above, we wanted to ensure each CSM and CSE were provided with a custom blueprint for success at Palo Alto Networks.
To launch this blueprint initiative, our Enablement team member meets with every key member of my delivery staff to ensure managers in the field created an employee-tailored Enablement plan for all of their team members. All CSMs/CSEs have different needs. At our company, those needs are evaluated between the manager and the employee, and then together they create a customized learning progress plan.
We call it our Customer Success Academy and like to think of it as a university. We provide the content, courses, and training, while each employee follows a certain ‘major’ (or career path). CS team members can take certain courses, become a mentor, do technical labs, teach classes, and so much more to level up personally and professionally.
—
To learn more about building a world-class Customer Success team, connect with Nick Chang on LinkedIn.
CUSTOMER-LED GROWTH
A CS Leader's Impact on Company Valuation
Recently on the Success League Radio, I spoke about how CS leaders can use the Rule of 40 to better understand their impact on valuation. In this piece, Bill Cushard, GM of Partner & Commercial Success at Dragonboat, breaks down this metric even further. I love his final thought. If every CS leader presented their strategy in terms of the valuation impact they'll have on the business, we'd see way more CS departments with increased funding (compared to what we see most of the time today which is the CFO rally cry of "make CS more efficient".)
REMOTE WORK
Returning to the Office? Not So Fast.
Gong ran a study at the beginning of this year with 300+ Sales reps about the amount of time they’ve spent in an office over the past six months and their preferences moving forward. I found the following data enlightening:
BUSINESS ANALYSIS
The Impact of Contract Term on Customer Success
Fellow Customer-Led Growth champion, Dave Jackson, digs into how ARR vs. MRR impacts the Customer Success delivery model—a topic not talked about often enough.
1:1 MEETINGS
As a Manager, I Always Ask My Team This Unique Question
Anna Burgess Yang, former 15-year Director of CS/Product Manager at Suntell, shares the most constructive question she asks during 1:1s — “The generic question ‘How are things going?’ doesn’t always elicit forthright responses. Some employees would gloss over their struggles or respond in the same generic fashion with ‘Things are fine.’ Asking ‘Has anything weird come up?’ gave me so many insights.”
LEADERSHIP
7 Tips for a New CCO
This quick read is tailored to the CCO role, but the 7 pieces of advice Rod Cherkas shares in this article apply to most people kicking off a new role in Customer Success leadership. I suggested adding in an 8th tip: Define how you'll collect and distribute customer data to the executive team and Board. At a minimum, ask customers how much value they receive from the product.
Ethan Beute has spent the last three years hosting The Customer Experience Podcast and the last ten years of his career at BombBomb helping people to implement simple, personal videos for clearer communication, human connection, and higher conversion.
These experiences helped shape the ideas presented in his new book, co-authored with Stephen Pacinelli, called Human-Centered Communication: A Business Case Against Digital Pollution. In this newsletter, we’re highlighting an excerpt from the book featuring Winning by Design founder Jacco van der Kooij and the bow tie funnel he created.
This excerpt focuses on why we should cast aside the traditional funnel where the final step and goal is a customer transaction. Ethan and Jacco propose that we replace it with the bow tie framework which allows us to “devote our effort and expense to what matters most: creating recurring impact for people.”
You’re likely familiar with the traditional sales and marketing funnel like in the figure below. The language changes depending on whose funnel it is, but it typically follows the AIDA structure (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action). The final step, Action, is a purchase, commitment, sale, conversion, or another form of transaction.
Its flaws have been identified before, but we’ll do so quickly again here. And we’ll start with the fact that the physics are all wrong; people don’t get into the top of your funnel and just slide down the side into a purchase. More importantly, the goal, perspective, and mindset are broken. Among the potential costs of adhering to its flawed simplicity are digital pollution, lost opportunities, transactional culture, and burned reputation.
The Goal Is Broken
The goal of the traditional funnel is to close the sale. However, this transaction is the goal line only in a transactional culture. A funnel that ends with a purchase says: We got what we wanted. But most businesses are relationship-based. The purchase isn’t the end of a process; it’s the start of a long-term relationship. Tacking on the word “Retention” or “Advocacy” underneath “Action” or “Purchase” is a move in the right direction but doesn’t get us where we need to be.
In a subscription model, a purchase may not even be profitable for you. Instead, you must renew or upgrade a subscription over many months to reach profitability. Even if you’re not in a subscription-based business, you rely on recurring revenue in the form of repeat purchasing, expanded purchasing, and customer referrals. No matter the model, a healthy business grows with and through current customers, not by creating a costly parade of one-time transactions. You want to grow the lifetime value of each customer, not just close deals.
The Perspective Is Broken
The traditional funnel is created from the seller’s perspective. When it gets operationalized, we tally up the people and potential revenue at each stage, track conversion rates by stage, measure pace through each stage, and so on. Its purpose is accurate revenue forecasting. Its bias is toward getting the deal closed, not on developing the deal. For example, in five common stages of a sales funnel (contacted, qualified, demo, proposal, closed), four stages are dedicated to getting the deal done, but only one (qualified) is dedicated to discovery. And that’s assuming qualification comes through a curiosity-based conversation. Regardless, the seller’s needs and wants overshadow the buyer’s.
The Mindset Is Broken
In Jacco’s example earlier in the chapter, our default plan to double revenue from $80,000 to $160,000 is to double the top of the funnel. Double the calls. Double the emails. Double the connection requests. Double everything. This volume-based approach is driven by an alpha culture demanding that people and machines crank out activities, rely on size and force, and ignore counter impacts.
“That whole mindset is deeply ingrained into the typical sales culture,” observes Jacco. But “there is scientific proof that shows that twice the volume does not bring in twice the results.”
To illustrate, Jacco shares the story of the elusive four-minute mile. For years, it was thought to be an unbreakable barrier for runners. Most contenders had the mindset of running more and more, training more miles into their bodies. A doctor working in a hospital lab, Roger Bannister didn’t have time for volume. Instead, he focused on interval training—shorter bursts to increase speed. One of his favorite track sessions consisted of three 1.5-mile runs at a swift pace.
“What he learned is that running less made him go faster,” explains Jacco. He was the first to break the four-minute mile barrier in 1954.
Bannister’s counterintuitive approach opened the door. Though three times as many humans have summited Mount Everest than have run a sub-four-minute mile (approximately 5,000 versus fewer than 1,500), most major college track teams now have a sub-four-minute miler.
This story sets up the third of three of nonnegotiable principles of sales that Jacco shares with us. Each principle demands a better funnel with better processes and better communication:
Each of these principles helps fix the broken funnel.
A better funnel is The Bow Tie Funnel, which Steve and I learned from Jacco’s books and videos. As you can see in the figure below, it’s shaped like a bow tie. This funnel views the transaction, purchase, or commitment not as the end, but as the start of an ongoing impact journey. In this way, it involves your entire organization and starts from a more customer-centric perspective.
As we co-create with our customers their journey across the funnel into a positive growth loop, we work to deliver emotional impact (how it benefi ts the individual) and rational impact (how it benefits their organization). Impacts are problems solved, opportunities gained, and value delivered. The more we understand our customers and build trusting relationships with them, the more impact we can deliver. The delivery of impact earns us the right to revenue.
For a quick orientation to The Bow Tie Funnel, the three main stages are Acquisition, Commitment, and Expansion.
On the Acquisition side, which is typically the domain of marketing and sales, prospective customers become aware of their problem or opportunity, get educated on solutions, and select one of the providers competing for their business.
On that path, they’re qualified by marketing (MQL) and then by sales (SQL), who work to earn a commitment. When customers Commit, they’re onboarded into the product or service and guided to initial impact. Helping them achieve that desired outcome generates monthly recurring revenue (MRR). As we continue to provide impact for customers, they grow and expand with us, increasing lifetime value (LTV) over a long-term relationship.
Even if you don’t use this language to describe your business, you can use The Bow Tie Funnel. No matter the size of your team or your customer base, this model applies. Whatever your product or service may be, you can view relationship building, value delivery, and revenue generation through this lens.
The Goal Is Better
With this funnel, the sale isn’t the goal—customer impact is. It doesn’t end with a purchase; it looks to an ongoing growth loop. It is inherently customer centric.
This bears out Jacco’s first principle: Recurring revenue is a result of recurring impact.
The Perspective Is Better
The Bow Tie Funnel takes the customer’s perspective. Their benefit (impact) is a necessary precursor to our benefit (revenue). It demands we stop selling and start helping. It demands we think first about their needs, not our own.
This reinforces his second principle: People love to buy, but they don’t like to be sold to.
The Mindset Is Better
The path to doubling revenue isn’t to double the top of the funnel, it’s to create more impact for your customers.
Math fact: 10% to the power of seven is 1.8. Therefore, creating a 10% improvement in each of the seven main stages across The Bow Tie Funnel will nearly double revenue. Improving a conversion rate from 4.7% to 5.17% is a 10% improvement. An incremental, human-first approach builds trust, minimizes counter impacts, and grows revenue.
This exemplifies the third principle he shares with us: The impact of marginal gain is better than volume.
“What we’re looking for now is authenticity,” Jacco declares. “I believe that ultimately, this is what we want. People want transparency.”
For too long, we’ve been trained to create the appearance of perfection. The shine and gloss. The impression and illusion. The effort and expense. The call for authenticity is a call for substance over style.
When we drop the facade, we can devote our effort and expense to what matters most: creating recurring impact for people.
Our sales calls and our recruiting interviews start long before we ever meet inperson. Our reputations precede us now more than ever. Our first impression is often made virtually. Word of mouth has been with us for millennia, but its effects are wider and deeper digitally. Now is the time to get intentional about authenticity, transparency, and human centricity.
EVENT
Gainsight’s Pulse Conference
“Venus and Serena. Jordan and Nike. Peter Parker and MJ. Some pairs are just easy to root for. Our favorite? Pulse and You.” Join me and thousands of other Customer Success leaders at Moscone Center for Gainsight’s Pulse Conference on August 17-18.
HIRING
"Take Control of Your Desk" And Other Career Tips
Former Sr. Dir. of Talent Acquisition for Splunk, Shreya Iyer, shares an abundance of career advice including a great section for hiring managers on how to find people looking to grow in their career (and then how to support them along that path). She says, “I think it’s a mistake when people assume job-hopping is a red flag. It’s a yellow flag — you need to dig in deeper. Are they job-hopping because their role and their career is growing, or are they job-hopping because of a lack of focus?”
FRAMEWORK
The Three-Legged Stool
Here’s Rav Dhaliwal with a piece on why Customer Success needs to serve as the third leg on a stool to close the buyer-deployer gap by conducting “deployment discovery” during the sales cycle.
OPINION
Why NRR is Probably The Wrong Core Metric for Your CS Team
Jason Lemkin, founder of SaaStr, says CSMs are the laziest Individual Contributors. What say you?
“I’m looking for best practices for career laddering”
“I need new strategies to retain top CSMs”
“I’m concerned about my CSMs getting poached”
If you’ve said any of these statements in the past year, you’re in good company. As the Customer Success department grows in prominence, businesses are forced to change their approach to developing and retaining top CS talent rapidly.
That’s why we spoke with Chad Greenleaf, SVP of Client Services at AppsFlyer, about two career paths he’s successfully implemented. As Chad says “these ladders are presented here as a guideline for leveling and growth of the CSM role, and are by no means the ‘only’ or ‘best’ career ladder options. But each can be customized for an organization and should also be considered for parallel roles in Professional Services, Support, Education, Technical Success, and other roles in the broader Customer Success organization."
Associate CSM - Associate CSMs are entry level, either into the industry and/or at the start of their professional careers. Associates work under the direction of a more experienced CSM or under a Team Lead. Associates may work with less complex customer situations, with clearly defined tasks, and with Mid Market or SMB customers at scale. CS organizations would expect advancement from an associate role faster than advancement through other roles.
CSM - This individual contributor is the backbone of the CS organization. This individual’s day-to-day responsibilities ultimately determine if their customers, and by extension their own organization, succeed or fail in a subscription-based world. CSMs can have a variety of responsibilities depending on the organization, but they are ultimately accountable for the customers’ success, satisfaction, and renewal. In some cases, they may also be responsible for product expansion within the customer organization.
A CSM seeks to understand a customer's current state, desired destination, and the initiatives and software required to reach the destination (or attain the outcome). They link business value with their own organization’s product value and create visibility within the customer organization of what progress has been made. A CSM is an individual leader that drives a matrix team (both vendor and customer) to deliver expected value for the customer. Great CSMs create advocates within their customers that are willing to speak positively about the software or product in public settings.
Senior CSM - Senior CSMs are expected to achieve individual targets consistently and with little oversight. They are often assigned and used extensively in the most strategic or complex customer segments. They frequently mentor CSMs or Associate CSMs.
“Principal CSMs are evidence that career success doesn’t have to follow the traditional management route.”
Principal CSM - Many consider this role to be an individual peer to managers, from a maturity and competence perspective. Principal CSMs are evidence that career success doesn’t have to follow the traditional management route. Achieving and exceeding individual targets and goals are a given. The Principal CSM is called upon to resolve challenging situations or customers in an effective and self-driven manner. They mentor other individual CSMs and are resident experts in one or many technical, product, or strategic subject matters.
Senior Principal CSM - These are the most experienced CSMs at the company. They’ve demonstrated mastery in product knowledge, subject matter expertise, getting things done with other departments, and management of the company’s largest accounts. They consistently set the highest standards by which all other levels of CSM are compared.
CS Team Lead - Team Leads mentor individual CSMs in a formal sense, minus the HR and revenue responsibilities that a manager has. Team Leads set the pace and lead specific initiatives, areas of responsibility, and mentorship for individual team members. Programs with a Team Lead position use the role as a stepping stone for candidates who demonstrate management potential. A CS Team Lead normally serves as a player/coach.
“Programs with a Team Lead position use the role as a stepping stone for candidates who demonstrate management potential.”
CS Manager - This is the baseline or formal foundation of Customer Success leadership. Managers can still serve as a player/coach, but this role tilts more towards coach. This person has formal HR and performance responsibilities for a set team, and for performance of those individuals’ aggregate book of business. They serve as the first escalation point for CSMs with customers.
CS Senior Manager - More experienced managers may advance to a Senior Manager role. Senior Managers are expected to be competent and consistent in managing a team and driving that team to high performance. They will often be drawn by senior leaders for strategic initiatives with the organization or to mentor more junior managers.
Director/Senior Director of CS - Directors often manage other managers, meaning they are the first role that must derive success from second-level leadership. Directors are responsible for individual and team performance across a larger span, including individual and financial success. They mentor managers and partner with other leaders in the broader field teams (Marketing, Sales) as well as the Product team to ensure customer success.
VP/SVP of CS - Often responsible for an aggregate group of teams, regions, customer segments, or departments (CSM, Consulting, Support). VPs of CS report to the CCO, or if a company doesn’t have a CCO role, the CRO or COO. The VP sets strategy and is responsible for the successful execution of the department’s goals. They often contribute to strategy that happens at the CCO level and are an important executive touchpoint for customers. The VP ensures that customer sentiment and feedback make it to the C-level executives and product leadership team.
“CCOs evangelize the need for the entire organization to be involved in Customer-Led Growth.”
Chief Customer Officer - The buck stops here as CCOs are responsible to the CEO, CRO, Product, and the Board for all Customer Success-related areas. A CCO drives organizational and go-to-market strategy for the CS group and ensures that different CS departments are working harmoniously towards the quarterly or annual goals set out by the CEO and Board. The CCO is often the executive sponsor in strategic customer relationships to ensure executive alignment. The CCO also ensures the organization continues to evolve and improve as customer needs shift and expand. CCOs also evangelize the need for the entire organization to be involved in Customer-Led Growth.
TEAM STRUCTURE
Fundamentals Matter
Janine Sneed, VP of Customer Success at IBM, makes a connection between CS and sports and explains how important it is to get the fundamentals right in each. This is the latest post on Janine’s new blog, Scaling Customer Success, which is a resource worth bookmarking.
ENABLEMENT
Why Invest in Customer Success Enablement
“When you make CSMs more effective and efficient, not only do they do better work, they have more time to do that work at that higher level of performance.” Here’s a post by William Buckingham, CS Operations Manager, Enablement at Delphix, with all the research to convince you to invest more into CS Enablement.
WEBINAR
How to Become A Customer-Led Growth Leader
We are stepping into the age of the customer and CS leaders must lead the charge. Join me during this session to learn more about Customer-Led Growth (CLG) and the skills you’ll need to implement this movement at your company.
The Great Resignation continues to cause problems for CS leaders that need to grow and retain their strong existing talent.
Debra Squyres saw this trend early and took action to create a workplace that was attractive to a remote-first workforce. As HackerRank’s Chief Customer Officer, Debra adjusts the hiring, engagement, and retention strategies and has offered to share her learnings via an interview below.
People are more willing to leave their companies due to several factors.
1) The world has gone remote (or hybrid).
2) Movements like the contingent workforce population are growing rapidly. This is where people are disconnecting from the concept of security and the necessity of having a full-time job.
Because of this, workers have more options than ever before and more power than they’ve ever had. We were headed in this direction, but I think COVID-19 accelerated us on this path by about 10 years over the course of about 6 months.
I don't think the Great Resignation is a bad thing. As a leader and hiring manager, the opportunity to hire talent is greatly expanded because I don't have to think in terms of traditional barriers, like location. In fact, I was the first leader at HackerRank that was hired outside of our headquarters location. Had it not been for COVID-19, I wouldn't be here. But we are now a remote-first company.
Workers want the same thing that they've always wanted. They just are more likely to walk away when they aren’t getting it.
The first way leaders usually try to solve this problem is by offering more money. This ultimately leads to a situation where your ability to compete with other companies for talent comes down to how much you’re willing to pay. Money is a hygiene factor. It may attract employees, but it won't retain them over the long term.
At the end of the day, when you look at employee surveys, it all boils down to the same things.
People want to:
It's important to recognize that good people and good talent are not always a good fit for what you need at the stage of the company, the nature of the role, or the product that you have. You have to really drill into the basics and understand your company’s stage and your CS organization's maturity level.
Do your CSMs have a broad spectrum of responsibilities? Or do you have CSMs who specialize? If you have Enterprise CSMs who work with multimillion-dollar accounts, scaled CS on the other end, and a variety of roles in between, the personas you’ll need in your org will look much different than at a company with CSMs who have an expansive remit.
The colleagues who excel and thrive in an environment where they do something different every 45 minutes hate being in mature organizations where they’re specialized by function and segment. It's not the same nature of work.
You can have exceptional CSMs in both environments. But if you're not clear about what your environment is, or you're not hiring for what you need them to do, or the circumstances in which they're going to be doing it, then you will create a mismatch. There will be frustration and attrition.
I have spent the last 15 years in rapidly growing companies. The reality is you can't retain everyone over the course of every phase of a company's lifecycle.
You can retain more team members if you're open about what that journey looks like and what opportunity it presents to them. You also have a better chance of keeping people if you’re clear on what their strengths and passions are because you can push them in certain directions or give them projects that keep them engaged for longer.
But as a leader, you're really fooling yourself if you think you can have 90-100% retention in a rapidly growing environment where the circumstances and nature of work are ever-evolving.
One of the things that many CS leaders, myself included, struggle with right now is the level of fatigue our teams are feeling.
Customer-facing people have to juggle many simultaneous responsibilities in a fast-paced workday managing multiple customers. They’re the voice of the company to the customer. They’re the voice of the customer to the company. They bring feature and bug feedback to the Product team. They bring ICP and pricing feedback to the Sales and Marketing teams. And since CSMs are usually “people” people and we’re mostly working in a remote-first world, they don’t have outlets to recharge their energy like they used to.
So dealing with fatigue, engagement, and retaining passion around the work has been a true challenge from a leadership perspective and ensuring that the team is okay.
All companies need to think about how to create an environment where people who have these intense experiences (like working with customers) can overcome obstacles and find a level of balance and peace in their work.
COMMUNICATION
Thoughtful Apologies for Bad Customer Service
So long as humans run companies, mistakes will be made. Here’s a post on how to craft a professional, but heartfelt apology when a customer is on the receiving end of poor service. The author also shares 5 email templates you can use for various scenarios like after a system outage, a negative customer service experience, or if inaccurate communication was made.
MANAGING UP
The Right Amount of Context to Manage Up
Here’s Wes Kao, Cofounder of Maven, with a thread of advice on how to share the perfect amount of information to make your boss’ life easier. She says, “It's your job to do the heavy lifting. By providing the right amount of context, your boss won't have to guess to figure out what you’re trying to do. Take the mental load off your boss & you’ll shine as an employee.”
ALIGNMENT
Stop Blaming the Sales Team
This quick read from Chad Horenfeldt, Head of Global CS at Kustomer, calls for Customer Success professionals to “stop blaming sales by default.” He advocates for leaders to develop a mentality of extreme ownership to “speed up the chance to make real change and progress” between CS and Sales organizations.
LEADERSHIP
The Dreaded Re-org
Lara Hogan’s piece will help you empathize with and prepare for how your team may react to an upcoming Customer Success team re-org.
Success Happy Hour is a weekly newsletter for Customer Success leaders. Each week we feature one digestible piece of advice or a framework from a top Success leader, along with the best resources from that week. Subscribe here.
Of course your CEO says they're "customer first". But how does that claim actually show up in their actions?
This week, we brought together 4 trailblazing customer-focused CEOs (Yamini Rangan of HubSpot, Nick Mehta of Gainsight, Christina Kosmowski of LogicMonitor, & Andy MacMillan of UserTesting) to understand how they create a company-wide customer obsession.
You can watch the full recording here.
This newsletter includes the panelists’ answers to the question “How have you transferred your deep passion for customers to your entire organization?” Their responses have been lightly edited for clarity.
Christina Kosmowski, CEO at LogicMonitor
I think anyone who has heard me talk understands I'm passionate about Customer Success and putting the customer at the center of everything we do.
I also believe that process is not the antithesis, but the enabler. You can say “we’re customer-focused” but if you don't actually create the processes around that claim, you can't enable your company to truly be customer-centric. That’s why we have very tight processes in place that hold our entire organization accountable to the customer experience including our red account program and voice of the customer.
In addition to those processes, we are purposeful about bringing the customer story to life—the qualitative aspect. There are 2 main ways we share our customer stories:
#1 We have a customer story channel in Slack where our customer-facing teams post client stories so that the whole company can hear those narratives.
#2 Once a quarter we require a customer to come in and speak live at our All-Hands. All team members know in the first month of the quarter they will hear a customer speak about the good, the bad, and the ugly. We also have customers share feedback at our executive staff meetings on a quarterly basis.
“Being able to balance that qualitative customer story and experience piece with tight processes is key to keeping the customer truly at the center of the company you’re building.” — Christina Kosmowski
Andy MacMillan, CEO at UserTesting
I completely agree, Christina. As a leader, the things you highlight and talk about are the things that ultimately are important because people listen to what you’re saying and follow your actions. Always talking about your customers is important because it is what your organization will focus on.
I wasn’t a founder of UserTesting. So I had the benefit of joining a company that was already very customer-centric, but I tried to accelerate that culture. For example, I did an All-Hands a few days before I joined where I got introduced to the company. Then my first day was a Monday in the office. During my second day, I was on an airplane to visit our largest customer. And at the end of the week, I told everybody, “Hey, it was a great first week. I met a bunch of you and I met our largest customer in person at their site.” That set the tone about what was important to me.
To transfer customer-centricity to an entire org, leaders need to:
1) talk about customers and then,
2) back that talk up with action.
I also believe that customer-centricity can't just be about individual acts of people interacting with customers. Those moments are important too. But the companies that are customer-focused at scale are able to find narratives about what's going on with their customers that they can align everyone around.
The core of what we do at UserTesting is to help people invite others to record and share their experiences with products or services. User videos then become assets to share internally around an organization.
We focus on how to get those stories from your users and customers, and then scale them around the organization. I think video is a very powerful way to do that because an organization can align around the same customer narratives, and then build a culture around impacting that.
“Customer-centricity can't just be about individual acts of people interacting with customers…Companies that are customer-focused at scale are able to find narratives about what's going on with their customers that they can align everyone around.” — Andy MacMillan
Nick Mehta, CEO at Gainsight
There are three very tactical things I've found helpful to promote customer-centricity org-wide.
#1 Lead with transparency. Every employee and CEO wants to help customers. The problem is, sometimes people just don't know what's going on. That’s why it’s so important to have transparency around the customer experience.
For example, every day I post in Slack and every week I send an email about the customers I met with and what I learned about them. This is a very obvious tactic, but to me, it's so important.
#2 Lead by example. Similar to what Andy talked about, you have to show the org your own customer obsession. I'm that super, crazy, maniacal person who still reads every NPS, meets 10-20 customers a week, and listens to Gong calls. I do everything I can to better understand the customer, and that’s visible to everyone at the company. Gainsters know that if the CEO’s top priority is the customer experience, they should also prioritize customers above all else.
#3 Lead with humanity. It's not just “this customer”. It’s “this person”. We need to highlight their aspirations and really humanize them. We can call out new roles, promotions, or celebrate wins.
Separately, for a long time I’ve hosted customer roundtables where I go visit customers around the country and have dinner with them. I do this several times a month. But one really exciting thing is that other team members at Gainsight are learning how to run these meet-ups. This is another example of how the team is learning and picking up how to be highly customer-focused.
“You have to show the org your own customer obsession. I'm that super, crazy, maniacal person who needs still reads every NPS, meets 10-20 customers a week, and listens to Gong calls. I do everything I can to better understand the customer, and that’s visible to everyone at the company.” — Nick Mehta
Yamini Rangan, CEO at HubSpot
For us at HubSpot and throughout my career, it's come to this question: what is the guiding principle for the organization and is that guiding principle customer-centric? At HubSpot, we call it Solve For The Customer (SFTC). SFTC is not just the starting conversation—it's the way we make decisions across the company. Almost everything comes down to customer over company, team, and self. So for any decision we need to make, we start with solving for the customer. That’s how you get customer-focus embedded into the DNA of the organization.
And then it's very, very practical.
We start every week by sharing our NPS with the larger management team and the product organization.
Every month, we start with a customer-first meeting where we hear directly from a panel of customers. That kind of qualitative data associated with quantitative insights are great.
And then every company meeting, board meeting, almost everything of consequence, starts with having a customer panel.
Nothing can replace meeting the human who is the customer. You see what they have to juggle. You learn about what they're struggling with. Hearing directly from the customer creates company-wide empathy that is crucial to your success as a business.
“You must continually hear from customers so that customer obsession doesn't become just another initiative. It must be built into the DNA of the organization.” — Yamini Rangan
LEADERSHIP
How to Effectively Receive Feedback as an Executive
Here’s a great post with Yamini’s recommendations on how leaders can appropriately receive feedback. The TLDR is to be curious about how you can improve and use feedback as an opportunity to grow.
MODEL
The Three Types of Customer Success Teams
Thomasz proposes a simple model for building a CS team structure. The alarming trend is that some companies are removing CSMs completely from strategic accounts and going with this account team: AE, SE, Support. Think about the impact this could have to your organization.
CULTURE
Running an All-Hands Meeting
An older (2016), but evergreen post with tips to run a more purposeful All-Hands meeting. The one big missing piece I’d add to this article is the importance of having customers consistently come to your All-Hands meetings to share feedback.
DIGITAL CS
The Proactive Pooled Model at Looker
Seth Wylie heads up a CS Ops group that recently had Brian LaFaille give a presentation about Looker’s pooled model. His talk is definitely worth a listen if you’re interested in learning how your low-touch CSMs can be more proactive. Skip to 4:30 to start.
CONTEST
Vote on Your Favorite 2.0 Magazine Photo
This year’s theme for posting photos with the 2.0 magazine has been (unexpectedly) “Kids & Pets”. Help us pick some winners and vote on your favorite photo.
Digital Customer Success is an engagement strategy that can be used with customers in SMB, Mid Market or Enterprise accounts. Adding digital into your customer journey will create better experiences for all customers.
We’ve interviewed dozens of CS leaders about their approach to digital CS, we shared insights on the Nuffsaid podcast, and today we’re bringing the best of what we learned.
Dickey Singh, CEO at Cast.app — “When you’re starting out your digital CS program, remember that you don't have to boil the ocean. A lot of people think ‘let's automate everything.’ You don't have to do that. You can start by automating smaller pieces like the QBR or a playbook for a specific segment. And then you can iteratively digitize additional touchpoints, playbooks, or segments.”
Marley Wagner, VP of Marketing & Digital CS at ESG — “There are foundational elements you need to have in place before you can even think about launching a digital CS program. Here are the prerequisites:
“Once these pieces are in place, you can move up to Stage 1 and beyond of the Digital CS maturity model.”
Lane Holt, Director of Scale Programs at Gainsight — “This strategy is reflected in our Scale programs team structure. Our team includes retention and adoption marketing. It includes customer advocacy. We have a 1:many Ops team. We have one person who handles our in-app messages, another person works on our customer emails, and then I have a team of CSMs who support our customers. All together we make up our Scale programs. Only a small portion of our team is dedicated to that SMB and fast growth segment.”
Brian LaFaille, Global Lead of SaaS CS Programs at Google (Looker) — “There are three key teams that influence our Digital CS program at Looker:
“These three teams are very collaborative. I have a weekly sync with a PM and a Customer Marketing manager to really dissect what the customer experience needs to look like. While Customer Success is accountable to and owns the cadence of how and when customers are communicated to, I'm not a copywriter, right? So I lean on the experience of the Marketing team and all their design chops to make sure that the messaging resonates and fits in with the rest of the brand. Meanwhile, I'm not a product expert, either. I lean on our PM to fix any of the hashing issues or things like that that we might have in anonymizing user data, for instance. With our experience combined, we’ve become a really powerful trio.”
Meenu Agarwal, SVP of Customer Success at VMware — “At VMware, we absolutely want to meet our customers in the moment. That's where digital gives us a lot of power and capability. We've launched a collaboration platform called VMware Customer Connect, which helps provide a very personalized, holistic experience for our customers at different engagement points. There are three elements that make up Customer Connect. First, it’s a central hub and repository where customers can access any information they need—be it product, support, daily operational tasks, self-help education, knowledge, or community.
“Customer Connect is also personalized. For example, if a customer is onboarding they will see content relevant to getting started. As a customer moves further along their consumption and adoption journey their experience will change in the platform. We make it very tailored to the user.
“The third element of this platform is our use of advanced technology. We have AI components to give customers even more in-the-moment capabilities and so we can sense what they're trying to do. We want to accelerate customer outcomes at the end of the day.”
Dickey Singh, CEO at Cast.app — “In most digital CS programs, customers end up turning off the emails that you're sending them because it’s not meaningful content. You're just overwhelming them with content. The same thing goes with dashboards. We have overwhelmed our customers with dashboards and now we’re overwhelming them with pointless emails, reports, and pdfs.”
Brian LaFaille, Global Lead of SaaS CS Programs at Google (Looker) — “At Looker the top 3% of our customers work with named CSMs, but everyone else, north of 3,300 customers, are in a Pooled model. Sometimes these customers need a proactive human element from Looker. That’s when we deploy a light-touch team member for a short burst engagement. We're able to rotate the customer out of the pool and move them into the light-touch CSM’s portfolio for a short period of time, so they get that extra white-glove experience for a brief stint.
"The customer is ideally driving towards some desired outcome (i.e. to roll out to some new department, a data migration, escalation, etc.) Then they roll off. And we try to be as transparent as possible with our customers about this. In the CSMs opening email they’ll say, ‘Hey, I'm going to be here with you for seven days. I really want to make sure that we're able to accomplish X, Y, and Z. Here are the resources I'm going to use to do so. When can you meet?’ This approach usually lights a fire under the customer to engage with us because they know there's a time limit associated with that engagement.”
Elisabeth Courland, Digital CSM at Agorapulse — “Digital CSMs are often afraid of sending emails because they worry that either 1) the emails won't be well written, or 2) emails will get lost in customers’ inboxes. Here’s what you have to do: make sure that when you send an email, it provides maximum value (don’t pitch, or say obvious things).
“We all have email and we all have to weed through at least 10 spam emails a day. It's exhausting—honestly, it’s a nightmare. So when customers receive an email, they have to get the added value. They have to immediately see how the message is serving them. For this to happen, you have to understand personas before sending out an email and each message must provide a clear call to action (CTA).
“When you’re the sender of emails, it's never about your company. It's never about the product. It's about your customer and his pain point. At the end of the day, no one cares about the product or its features. A product is just a way to achieve an objective. So my advice is to not speak about your product. Instead, let your emails be the advisor that your customers don't have enough money to pay for. Train your customers that your emails are always worth reading.”
Dan Ennis, CS Scale Team Manager at monday.com — “I see two big pitfalls people can fall into when developing a digital CS program. The first is making assumptions about your data. That’s the quickest way to ensure your data isn’t valuable. It can be really easy to see high numbers or product usage and then assume that indicates healthy customers.
“It’s also important to remember to avoid using 1:1 intervention thoughtlessly. If you have experience as a CSM, your natural go-to card is often to jump in and help customers 1:1. But that’s not necessarily the right move when building out a digital CS program. I always encourage others to intentionally hold that piece back a little. It’s a tool, not the tool. Later on you can leverage that 1:1 intervention for the truly strategic components, and focus on how to automate intervention within your Scale program.”
Lane Holt, Director of Scaled Programs at Gainsight — “One of the key pillars for our team is to lighten the load for CSMs. How can we make it easier to be a CSM here at Gainsight? Part of accomplishing that is to help send the right message, to the right customer, at the right time. For example, my team helped develop the communication strategy around our event Pulse alongside our Marketing team.
“We sent out an announcement about the tracks that would be available this year at the event. Then we followed up with an email on behalf of high-touch CSMs. That email said, based on the user’s persona, ‘These are the tracks that you should attend this year.’ The results were incredible—some of our quietest stakeholders responded, thanking the CSM for sharing this information.
“By automating this small piece for our CSMs, we helped save their time and energy in a big way. And we hit our registration numbers earlier than we've ever hit them before because of our thoughtful approach to sending messages to our users.”
Dickey Singh, CEO at Cast.app — “Of course, you cannot replicate white-glove experiences in environments when you have thousands of customers and not enough CSM coverage. So I recommend automating the top positive interactions or moments of truth of your named CSM experience to provide a great experience for customers at scale. For instance, take the best playbooks from your top 1:1 named accounts and consider digitizing those. That’s how you can scale this program.”
Creating content, segmenting customers, deciding on an automation platform, looking into engagement models, understanding personas…when you’re just starting out with a Digitally-Led Customer Success motion, knowing where to begin can be the biggest obstacle.
That’s why it was refreshing to speak with Elisabeth Courland recently on the Nuffsaid podcast. The Digital CSM at Agorapulse was an integral part of launching Talentsoft’s Scale CS program and she is currently working on building Agorapulse’s digital CS motion from the ground up. Because of her experience, she is able to get tactical about the process.
In this newsletter, Elisabeth shares five easily digestible tips that any leader working on digital CS can use right away.
Tune into Elisabeth’s Nuffsaid podcast episode, if you’d rather listen than read.
ELISABETH:
When you’re starting a Digitally-Led CS program from scratch, the first thing to do is to take a step back. Understand that you cannot deal with and implement everything you want to in the first week, so I suggest making three priorities per quarter and sticking to those priorities.
Step 2 is to look at what's already happening at your company in terms of a digital CS program. This step involves speaking with three different stakeholders:
1) Current CSMs. I send out a form to existing CSMs asking them a number of questions:
2) The Product team. It’s important to speak with Product about expectations for what the customer can do with the product and what the ideal experience would look like (i.e. Digital CSMs should learn what Product wants customers to understand and be able to do first with the product.)
3) Existing customers. Contact as many customers as you can because you need to deeply understand them before you can help with digital CS. Whether it be customer advocates who are super successful with the product, or even customers that recently churned, I ask questions like:
The objective of talking to all these stakeholders is not to have a single source of truth. It's your job to see how each department, how each persona (either internal or external) views the customer journey.
Then translate all your conversations with Product, CSMs, and customers into data. That means collecting and aggregating all the feedback from stakeholders into a spreadsheet that you can use to inform your digital customer journey mapping, segmentation, & tiering, and prioritizing tasks. This process will help you better communicate with customers in a newly launched 1:many motion.
ELISABETH:
People are really afraid to send emails because they worry that either 1) the emails won't be well written, or 2) emails will get lost in customers’ inboxes. Here’s what you have to do: make sure that when you send an email, it provides value (don’t pitch, or say obvious things).
We all have email and we all have to weed through at least 10 spam emails a day. It's exhausting—honestly, it’s a nightmare.
So when customers receive an email, they have to get the added value. They have to immediately see how the message is serving them, or going to help them. For this to happen, you have to understand personas before sending out an email. And each email must provide a clear call to action (CTA).
When you’re the sender of emails, it's never about your company. It's never about the product. It's about your customer and his pain point. At the end of the day, no one cares about the product or its features. A product is just a way to achieve an objective.
So my advice is to not speak about your product. Instead, let your emails be the advisor that your customers don't have enough money to pay for. Each message should add maximum value.
ELISABETH:
Customer sentiment can be a tricky topic because anyone in CS knows how often we send out customer sentiment surveys. The problem is that we don't really know if we can rely on it or if it's useful.
Let's be honest, when it comes to NPS (i.e. How likely are you to recommend us on a scale from 0 to 10?), the question is inherently misleading. No one sits around and recommends software products to their friends.
In digital CS, use automation. Send a one question survey in the body of an email that customers can answer in one click.
And the question should be simple:
This is dangerous because it's a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’. And if it's ‘no’, you may see churn. But if it is a ‘no’, at least you can act on it. You can say, “Okay, do you want some help? How can we help you? Should we schedule a call? Do you want more content?”
This way, at least you’ll have some visibility into an account. Don’t send surveys you won’t act on.
ELISABETH:
The reason your company is utilizing a digital CS approach is to give a large number of customers a great experience at scale. Your customers need to be kept in the loop. That’s why in digital CS, it’s crucial that when a new feature is launched, or the product changes customers are notified.
Product and CS can work together on the following activities so digital CS customers have a great experience:
1) As soon as a new feature is implemented, an internal presentation should be created so:
2) Then, a live session or webinar should be scheduled to address and train the customers on the new feature or change. This requires the following:
ELISABETH:
If you’re interested in investing more heavily in digital CS, your first few hires are important. I see a few skills that can do really well in Digitally-Led Customer Success.
#1 Data-driven: Digital CSMs shouldn’t be afraid of digging into data. To run automation and a large number of customer communications, you should be excited by looking at data.
#2 Curiosity: You need to have a desire to understand your customer deeply, and you should be good at asking for information (either from the customer or from internal departments working on the customer experience).
#3 1:1 CS experience: I think having prior experience as a high-touch CSM is also important. It’s helpful as a Digital CSM to simplify what you've experienced in the past and be able to verbalize it for this new, 1:many audience.
#4 Social: In digital CS, the ability to collaborate with other departments is crucial to you and your customer’s success. We are always teaming up with Product, Marketing, Support, Data, high-touch CS, and more.
When it comes to skills in Digital CS, I believe that everything can be learned over time. I don't have any degree in CS. I've obviously had some certifications when started, but it’s more about soft skills (like communication, organization, etc).
We are also in a world where resources are free. Everything you need to know is on the table, you just have to go look for it.
To hear more from Elisabeth, go follow her on LinkedIn.
STRATEGY
Ultimate Guide to Customer Success Org Structures
Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta breaks down some common models for CS org structures. (His pdf, shared at the bottom of the post, is worth bookmarking.)
LEADERSHIP
Your Team Needs a User Manual (On You)
Everyone works differently and it helps to know how your peers or manager operate. What are their strengths and weaknesses, and their “default” ways of working? At Nuffsaid every manager shares their strengths and weaknesses openly. This article outlines how you can take a similar approach, and write a manager README.
POSITIONING
Tips for Handling Renewals from Gong and Gainsight
Here’s a quick article worth sharing with your team. It shares a few tips CSMs can use in QBRs to reduce churn risk (e.g. “frame the renewal in a way that ‘avoids change’”).
INTERVIEW
The Silicon Valley Executive Who Coined Customer Success
Here’s an exclusive conversation with Marie Alexander, the woman who came up with the terms Customer Success and CSM. It’s a lengthy interview so jump to each guest question and Marie’s corresponding answer for some key takeaways. For instance, Wayne McCulloch asks if there were any missed opportunities in the evolution of Customer Success. She responds, “what causes me the most angst is that Customer Success became a role rather than a philosophy or a corporate goal…Instead, it should be built into the product, built into each of the processes in your company. Customer Success Management is merely ensuring the focus.”
Success Happy Hour is a weekly newsletter for Customer Success leaders. Each week we feature one digestible piece of advice or a framework from a top Success leader, along with the best resources from that week. Subscribe here.
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