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The following is a summary of advice Chitra gave in a recent interview.
Most CS leaders understand that the best CSMs are seen as trusted advisors to their team. They’re great at identifying customer needs and tailoring the company’s solutions to meet those goals, and customers look to them to understand how they compare to the industry and where they can improve.
Problem is, a CSM can be a top performer in one company and fail in the next. They’re gifted in the context of one company’s customers and solutions, but they’re unable to apply their skills in the context of another.
So hiring great CSMs is the most important activity to building a team that works as effective consultants with their customers. Below, I’ve shared some tips for evaluating candidates in the hiring process and then coaching them to continue developing those skills once they are on the team.
One of the best ways to find CSMs that naturally have a consultative approach is to set up a role-playing exercise as one of the interviews that models your buyer context.
You can try role-playing different types of meetings for this exercise but the kickoff meeting is a good starting point. It helps you see whether candidates can identify a customer’s desired outcomes and then tailor the solution to those goals.
The setup:
Assess the candidate’s ability to challenge the “customer”
If appropriate, does the candidate:
Look for signals that the CSM is naturally curious
To identify a customer’s desired outcomes and help them change their processes or workflows, a CSM needs to be able to effectively use questioning and listening. There needs to be a balance, of course—the questions can’t feel too self-serving and if the CSM is rapid-firing questions, the customer may feel underprepared.
Check for coachability by evaluating the candidate’s ability to self-diagnose
If a CSM can’t be coached, they’re likely to not be able to coach others well.
So after the role play is complete, ask the candidate to self-assess how they did. You’re looking to see how reflective and analytical they are about their own performance. If they simply say “I did great,” and don’t point to any areas where they could have improved, that’s a sign they’re not very coachable.
Then, share your feedback about how the call went and evaluate how well the candidate absorbs the feedback. If they don’t listen well or don’t seem to understand the importance of the feedback, that also is a sign they’re not very coachable.
Conduct peer-to-peer role playing exercises and internal workshops
Have CSMs work together to act out various scenarios. Let’s say a Sara (a CSM) is struggling with how to approach a conversation with a difficult customer. Set up a role playing session where Sara can pretend to be the customer, and Tim (a CSM without any context) is Sara. Taking a step back and seeing how Tim approaches the problem from a different vantage point will give Sara insight and help her come up with different solutions.
Additional places to help CSMs develop a consultative mindset:
Coach CSMs to grow the skills to become a trusted advisor to their customers
Entry-level CSMs tend to start by doing transactional work. CS leaders can help them grow the skills to become seen as trusted advisors with their customers by coaching them (in 1:1s, or by conducting workshops or presentations) on the following.
COACHING
How to Become a Legendary Coach With Data
“Sales coaching is a combination of three pillars: motivation, strategic guidance, and skills development.” Here’s Gong Labs with a list of research-backed tips for coaching sales teams that can be easily applied to CS teams.
GROWTH
Hubspot’s CCO on Go-To-Market Success and Redefining Growth
Yamini Rangan shares her insights on a range of topics—the role of the CCO, how to build a go-to-market playbook, the keys of decision making across a large team, and more.
STRUCTURE
The Partnership Between Customer Success and Professional Services
Alex Farmer, VP of Customer Success at Cognite, with a concise story that answers the question, “How can pro-services and CS teams work together to drive customer success without too many cooks in the kitchen during the onboarding phase?”
CULTURE
Selling as a CSM
Founder & CEO of The Success League, Kristen Hayer, makes the case that great CSMs are always selling, but “it just might not be transactional.” She goes on to debunk 3 common myths often proposed by those who argue against CSMs selling to customers.
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.
There’s no doubt that growing a CS team from one that owns everything post-sale to one with narrowly defined goals and specialized roles requires a major lift. But scaling a team isn’t something we should do and learn from on our own. Despite the nuances of running businesses with very different customer journeys, many of the foundational elements of scaling a Customer team remain the same across companies.
That’s why we’ve rounded up some of the best advice from our newsletter and blog on scaling CS teams that can be applied in most companies.
As a team scales, CSMs need to be increasingly focused on helping customers achieve their desired outcomes. CS leaders should look to peel away responsibilities outside that core job of a CSM, and create new teams to manage those activities.
“Directors of Customer Success should begin by looking at the foundation they’ve set for the team. That foundation is something I call the role profile. Having a rubric like this will help define and set boundaries around what the responsibilities of your CSMs are, the metrics they will be measured on, and the expectations they will be held to. A role profile is a document with answers to the following questions:
"Once you’ve answered the 5-question rubric, you have a foundation that will direct how to structure everything else for CSMs. Hiring, training, culture, compensation and incentives—all of this stems from the clear definition of the role.” — Brett Andersen, VP of Client Services at Degreed
“At Pendo, CSMs were originally responsible for everything from product adoption, customer health, securing renewals, contributing to expansions, and more. I recognized that we needed to peel the renewal and expansion piece away from the CSMs so they could do what they do best - help customers achieve their business outcomes. To do that, we created a new team within CS called Subscription Success. This team handled expansion and renewals for the commercial and corporate customer segments. CSMs were still responsible for keeping customers happy, driving value, and influencing the renewal and expansion, but their focus was narrowed.” — Jennifer Dearman, SVP, Global Customer Success and Operations at Udacity
To create a more consistent experience at scale, CS leaders need to regularly work with their peers in Sales to ensure there’s a seamless handoff with customers. CS leaders should consider when CSMs are introduced and how that introduction is positioned.
“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 improves the customer experience in two ways. First, the customer doesn’t have to repeat anything. The Success person gets looped into the customer’s situation and goals early and can help them get value out of the product much faster. Second, the customer gets to see what it’s like to work with Lucidworks. That’s going to give the customer much more confidence and increase the AE’s likelihood of closing the deal.” — Jess Jurva, CCO at Lucidworks
The Success leader can also establish regular internal touchpoints to ensure Sales understands what it takes to get a customer up and running with the product.
“Here’s a problem many Sales and CS teams experience: There’s not a clear understanding of what it takes to actually onboard a customer. Areas that are often misspoken about include the many roles required to get customers set up (technical people, project managers, etc.), how long it will take for different product implementations, and the level of effort the customer needs to put in to fully onboard. To fix that, Success should help prepare Sales to answer questions around Time to First Value, key milestones, and the types of roles the point of contact needs to bring in to have success adoption of the product. Preparation can come in the form of one-pagers, slide-decks, or even call coaching. ” — Emilia D’Anzica, Founder, CEO - CS Consulting at GrowthMolecules
At scale, it’s increasingly difficult for Marketing and Product team members to stay close to the customer—and it’s the Success leaders’ job to make sure those teams have the customer data they need to make informed decisions with the customer in mind.
“There are three areas CS leaders can focus on to build a strong feedback loop between teams, so they can get the information they need about customers:
“In my experience this process has generated important insights that inspired real change.” — Megan Bowen, CCO at Refine Labs
“There’s a well-used playbook for building foundational elements of Customer Success. It’s scaling the Customer Success organization where the playbook begins to diverge. Some companies focus solely on the high-touch experience first because, frankly, it’s easy to give these customers more love. On the other hand, it's a lot harder to touch customers at scale. I'm a proponent of creating a model that affects all customers at the same time instead of only starting with one segment. Every customer deserves an investment in their success and a more comprehensive engagement model provides value to all of your customers regardless of their size or contribution to your business.” — Jennifer Dearman, SVP, Global Customer Success and Operations at Udacity
“We started building out our CS Ops function when we noticed a few dynamics happening in the team:
Those were all things we felt that encouraged us to invest in building a CS Ops function. Now that we’ve experienced what it’s like to have this function embedded in Customer Success, I can say that CS Ops is the glue for the Customer Success team. They’re focused on making sure we can scale both our team and our customer experience, and they’re helping make everyone’s life easier.” — Jeff Heckler, Global Head of Customer Success at Pipedrive
DISCUSSION
Can Customers Afford Your QBRs?
This week Dave Jackson, CCO at DeepCrawl, brought up an interesting point: “Before thinking about how to deliver a good QBR ask yourself should you have them at all?” Customers are busy, and QBRs tend to be more about the vendor than they are the customer. Consider whether there’s a better approach that’s less time consuming for the customer (and do you need to replace QBRs with anything)?
LEADERSHIP
Tough Love for Managers Who Give Feedback
Lara Hogan, Leadership Coach, shares a concise and powerful letter to managers. “You owe it to [your reports] to be better at [giving feedback], because you have 100% of the power in this relationship.” One of the best reminders from her list: “Your feelings have no place in feedback for your reports.”
CAREER
How to Start a New Tech Exec Job
Here’s a quick list of reminders when joining a new company. Two of the more common patterns I’ve seen are “rushing to provide value” and, sometimes, “belittling past efforts.” Take time to learn about the team, the processes, and what they’ve already tried before offering your opinions.
ONBOARDING
Optimize Training for Customer Learning
Ed Powers has a knack for distilling his ideas about Customer Success related topics in a thoughtful way, and will surely facilitate an interesting discussion about how we can be more effective in training CSMs (and in educating customers). Join his free, online discussion on February 24th.
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.
In the Customer Success community, we're faced with the common challenge of 'being more proactive'. You hear it all the time: "How do we move from reactive to proactive?"
I recently started a discussion about this on LinkedIn, and saw a lot of thoughtful comments and ideas come through on the topic. Here’s a summarized version of the tips and advice shared by the community.
Organizational behavior and individual behavior
Ed Powers offered how he thinks about moving from being reactive to proactive. His way of explaining it seemed to provide a framework in which all other advice fit:
“I think about this in two ways: 1. Organizational behavior, 2. Individual behavior. The first is a management issue that can be overcome by improving processes upstream, such as better onboarding, business reviews, health scores, etc. Doing so increases the odds customers will renew, so CSMs will spend less of their time reacting and trying to save customers.
“The second is a leadership and personal mastery issue. Leaders must provide direction as to what is and is not a priority, and employees must then manage their time accordingly. Stephen Covey's seminal work, "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" is a wonderful resource for the latter. Habit 1: Be Proactive.”
Create a book of business that matches the level of service you're asking for from your CSMs. From there, coach CSMs to understand the expectations for the amount of time they should allot to each customer, and also to discern whether they should direct a customer to other resources internally (e.g., to the support team) or work on the problem themselves. Time management is a learned skill and it’s critical to being proactive. Help CSMs create new habits to manage their book of business instead of allowing it to manage them. For example, have them start scheduling QBRs for the upcoming quarters and monthly calls.
And on top of it all, being proactive means getting ahead of renewals. No last-minute renewals that turn into a fire. Forecasting is critical for this so you know where CSM time is most likely to have the highest impact.
All of these activities help the team focus on prioritizing and being proactive about providing value to their customers.
A large part of enabling the team to be proactive is to have systems in place that automatically highlight customers that transition into risk or opportunity states. Apart from having data and alerts around how customers are using the product, CS leaders can enable their team to be proactive by also having tracking indicators of churn like:
Identifying all the activities or behaviors that could lead to churn or upsell, and tracking those, will allow CSMs to proactively know where to focus their time at scale.
New CS leaders often start by creating a clear customer journey map, specifically to create better handoffs between departments. But having a clear customer journey map can also help CSMs anticipate where they can really add value.
Much of the CSM’s role is to keep up to date on a customer's business—what their long term strategic plans are, how dynamics are changing—so they can advice on how the product can address a changing set of priorities.
Then, CSMs should also get in the practice of thinking about how other customers in similar situations (e.g., goals, growth plans, industries) may be experiencing the same changes, and proactively providing resources or guidance around those. CSMs are, in effect, building up a library of how they can drive valuable outcomes for *other* customers in their portfolio that could fit similar characteristics of the problem the CSM has solved with the immediate customer.
Anytime you have a customer that onboards a new team member that will be involved or somehow helping support the ongoing adoption of your product, make sure to go out of your way to help onboard them to the product and the process of working with you.
Not only does this help you build a relationship with them on a personal level, it can help them get up to speed faster. Too frequently those initial value-adding conversations are overlooked by a CSM around engagement strategy, help channels, etc. Never assume that someone just knows how the process or product works.
Listen to your top accounts earnings calls, type up takeaways, and share the recap with your customers. This may help you hear about the health of their business and the strategic projects that you can incorporate into success planning and exec updates. Customers love it too, because they often don't have time to attend.
Listen to what your customers are saying to the public markets and you can map out their strategic initiatives for the year and how your solution can make an impact.
...
So, what does proactive Customer Success look like to you? Let me know.
COACHING
How to Motivate CSMs During the Pandemic
Paul Reeves shares helpful steps on how to keep CSMs motivated with a program to capture wins and track their progress.
PROCESS
Partnership Kickoff Meeting Structure
Kristi Faltorusso, VP of Customer Success at IntelliShift, explains how she built a process that transformed their Onboarding Kickoffs to Partnership Kickoffs.
ONBOARDING
Everboarding is the Next Level of Customer Onboarding
“Your product keeps changing. Every time a new feature is launched, existing customers have to be ‘onboarded’ to the new functionality.” Here’s Emily Wang, Co-founder and CEO at Bento, with a quick post that makes a case for rethinking onboarding. It’s never done, so it’s on the Success team to embed educational materials or other “re-onboarding” steps for every new relevant product change.
CULTURE
How to Build a Culture of Ownership
This interview unpacks advice from Jean-Denis Gréze (Head of Engineering at Plaid) on everything from creating a culture of ownership, aligning on metrics, and becoming a manager of managers. Written for Engineering teams, but applicable to anyone. On ownership, Jean-Denis says, “It might be surprising that my most common answer to a lot of organizational issues that come up is to just say, ‘Hey, that’s great, why didn’t you tell [insert the name of the right peer] about it? You need to solve it with that person.’ I want the leaf nodes across various functions to figure out 90% of the more difficult things on their own.”
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.
The following is Boaz’s response to the question, “Can you give us an overview of what a Customer Maturity Index is, and how Customer Success leaders can implement that as a way of measuring customer health and risk in their orgs?”
So a couple of years ago, Ralf Wittgen and I got together and started to think about how can we help evolve customer success as a function. And one of the things that we discovered, alongside a fair amount of research, is that almost every professional in customer success is using the concept of the customer health score to assess the level of relations between the vendor and the customer, and then trying to predict based on that assessment what the trajectory of the relationship is. So, is the relationship going towards churn, towards renewal, or is their growth opportunity.
But what we found is that most people using a customer health score said they were frustrated because it is not as actionable, practical, or helpful as they would like.
So when we analyzed the reasons their customer health scores weren’t sufficient, we found that one of the facets that was missing from the assessment was the objective assessment of the customer’s ability to do their job well—which has nothing to do with us as a vendor. We can help customers with our product, but there are other elements in the way they run their business that are irrespective to us. For example, do they have enough people on their team, do they have sophisticated processes to run their business, or is technology an inhibitor or helper in getting them to do what they need to do?
That missing facet evolved into what we now call the Customer Maturity Index, and it’s equally as valuable in understanding what actions we should take with a customer as is the customer health score.
Our suggestion with this framework is that a strong customer success function would assess every one of their customers on two dimensions: customer health (which is the subjective assessment about the trajectory of the relationship with the customer), and customer maturity (the objective assessment of the customer’s ability to do their job well). The combination gives you a framework with two dimensions of customer health, as opposed to just “high, medium, and low” or “red, yellow, and green.” Instead, with the framework you get a a 2x2 or 3x3 grid that shows what to do in each scenario.
If you have high maturity and high health, then you’ll want to grow and expand their business. Low and low, and you’ll want to churn or let them churn.
But take for example if the customer has a high health score but low maturity. It wouldn’t help to give them more training on the product, because that’s not the problem. The problem is they need help in driving their own business, which if you're willing to do as a vendor by for example providing management consulting type business services, then that's great. If you don’t want to do that, then you may just want to renew that customer as is on the basis that they like you but you can’t expand the product within their business. You don’t try to grow the product within their business or get them to do a big case study, or anything like that, so as to not exacerbate the problem.
The opposite scenario is if the company has a high maturity score but a low health score. Meaning, the relationship isn’t good and they’re not making good use of the product for whatever reason. But, by all measures, they’re good at running their business and their technologies and processes are a great fit for your solution. These customers are the ones that are worth investing in—they have high potential to be great customers if they were to use the solution well. So train them on the features, help them build relations with executives, get them involved in your customer community, do whatever you need to do to motivate them to start adoption the product.
So that’s how a customer success leader should approach the Customer Maturity Index.
CULTURE
Building a First Team Mindset
Here’s a somewhat older post I recently referred back to, by Jason Wong (former Senior Director of Engineering at Blink Health and current leadership development coach). Jason makes the case for fostering a mindset where leaders prioritize supporting their leadership peers over supporting the group that reports to them. The result: higher quality leadership and management across the company.
PRODUCT
How CS Leaders Can Influence the Product Roadmap
Emily Garza, AVP of Customer Success at Fastly, breaks down her approach to influencing Product.
LEADERSHIP
Advice for Building a Strong CCO <> CFO Partnership
CS leaders often cite “finance” as one of their core areas of weakness. Here’s the recording and recap of the live Q&A we held last week that was tailored towards giving CS leaders finance feedback, including what makes for a great CCO <> CFO relationship, what metrics finance leaders want you to track, and more.
CAREER
Three Crucial Skills That Leaders Must Develop to Be Executives
Nikhyl Singhal, VP of Product at Facebook, with a great post about what to expect at different phases of a leadership journey.
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.
The following is Rav’s response to the question, “How would you recommend founders go about creating an incentive structure across the business that drives a customer centric mindset?”
Incentives are really interesting. What happens in many companies—and not in just not startups or tech companies—is we tend to organize our companies like a production line. So you have Product, Engineering, then Marketing and Sales. And then right at the end of the production line, we have Customer Success.
Now, I don't think we’re really ever going to get away from that model because as you scale, you do need a structure in which to manage and coordinate everything. But I do think founders should think about how each of those groups are incentivized, because the way these groups are incentivized will drive their behavior.
So if I'm a salesperson and I'm only incentivized on new revenue, I will optimize my whole life for that. I'm not being paid to think about whatever happens after I close the deal. If instead I'm a salesperson and I have a compensation plan that’s 95% on closing new deals and 5% is on making sure each of those new deals gets deployed within 60 days, suddenly I've got an incentive to actually work closely with my colleague in customer success that’s aligned to my territory.
Similarly, if I'm a CS person and I have a compensation plan, and if 90% of that is based on my NRR driving net revenue retention but 5% is helping the sales person close the deal in the first place, we now have some overlapping interest. We have an incentive structure that is designed to keep us aligned, with the net result of that being increased value and faster value for the customer.
So rather than thinking about org structure and who reports to, you can leave everyone where they are and then design incentives that make the groups work together to create long-term customer value.
Similarly, in the product team, there's nothing stopping you from getting your teams to have targets that increase the team’s focus on building a product roadmap that accounts for what customers are telling you they actually need. And, it’ll focus the team on tracking whether the features being shipped are driving ROI for the company or more value for customers.
So you can start to expand on this idea. You can define your MQLs based on the attributes of your most successful customers. You can compensate Sales on upsells. You can start to actually weave this concept into part of how everyone in the company is incentivized.
Here’s another example of how this could work: I've worked in a company which didn't pay engineers when the feature was shipped. They paid engineers on when the feature reached a certain amount of usage. So, again, a very simple example of how you can use incentive structures to drive behavior that ultimately drives long-term customer value.
One area you might get pushback around is with Sales. Let’s use the earlier example where the comp plan is 95% based on closing new deals and 5% is on making sure the product get deployed. Your Head of Sales is typically paid right when a deal closes, and you’re advocating for a move into a model where they get paid after the customer completes onboarding.
The important thing to remember is that you’re not saying that Sales won’t get their commission at all unless X happens. It’s a portion of their commission that’s going to get paid once the customer completes onboarding. The vast bulk of their commission is still getting paid right after the deal because we want Sales to optimize for closing deals. But we also want to find the right percentage (I picked 5% as an example, it could be more or less) that’s meaningful enough where it’s materially worth it for them to think, “well, 5% is actually pretty important,” so they’re interested in what happens after the deal is signed.
If you get the percentage right and you hire the right kind of people, I'd recommend helping your Head of Sales understand that you want them to optimize for closing deals and hitting their number. But we do not want to have short-term thinking or the team to leave a trail of destruction behind them.
REMOTE WORK
Why Remote Work Changes the Nature of Leadership, and the Kinds of Leaders to Recruit in Startups
“Instead of valuing confidence and charisma, remote teams value leaders who are organized, productive and facilitate connections between colleagues.” Here’s a quick but insightful piece by Tomasz Tunguz (who highlights the perspective of Erica Brescia, COO at GitHub) on why companies should consider the “two types of leadership” when hiring managers during a time when everyone is remote.
CAREER
Customer Success Career Paths
Brian Lafaille, Global Head - Customer Success Strategic Programs at Google, shares the most common career paths CSMs will take.
TRENDS
Enterprise Customer Success Study: What Do Customers Want?
Deloitte conducted a study to explore customer success programs from the end customers’ point of view to understand emerging needs and preferences. Some of the takeaways: Only one third of customers are truly satisfied with the current levels of services delivered today, and adoption and optimization are the most valuable CS services.
COMMUNICATION
The Surprising Power of Asking Great Questions
Here’s a piece that may be relevant to you and the entire team: authors Alison Wood Brooks and Leslie K. John say “most people just don’t understand how beneficial good questioning can be,” and then break “good questioning” down into a science.
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.
This week marks the end of 2020, one of the most unusual and challenging years in modern history. We'd like to say goodbye to 2020 and welcome 2021 by celebrating some of this year's wins in our community. So for this issue, we've pulled together a “highlight reel” of 18 Customer Success leaders sharing their proudest moments from the last 12 months.
Note: We originally published this as a podcast episode yesterday — the following is an edited version of that episode. If you’d prefer to listen to the podcast, head over to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Transistor.
1. David Sakamoto, VP of Customer Success at GitLab
“2020 was a year of building the foundation for a scalable Customer Success organization. As a team, we established the people, processes, systems, and tools required to allow us to deliver repeatedly on customer outcomes and growth. That included adding job levels for team members, improving our enablement, creating a better onboarding process to drive better time to value, and implementing the systems needed to give us the data we need to retain and grow our existing customers.”
2. Emily Garza, AVP - Customer Success at Fastly
“The biggest initiative we ran this year was creating better visibility around our existing customers. While we previously considered CSM sentiment to drive visibility around red accounts and influence our health score, this year we began updating key notes about our accounts on a weekly basis. This gave CSMs a platform to share wins as well as concerns, and track progress on accounts, at a more macro level. With these updates, we began to give more visibility to our executive team, sharing highlights and lowlights as well as sharing key upcoming meetings.”
3. Jason Noble, VP of Global Customer Success at Vinli
“2020 has been all about resilience and adaptability to very challenging times for each of us personally, and for our customers, our companies, and our friends and families. What I'm most proud of this year is the level of resilience, professionalism, and customer-focus at Vinli. Apart from that, the Customer Success industry has seen a number of incredible initiatives and the creation of some awesome new communities that are much needed—which have have helped us all through this year. 2020 has been the year that Customer Success has been called upon to help customers and companies, and I’m excited now to see what 2021 has in store for us.”
4. Kristina Valkanoff, VP of Customer Success at Brandcast
“This past year, the CS department at Brandcast was not only able to pull off the highest renewal rate in the history of the company, but we've also developed one of the more innovative initiatives this team has seen in a long time: we created a portal that’s built to manage our entire customer lifecycle on one site with one URL from initial sales proposal, to onboarding project planning, milestone tracking, and mutual success planning. All of this is managed in each customer's Brandcast portal, so now CSMs can create customized content for customers without hours of manual work or engineering help. None of this would be possible without an incredible amount of work from the Success team here at Brandcast, and I feel very fortunate to lead this organization into 2021 and beyond.”
5. Irene Lefton, Acting VP of Customer Success at EmpInfo
“There are a couple of things I'm very proud to have been a part of this past year. At the beginning of the year, we built a detailed customer journey map for EmpInfo that helped us uncover the different paths that our customers take and where they get the most value, and it identified some key points of friction that needed to be addressed. Then COVID hit. The good thing was this journey maps still stands strong and gave us a framework for how to move forward. Apart from that, I’m also really proud of how this Customer Success community is always there to help each other.
6. Jess Jurva, CCO at Lucidworks
“My proudest moment from this year was to witness the resilience of our Customer Success team. We came into the year with a ton of excitement to push the boundaries of what we had achieved the prior fiscal year. We were gaining momentum when, of course, COVID-19 hit with a few hundred renewals to pull in, and our team had to shift gears. As many of our customers were being impacted, instead of panicking and operating out of fear our team quickly pivoted to upping their game, going the extra mile, and seeking opportunities to help our customers stay in business and be a great partner to them. Seeing how the team pulled together during a very challenging and very difficult year is something I will never forget.”
7. Matt Myszkowski, VP of Customer Experience - EMEA at Cision
“My proudest moment from this year was how the Customer Success community came together to address a number of important and sensitive topics such as diversity and inclusion, and mental health. I’ve been involved in many online events this year covering those topics, because it’s important to me to not just be open and transparent about these topics but to also try and influence change both within the companies I've worked for and ones that I haven’t. One webinar I’m particularly proud of was one called “Survive or Thrive?” — I discussed my own battles with mental health, what my previous employer (SAP) does to support employees, and practical advice on how to support your teams through the pandemic.”
8. Peter Armaly, Senior Director of Customer Success Enablement at Oracle
“I'm proud of how quickly our organization responded to the pandemic and its effect on our customers and, at a broader level, with the market at large. Oracle proactively worked to help our customers adapt and understand what it’s going to take to move into the digital realm in a much more accelerated fashion. And on a more personal level, I'm especially proud of two achievements: I’m humbled to have been selected to be one of the top 25 Customer Success Strategists, and I’m also proud in the fact that I’ve started to write a book that’ll likely come out in 2021.”
9. Or Guz, Director of Customer Success at PerimeterX
“My proudest moment from this year was three months ago when I received the update from SuccessHACKER that I was chosen as one of the top 100 Customer Success Strategists. I was and am still very honored to be on this list among many other exceptional CS leaders.”
10. Graham Gill, VP of Customer Success and Services at Accent Technologies
“My proudest moment from this year has to be how our clients in our organization were able to adapt to new circumstances. Teams were asked to do more with less, oftentimes in the face of budget cuts and layoffs. Seeing new team members rise to the challenge personally and professionally, while also balancing the logistics of work life and home life, is something I will never forget.”
11. Ronni Gaun, Enterprise Customer Success Manager at Zoom
“My proudest moment in 2020 was when I actually realized that I don't have to have a certain title to exhibit leadership. Instead, I chose to use my leadership skills during hundreds of hours with CS professionals, offering my support over zoom meetings with those who had lost their jobs as a result of COVID. I dedicated myself to becoming a champion for my craft and my community by way of those meetings and on LinkedIn, which together landed me a spot as a top 100 CS Strategist. And in less than a year’s time, the CS community got louder and in some respects started a customer-centered revolution. I'm very proud of my contributions to evangelize Customer Success and look forward to working with this community to continue our trajectory of delivering value to organizations just as we deliver value to our customers.”
12. Alex Farmer, VP of Customer Success at Cognite AS
“My proudest moment of the year was joining Cognite and, right when I got there, working with the team to build out a holistic customer journey. On a personal level, my biggest initiative this year was launching the first ever Customer Success Excellence awards. We're planning to run in-person award events to recognize excellence in Customer Success in London and the United States at the end of 2021.”
13. Elisabeth Courland, Digital CSM at Talentsoft
“My proudest moment from 2020 was when we created the Open Book of Customer Success — a research project that combined everything regarding Customer Success Management. I was also very proud when I have was hired at Talentsoft to become their first Digital CSM and own the long-tail customer engagement strategy. And finally, I was also very proud to have been named to the Top 100 Customer Success Strategists list.
14. Shanta Bodhan, Customer Success Director at SupplyShift
“My proudest moment from this year was how our team stood by our values. We work in supply chain visibility software, which all of a sudden took on new meaning to the world. In 2020, our team pulled together in four days and created a simple solution for anyone to use our software in order to understand the impact of COVID on their supply chain for any industry, including those that were sourcing PPE. We could have sold the software, but we chose to instead offer it for free to anyone that needed it. Our teams across the entire company took on extra work to support this initiative and help our global community. I’m proud to work at SupplyShift on a daily basis, but actually walking the talk with my team during unprecedented adversity made me even more proud to work here.”
15. Shari Srebnick, Head of Customer Success - US at Searchmetrics
“My proudest achievement this year was being named to the top 100 Customer Success Strategists list. I'm super excited to be part of that because it's kind-of the people's choice awards for Customer Success, and it was incredible be named as part of a group of phenomenal people on that list.”
16. Chris Brown, Director of Customer Success at Fulcrum
“It may sound counterintuitive, but my proudest moment initially started when I was terminated from my previous position due to the pandemic. It ultimately gave me an opportunity to be exposed to the larger Customer success community—people that were in my network were reaching out to offer support, recommendations, tips on new jobs... And then there were also a number of people that that weren't in my network who did exactly the same thing, all just to support each other. And so that’s why I’d say the proudest moment for me in 2020 was to become part of a tight-knit and supportive CS community.”
17. Vic Kasoff, Director of Customer Experience at ALAN
“My proudest moment after joining ALAN has been building out the Customer Experience team and facilitating its growth to what it is today. I was tasked with a number of goals when I first started, including building the framework around the CX team's roles and responsibilities, hiring and helping grow the leaders Success, Support, and Sales, implementing processes for every aspect of the customer journey. However, the achievement I'm most proud of is continuing the fantastic culture of ALAN through the CX team. The camaraderie, collaboration, and drive to be successful is apparent throughout the team. Each member exemplifies the core tenants of our organization and is striving to be the best team we can be.”
18. Maranda Ann Dziekonski, VP of Customer Success at Swiftly
“I have a lot to be proud of. In March, we watched the Customer Success community rally around each other to help those in need to find resources or employment, and we created a Slack group (CSLN) to help individuals in need which now has well over 2200 members. I believe the already strong CS community is now stronger than ever. And on a personal note, I was very proud of how my entire team shifted to a remote only environment while still maintaining a strong customer-first focus. We had to shift everything we do from onboarding and training to executive business reviews—all many of our customers were adjusting to this new world as well. We had to change how we operate it overnight with practically no notice. While we are still learning, growing, and evolving, we are stronger now than ever. We are ending the year with an NPS in the mid sixties, net retention of greater than a hundred percent and an increased focused on what matters: ensuring our customers are achieving ROI and knowing they have strong partners in us. For me, 2020 was a year of growth and I’m thankful for that.”
INDUSTRY
Customer Success is Taking Over
Here’s 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.”
CULTURE
There's No Such Thing as Post Sales
Rav Dhaliwal, Venture Partner at Crane (and former Head of Global 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.”
PROCESS
Face It, Your Champion Strategy is Weak. Here's How to Get it Right
A framework for thinking about how to define the terms Power User, Champion, and Buyer and set expectations around how CSMs should approach building relationships with each role in your organization.
COMMUNICATION
Words and Phrases That Top Sales 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 in the coming year.
MANAGEMENT
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.
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.
This week’s newsletter features an excerpt from Chapter 1 in Rick Adam’s latest book, Practical Customer Success Management. Special thanks to Rick, and to the printer Taylor and Francis, for allowing us to share it with you all. I hope you’ll see today’s issue as something to reflect on and share with your team.
You can purchase the full book here. You can also register to gain access to the full first chapter (which is where the below section is drawn from), and other CS resources like podcasts and articles, at Rick’s website: practicalcsm.com.
There are 14 tenets (or principles) by which a CSM should live. Some of these may be obvious,
but it is worthwhile reviewing all of them carefully as these explain both the role of the CSM
and how that role can be successfully performed. Absorbing and understanding these tenets and then applying them in your work will go a long way toward helping you become an effective and productive CSM.
The reason why your company has decided to invest in customer success management (either as a fully fledged, separate department or as tasks to be performed by people in other existing roles such as customer services) is because it expects to see a financial return from that investment. Usually, this financial return comes from increased product/service sales and contract renewals from customers, but it may also include additional customer advocacy levels and/ or a deeper understanding of customer needs to help with product development.
Customers expect to see a return from their investment in our products/services. The primary task of the CSM is to help customers to attain the maximum returns possible and to make sure they are measuring and reporting on these returns so that it becomes known and understood by the relevant decision makers within the customer organization.
The customer is already a subject matter expert in how to run their own business, but the reason why a CSM can add value for a customer is that they have subject matter expertise in the products and services that this customer has purchased. Specifically, that expertise lies in the adoption and value generation processes that customers need to undergo in order to attain the maximum return on their investment.
While the CSM may never know as much about a customer’s business as the customer themselves, they need to make sure they know enough about that business to be able to understand how their own company’s products and services can add value for that business and to provide contextualized help and assistance to the customer in planning for and undergoing product/service adoption and in measuring the value gained from doing so.
In order to plan for and take effective action, the CSM must first understand the situation, which means the CSM needs to be able to uncover the right information and to make sense of it. The information that needs to be researched and analyzed includes that which relates to the customer’s business strategies and outcome requirements as well as its current situation. It also includes that which relates to the CSM’s own products and services and how they might be adopted.
For each customer engagement, the CSM’s role is to act as consultant and adviser, rather than as the decision maker. It is the customer’s money that is being spent to pursue the customer’s own strategic outcomes by engaging the customer’s workforce to use the customer’s new products and services (that they have bought from us). Our responsibility is to provide timely and useful information and guidance and to lend a practical hand where necessary to help them get our products and services adopted.
Key stakeholders within the customer organization may not always know everything that they need to know about the products and services they have purchased from us, or about the activities that need to be performed to get them fully adopted. While the CSM should make sure not to take on a formal training role, it is definitely part of their role to provide informal training and related activities to help these stakeholders understand the situation more completely in order that they can make well-informed decisions.
Communication is at the heart of customer success management. This includes verbal communication in meetings, workshops and presentations as well as written communication in reports and on management systems (such as a CRM tool). Needless to say it also includes active listening. The CSM needs to have excellent communication skills and must be versatile enough to communicate with a wide range of stakeholders from a variety of cultural and job role related backgrounds from within their own and the customer’s companies and sometimes from third-party companies as well.
While the CSM is not generally the formal leader within an engagement, they most definitely need to have strong leadership qualities, especially the abilities to influence people and to enable activities to occur. Strong interpersonal skills including rapport building and forming trust relationships are also important, perhaps especially because the CSM may not be seen as the “person in charge” but yet still needs to influence others in order to get the job done.
Not all activity is equal. Before taking action it is imperative that time is taken to formulate a well thought out plan that adequately manages risk while maximizing efficiency and effectiveness in getting things done. Once the plan is in place, it needs to be followed and outputs measured and where necessary adjustments made to ensure that the project remains on track to deliver the desired results. The CSM may not be a formally qualified project manager, but should definitely be comfortable with planning and managing activity.
There are many potential barriers to customer success that CSMs may come across. These may relate to very practical problems such as a lack of information or insufficient resources, they may relate more to conflicts of interest and/or opinion between stakeholders or they may come from outside the project itself such as a change in corporate strategy or a new piece of legislation. Whatever the situation, CSMs need to be good at viewing problems logically and rationally and determining the right course of action to overcome those problems.
It is perfectly reasonable for customers to desire to see a return from their investment in our products/services. But sometimes the customer (or specific stakeholders within the customer organization) may have unrealistic expectations. Perhaps sometimes even our own colleagues may also have ideas that are impractical or unworkable for one reason or another. The CSM needs to remain realistic about what can be achieved within the timeframe, budget and whatever other resources and situational limitations exist.
While I am not an advocate of turning CSMs into sales people per se, I do very much believe that it is the duty of every CSM to use their knowledge and understanding of both their own company’s products and services and the customer’s business and technical needs to identify further opportunities for which the CSM’s company’s products and services might be used by the customer to gain additional value. These opportunities should be passed to the Sales team to follow up with the customer as necessary.
This final tenet is partially humorous but also partially a truism since in an ideal world there should be little or nothing that the CSM needs to do. In this ideal world, much of the work that a CSM is normally involved with will already have been completed during the pre-sales process, and much of the remaining work will be completed by a well informed and sufficiently skilled and resourced customer adoption/change management team. It may not come as a surprise to learn however that we do not live in an ideal world, so in reality there will generally be plenty of work for the CSM to do. The secret of a good CSM lies in spotting where the knowledge and skill gaps lie and what hasn’t been done that needs to be done, and in doing the work to plug the gaps and get the necessary tasks completed.
EVENTS
[Panel] It's Time to Level Up Your Finance Game
We’re hosting a free Q&A-style discussion on Jan 13th with Finance leaders from Blend, Lever, UserTesting, and Higher Logic. The conversation will be tailored for senior-level CS execs on how they can better approach budgeting and planning conversations. (Note: If you can’t make the event, you should sign up anyway. We’ll send you the recording afterwards.)
PROCESS
VOC: Typeform's Guide to Turning Customer Feedback Into Action
Here’s an in-depth guide created by the team at Typeform (written by Cristina Marcelo and highlighting Angela Guedes) on how to share customer feedback across the company in a structured way.
LEADERSHIP
Tips for Running an Effective CS Summit
If you’re considering hosting a CS Kickoff or Summit in the new year, here’s a quick post with ideas from Emilia D’Anzica (Founder at GrowthMolecules) on how to run an engaging summit.
MANAGEMENT
A Tactical Guide to Managing Up: 30 Tips From the Smartest People We Know
This list from First Round compiles advice from leaders at companies including Opendoor, Zendesk, InVision, and many others, that together help break down the science of managing up. Here’s one of my favorite quotes from the piece: “One of the essential parts of managing up is understanding what actually are your manager’s most urgent priorities, and then adjusting accordingly. If you’re at the top of the stack, over-communicate. If you’re not the most pressing thing right now, you have to learn to drop back and do really great work.”
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.
I joined the startup ALAN as the Director of Customer Experience in August 2020, during a volatile time in SaaS due to the pandemic. The company needed someone to scale Customer Success and Customer Support—a role that the leadership team saw as a key strategic position within the company, being largely responsible for driving the adoption and growth of the ALAN platform.
I'dd already led and grown Customer Success teams from the ground up. So, by leaning on those past experiences, and on former colleagues, industry best practices, and the team at ALAN, I set up a 90-day plan to build the foundations of a robust CX org. Here’s how it went and what I’d recommend for others who are building out a CX team from scratch:
There are a few things CX leaders building a new team need to learn before their first day: they need to know about the company’s culture, current processes, pain points, and the vision for the future—both for the company in general and more specifically with your department. Do your own research, but also set up time with the CEO, CFO, Head of HR, and all go-to-market department heads. (I was also fortunate to be joining a company that provided a suite of helpful resources for me to learn about the company and product.)
After researching and planning, we established these high-level goals for the next 90 days:
In order to meet all four of those high-level goals, I needed to learn some additional key aspects about my role, the company, and the team. I took notes and tracked conversations in an excel sheet about all of the following:
After learning from all of the above, the team was ready to implement the initial plans: 1) Hire in sharp, hard-working team members to fill gaps in our Customer Success and Support teams, 2) Implement systems and processes to scale our efforts, and 3) Enhance communication both internally and externally. Here’s a more detailed look at how we took action on some of those learnings:
Acting on customer insights about the ideal client avatar
One of the most important findings during the “be a sponge” phase was when the strategic team identified that our ideal avatar was not a “revenue level,” but instead a psychographic. The partners who have had the most success with ALAN have all started with their businesses at different points, but they all had the same character traits and similar behaviors, including an entrepreneurial spirit and being open to change, and strong engagement with marketing, sales, and Success materials and calls.
With that insight about the behaviors of our most successful clients, we were able to revamp the onboarding process to avoid inundating new clients, involve more ALAN team members and resources, and provide opportunities to hold the clients accountable to self-learn and ask questions.
Implementing a SaaS platform
The company was using a CRM before I joined, but was using it for very basic tasks. We decided to implement a new CRM system and use it to support live chat, shared inboxes, marketing, sales, and the customer experience in one central location. I created a plan to implement the CRM team-by-team (breaking down the features we needed to implement by team) to avoid trying to boil the ocean. The implementation was a daunting task, but it was important to get the appropriate foundational elements in place so we could build and tweak them over time.
Enhancing communication both internally and externally
One of the things we found in Month 1 was that the customers that were least successful with us were the ones that didn’t have expectations set at the beginning. We realized we needed to engage clients earlier and on a more consistent basis, and we needed to extend the onboarding process to allow for more time to learn and get fully comfortable with the product.
Internally, it was important that we set up cross-departmental leadership meetings and remove some redundant meetings the team identified. I set up ongoing weekly check-ins with key stakeholders, the product manager and VP of Business Development. And as Sales ramped up, the CX team was instrumental in guiding the sales process in making sure expectations were set early with clients and ensuring a strong client fit prior to the deal being closed.
Month 3’s focus was all about refining processes, removing manual efforts, and working towards growth. We were able to consolidate systems and remove redundancies. And as our client pool grew, we were able to hire smartly, but slowly, to ensure we could plan towards the future and support current needs. This allowed me to delegate to my incredible team sales, customer success, and customer support experts.
With the new team members in place, the CX leaders were able to dig in to projects, learn the new systems, and implement meaningful processes to allow our team to perform at top-of-license. I am so incredibly proud of the company, leadership, and the team I work with. We are in the middle of creating something great and I look forward to learning, growing, and helping our team succeed.
My final pieces of advice:
MESSAGING
How to Engage Executives at Your Key Accounts
Shari Johnston, Partner at Winning by Design, offers a quick and helpful framework for thinking about delivering compelling value to get executives to both join your calls and be engaged with the content.
STRATEGY
All Customers Start in the Red
Here’s a podcast interview with Kristi Faltorusso, VP of Customer Success at IntelliShift. The 40-min interview covers a lot of ground, but overall I appreciated Kristi’s (healthy) approach to viewing customer health scores, not over-relying on lagging indicators, and focusing the team on getting customers to reach their desired outcomes.
VOC PROGRAM
Making Customer Feedback Your Superpower
Josef Trauner, CEO at Usersnap, makes the case for setting up a process for customer feedback to be heard company-wide. One thing he mentions in the post stuck out: “Inspire your team to believe in feedback.” Just as customer-facing teams will lose the motivation to collect customer feedback if Product doesn’t take action on it, Product will be less eager to learn more about customer needs if customer-facing teams aren’t painting the full picture behind each request. Simply implementing a process isn’t good enough, you have to regularly inspire people to follow it.
MEETINGS
My Approach to 1:1s
Here’s a quick post that’s worth bookmarking and regularly referring back to. Marco Rogers, Senior Software Engineer at Mode (former Director of Eng at companies like Lever, Clover Health, and Yammer) outlines the high-level areas he aims to cover in 1:1s.
Success Happy Hour is a weekly newsletter for Customer Success leaders. Each week we feature one digestible piece of advice or a framework from top Success leaders, plus four of the best resources from that week. Subscribe here.
For one reason or another, many Customer Success leaders need to be able to hire junior CSMs with potential and then grow them into the senior “trusted partner” CSMs we know customers aspire to work with.
But it’s no easy feat to systematically help new CSMs bridge that gap and become seen by customers as a reliable and trusted source of expertise and guidance. That’s why—with many teams growing their Success function in the coming year—we’ve rounded up the best advice from our newsletter, blog, and podcast on onboarding and developing talent.
"As organizations, we need to shift our mindsets from thinking of CSMs as ‘quarterbacks’ where they’re the ones coordinating, getting all the right people on the field, and when the CSM doesn’t know the answer, they go point the customer towards someone who can. Eventually, the customer just wants to work directly with the person who’s giving them the answers. CSMs need subject-matter expertise in order to deliver on the trusted partner promise, and the quarterback analogy does not sufficiently describe the role of the CSM.
“Beyond that, get super clear on what you’re asking CSMs to do. What are the highest value activities you want them focusing on? Then, see if you can give the other activities to associate CSMs. Most organizations don’t have associate CSMs but I think they should: it trains the associates while freeing up time for the subject matter experts to do the more impactful work.” — David Ginsburg, CCO at WorkBoard
"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:
— Brett Andersen, VP - Client Success at Degreed
“One of the pivotal changes we’ve made to our process is to plan the first week of work for the new hire. We have it all outlined in one document that we share with them before their first day (here’s the template we used at Bridge, and here’s the template we use now at CaptivateIQ.)
“This practice helps get new hires up to speed and integrated with the team faster. Within that plan, we always include: an opening welcome, the company’s mission and values, onboarding goals, week 1 detailed schedule, a checklist for the first 30, 60, 90 days, and the role expectations.” — Clint Kelson, Sr. Manager - Customer Success at CaptivateIQ
“Help CSMs learn how different types of customers—different levels in a company, and different industries—use the product so they’re able to share best practices and lead strategy sessions with customers. Customers want to know how they measure up to their peers and how to stay current on what other companies are doing, so having CSMs be deliberate about studying how different types of customers use the product will help them become trusted advisors to customers. One way to do that is to ask individual team members to bring learnings or patterns they’re noticing across their accounts to your weekly team meetings.
“In order to effectively manage larger accounts and become a strategic advisor to customers, CSMs need to develop the skill of effectively positioning customer requests in a way that influences the product roadmap.”— Kristina Valkanoff, VP of CS at Brandcast
“Customers increasingly expect that Customer Success will help them not only achieve value with a product but also impact their business as a whole. But a customer’s habits can often be the roadblock to achieving success—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.
“In practice, CSMs can get customers to change by challenging them and then convincing them to change. A CSM can challenge a customer by 1. pushing against their expectations of the product if they’re unrealistic or lacking detail, 2. scrutinizing bad workflows if customers are using the product in a way that fails to deliver value, or 3. addressing low engagement. Compare what they’re doing with what the customer signed up for, or what other customers are doing that’s a better approach, to convince them to change.” — Alex Bakula-Davis, VP of Customer Success at Extracker
“It’s part of the Customer Success team’s job to help Product, Sales, and Marketing get the information they need about customers. As a CS leader, one of the most critical skills to train CSMs and support managers on is how to properly extract and record feedback from customers. Teach them how to ask the right questions and gather all the information needed for a successful handoff to Product.” — Megan Bowen, CCO at Refine Labs
“Sales and Success need to be aligned on the product’s benefits for customers—but driving this alignment requires an ongoing effort. One way I’ve managed this in my career is to make it a requirement that someone from CS go to Sales meetings, and vice versa. (I prefer it if the team members attending are regularly rotated so the relationships we build with Sales aren’t single-threaded.) Doing this helps CS understand how Sales is pitching the product, and helps Sales understand how CS is delivering it.” — Emilia D’Anzica, Founder and CEO at GrowthMolecules
HIRING
Builders vs. Scalers
Rav Dhaliwal, Investor and VC at Crane and former Head of CS - EMEA at Slack, makes the case for hiring a builder (a lesser-experienced team lead or senior IC) and not a scaler (“the tenured senior executive”) as the first CS hire.
ALIGNMENT
Customer Success: 3 Points of Internal Friction
In this post, Andrew Knapp, Director of Client Success at Sensibill, details some of the common negative consequences of three types of internal friction. Two of which, “urgency and resource gaps between CS and Product” and “CS complacency and burnout” aren’t often discussed. His “positive actions” for fixing each type of friction are especially insightful.
FEATURE REQUESTS
"I Want Deeper Reporting!" A Better Way to Field Customer Requests
Here’s a post from John H., Senior Director of Customer Success at Productboard, that’s worth sharing with your team. When CSMs play “the friendly order taker” (John explains: “thanks for the feedback, I’ll pass that to our Product team”), it inhibits the Product team’s ability to fully understand what the customer is trying to accomplish. Thinking about the customer’s “job to be done” when documenting requests will help Product make more informed decisions.
WORKFLOW
How the Busiest People in SaaS Manage Their Email
A quick read with quotes from leaders at HubSpot, Mailchimp, and Calendly, most of whom are inbox zero people. Like Christopher O’Donnell at HubSpot, I’m also one to use my email as a to-do list.
Success Happy Hour is a weekly newsletter for Customer Success leaders. Each week we feature one digestible piece of advice or a framework from top Success leaders, plus four of the best resources from that week. Subscribe here.
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