By: Stephen Wise & John Snow
The customer success industry is at a unique juncture in our current environment. We see many arguments being made for and against full-scale customer success teams and their true ROI to the business. Folks on both sides are digging their heels in on the sacred items that can or can't be touched or what lines should or shouldn't be blurred. This has led to severe upheaval and multiple companies removing portions of their customer success teams.
Let's pause for a moment, reexamine our business needs, and get to some core truths. This article doesn't tell you to keep or eliminate your customer success teams. This article and the following ones attempt to help you identify the right post-sales strategy for your business.
The Before
Before Customer Success arrived at your company: Who did All-The-Things?
Who onboarded the customer?
Who took the feature & bug requests?
Who created “adoption plans” or “success plans”?
Who made sure the renewal was a non-event?
Who ensured the product was fully adopted and created value for the customer?
It was likely peanut buttered across many teams with other full-time jobs, none of whom were focused on the highly specific & deliverable activities needed to ensure predictable revenue retention. Or your company threw a few brave souls at the problem, stuck in never-ending support or relationship cycles with the customers but never really seeing true product adoption. Eventually, especially as products became ever more complicated and technical in nature to roll out, you needed a team of people to make sure it happened. The industry needed a combination role of a relationship manager + onboarding project manager (aka Customer Success Manager) with a sprinkle of technical expertise.
One of the first errors made in the early days of Customer Success was the wholesale lack of recognition, attribution, and data on the other teams' reduced workloads. Because for years, the business was just borrowing capacity and output from other teams to make up for these post-sales shortfalls.
This prior approach also masked a ton of product and engineering sins. We firmly believe that your product has not finished shipping until it's actually installed and being used by your customer. Otherwise, you are still in “it works on my machine” territory. So businesses would offer services, engineering hours, upgraded support, discounts, etc., all in the name of getting the customer working and saving the deal. Sometimes, it would work. Sometimes, it would just lead to an unsustainable time sink, continuously distracting teams from their core goals.
Where are we today?
Well, all the work we just outlined hasn't gone away. It's just named a lot of different things.
The industry essentially told the business world to rub some customer success on this problem, and it will disappear. In the same mold as “You can't buy a box of DevOps” and sprinkle its magic over everything, the same applies to Customer Success. You needed then and likely still need most of those tasks to be done. You just hired the wrong type of customer success. While the relationship with the customer is important, perhaps your product dictates that the team responsible for the renewal should be focused on initial implementation and ensuring that the project the customer purchased the product for is successful. Maybe you needed a strong technical implementation team with some project management sprinkled over that. You also might have needed a very clear understanding of what a successful customer meant for your product.
And we aren't talking about the broad, well they upsold or adopted everything, measure of success. We mean from a data perspective. What specifically about your product or features creates value for the customer, and how do you measure that? How does the customer measure that? And how much of your time (and theirs) and at what stage of their journey does it take to reach those milestones?
It wasn't your fault; it was new and shiny, and your board, VCs, or whoever told you this is what you need to do.
But now, money is tight, and no one ever really bothered to capture how much unplanned work, toil, and time suck you were spending on non-sales activities before, so you look at everything and say, well, do I actually need this? We lived without it before, right?
What do you need?
Let’s be clear: whatever you want to call the work and tasks, the care and feeding of your customer base still has to be done. I don't think there is any argument against that specific statement. The main question is, who will do it, and can you afford it?
This is where we get into: What do you actually need?
The objective people will state is, “We want our customers to be successful,” but that's the outcome, not the path or how you get there.
Companies often start on the wrong path by addressing a symptom rather than the cause. You need to identify when and where your customers need the most investment from you after the sale. That helps you define what kind of post-sales resource and persona will be most successful at helping you accomplish your revenue retention goals.
For example, let's say you spend a ton of time in the implementation and onboarding stage, with SEs/SAs, support, services, etc, all leaning in to get them up and running. Afterward, the customer is usually okay with a regular support + sales relationship. What you need is not a standard CSM. You need an Implementation Engineer/Customer Success Engineer backed up by a project manager. That's different from having a highly relationship-based CSM. This is how you begin to guide your customers to the proper outcomes and pathways.
A sound post-sales strategy doesn't necessarily mean hiring specific Customer Success roles, either. It identifies your needs and hires for the right role at the right time.
There is a direct correlation between what expectations and responsibilities you place on your customer and your post-sales process & personas. Put another way, the more you depend on your customer's technical ability to use and deploy your product and the more your customer is responsible for their own onboarding, it will 100% determine what type of post-sales function & philosophy you need.
The way forward
Customer Success has come a long way since its initial inception, and like all concepts, it has to adapt to the times. It must evolve as better thinking and different technologies shape our business world. We see a clear and direct correlation between your product and pre-sales methodology, and what your post-sales strategy needs to be.
In the coming weeks & months, we will start to break down all the unique areas of customer success and how you can land on the right post-sales strategy.
Thanks for reading our first blog post!
Stephen & John
Snowise Technologies
Comments