Why can't I use my customer relationship management software (CRM) for customer success management (CSM)? Think of it as using a screwdriver to hammer in a nail. As screwdrivers are designed, they aren’t best suited to drive nails straight. You may use the back end of one, but you’ll likely end up with a crooked nail or a damaged screwdriver handle. The same logic goes for trying to use your Sales Force Automation (SFA) tool [...]
Customer Success Managers (CSMs) have challenging jobs. Tasked with delivering value to multiple customers so that they become loyalists involves lots of work, knowledge, and balance. The better a CSM is at their job, the greater the likelihood that they have some stresses around being able to do all that their job entails. If you’re managing CSMs, take caution to not regard these stresses as indicators of poor performance. If your CSMs are stressed, it’s [...]
How to Use Agile Customer Success Management to Increase Adoption In our previous blog, Implementing Agile Customer Success Management we shared some best practices for incorporating agile techniques during the first stage (Land) of a post-sale customer relationship. This blog post covers how to continue using agile methodologies as your customers grow more loyal and continue to adopt your solution. Agile methodologies work for Customer Success Management because of the iterative and cyclical nature of [...]
WHY IS End User Training IMPORTANT? End User Training is your chance to validate your sponsor’s decision to purchase by demonstrating the power of your platform to his or her team. It is an extremely valuable relationship-building exercise when you are able to do this within their live environment. The best End User Training is built around a well-planned learning design that is persuasive, capitalizes on real and relevant scenarios, and includes reinforcement. WHO NEEDS [...]
If you are a growth-minded B2B XaaS company, then you are likely “doing” customer success in some fashion or another. Whether you have a dedicated team or have operationalized the discipline of customer success across your organization, you are certainly recognizing the value of existing customers and working to deliver continuous value to make (and keep) them loyal. Increasingly, this approach is being supported with platforms designed specifically for enabling your best Customer Success practices. Operationalizing [...]
Incorporating an Agile Customer Success Process Begins in the Land Stage Agile Customer Success is the ideal model for incorporating the basic tenets of Agile management into Customer Success Management. Some of the core tenets are: Attain customer satisfaction through continuous delivery. Don’t be afraid to make changes. Cross-functional collaboration is key. Agile processes promote sustainability. Simplicity is essential. Inspect and Adapt. The Virtuous Cycle As B2B SaaS companies seek to operationalize their Customer Success process, [...]
Just so that we’re on the same page, let’s define the terms. “Martech” refers to all initiatives and tools used to help companies achieve their marketing goals. When we look at the landscape for Martech since 2011, we’ve gone from 3 categories with about 150 vendors to 6 categories with over 5000 providers. It is a vast landscape, indeed. Martech-ers represent a large portion of the SaaS industry, and are, themselves, at the forefront of [...]
UPDATE: This page has been moved and improved. Here's everything you need to know about customer advocacy Chapter 1: From Customer Experience to Customer Advocacy (a Primer) While there’s plenty of chatter about Customer Success being your “driving purpose” in a post-sales strategy, we have a slightly different take. Your customer’s success is a critical step on the road to garnering their loyalty and, ultimately, their advocacy. Attaining this end goal starts with how you [...]
Ask 10 CSMs what success in their job means to them, and they will have 10 answers, ranging from: keeping my customers from churning onboarding my customers successfully helping my customers adopt our solution identifying opportunities within accounts for growth facilitating my customers’ attainment of outcomes managing the renewal process None of these are wrong. They are all part of many CSM job descriptions. However, to limit customer success to these roles alone is not [...]
In the B2B recurring revenue economy, customer relationships are increasingly owned by a team of professionals (Customer Success Managers) who earn customer loyalty by continuously demonstrating the value of their solution to their customers. Ideally, they have a defined customer lifecycle as their model for customer engagement, and in doing so, are churn mitigators. As part of the charter for Customer Success, marketing teams are now joining the action to facilitate customer loyalty, too. In [...]
So my feeling on Graduation is that it’s less a post live meeting and more a post first value meeting. I would typically say that we are identifying a measure of first value that we want to achieve that impacts their business in some positive way in order to graduate. I think graduation is a step that both you and your customer will know you have reached once you have worked together to create and [...]
UPDATE: We now have a more comprehensive post with everything you need to know about customer advocacy. While there’s plenty of chatter about Customer Success being your “driving purpose” in a post-sales strategy, we have a slightly different take. Your customer’s success is a critical step on the road to garnering their loyalty and, ultimately, their advocacy. Attaining this end goal starts with how you manage your customer experiences. In a recent LinkedIn forum discussion, [...]
