Do you (or your team members) have some bad habits in how you engage with your customers? Maybe you tend to check-in without a real agenda? Or, perhaps your customers see you as someone who’s always trying to upsell them? Or maybe you’re a little scattered because you have so many accounts in so many different lifecycle stages? On the flip side, does your customer have some bad habits you’d like to help them break? [...]
10 Key Considerations for Customer Success Management What is Customer Success Management? Is it the measurement of how happy your customers are? Or is it knowing what your customers need at all times and being able to deliver value to them by doing things that help them reach their desired outcomes? If you’re shopping for a Customer Success platform, you might think it’s the former. Many of the current technologies that are promoting themselves as [...]
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 [...]
Did you ever run a lemonade stand growing up? If not, you can surely recall seeing the scenario play out on TV or in a movie: A small child tries to peddle lemonade for a quarter -- it’s young entrepreneurship at its best. What do you do when you happen upon the adorable and smart neighbor who regularly sells lemonade on the corner to raise money for a team fundraiser, for example? You stop and buy some, [...]
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 [...]
WHY ARE Retrospectives IMPORTANT? There are three primary reasons for conducting Retrospectives: allowing your customers to be heard taking steps toward cultivating long-term loyal customers agreeing upon the “sprint plan” that outlines what both sides are tasked with accomplishing ahead of the next scheduled retrospective Routine Retrospectives provide the framework for you to check in on your customer in a scheduled way to understand what’s working and what’s not. Simple agendas for Retrospectives allow you [...]
WHY IS Launch IMPORTANT? Launch is actually more a customer status than it is an event. Rather than thinking of Launch as something you do with or for your customer, consider it a state of accomplishment where you can (or should) take a breath and feel as though you and your customer are at a good place for them to take off in using your solution. WHO NEEDS TO KNOW HOW TO DO Launch? Launch [...]
WHY IS Core Enablement IMPORTANT? Core Enablement is the first step in ensuring adoption. Getting your customer administrators to own the platform creates a first line of sponsors and evangelists within the account. The better and sooner you can create master users of your admins, the more effective you can be in growing adoption throughout the account. While Core Enablement is about helping your administrative users understand how your solution works (behind the scenes), it’s [...]
WHY IS Rapid Prototyping IMPORTANT? Not every SaaS company does Rapid Prototyping for new customers, but we encourage it as an opportunity to be impressive right out of the gates. If your solution allows you to get a quick win with your new customer by focusing on a single area or part of your solution, you will start the relationship off with a bang that will have far reaching effects. WHO NEEDS TO KNOW HOW [...]
WHY IS Implementation Discovery IMPORTANT? You’ve kicked off your relationship with a new customer, and now it’s time to get tactical. Implementation Discovery is a step that can sometimes be forgotten, yet is extremely important. It’s an opportunity to catch things that may have been missed during the sales and kickoff steps, and validate the KPIs you and your customer have agreed to. Consider this the first tactical, down and dirty, meeting. What do they [...]
