By: Stephen Wise & John Snow
Welcome to our second blog on all things customer success. We started this company to help demystify how to achieve customer success and with a passion to bring this to anyone who needs help. We saw many companies, friends, and colleagues struggling to implement a sound post-sales function. With over 20+ combined years as IC’s and leaders, we’ve hit so many sharp corners doing this job day in and day out; do yourself a favor and learn from our mistakes.
Today, many post-sales functions are overly complicated and lack crucial customization that deeply technical products need. This has led to overly generic templates and advice where customization is needed, creating a shortfall in realistic, repeatable motions. Getting buried in a sea of hopelessly pointless advice is incredibly easy. I’ve personally seen success plan templates that told me to “call the customer.” Wow, thanks.
Erase what you know about Customer Success today, and think about:
A post-sales function that's 100% responsible for ensuring your product is implemented, adopted, valued, supported, renewed, grown, and evangelized by your customer.
Everyone wants that. Whatever we want to call that, that's something worth having. So, how do you bring that to reality as quickly and efficiently as possible?
Your Company
In the tech world, we often like to throw 9,000 caveats and a lot of “it depends” before diving into specific advice. In the interest of brevity, I’ll just cut to the chase and tell you that “your experience may vary.” We will try to cover the major gotchas here, but we will drill down to core fundamentals that we believe apply to several verticals.
First, your implementation/onboarding stage, as you are likely aware, is the most important stage you will ever do. If you get this wrong, the odds of recovery are extremely challenging. Yes, I realize that is a well-known sentiment, but it doesn't change how true it is. (I promise the advice will get more specific). So here we go:
The cornerstone and fundamental element to successful onboarding & implementation is knowing what THAT means to your company and customer. And what does it mean from a data perspective?
What are the specific data points and key activities your customer has to do before you, your product team, and so forth would say, “Yes, they are officially onboarded.” Also, what are the specific exit criteria your company defines as onboarded?
Onboarding should be seen as a multi-stage process that takes your customer from “hello world” to initial value. Some companies will put a license utilization number associated with it, such as needing to consume 10% of their total purchase before considering them “onboarded.” Your company might believe there are specific features or a mix of features and usage that would tell you the customer is done. However you define it, we know that to finish a successful onboarding, the customer completes initial onboarding motions and gains some form of an initial value of the product/feature.
If you're reading this and you currently don't have this at your company, your job is to get together with your product, engineering, sales & support teams to discuss these aspects. You might already have some solutions engineers, services, or support members who help your customers, but in all likelihood, someone at your company knows at least some of these answers.
If no one does, stop everything you are doing. Go get in a room with people and figure this out. If this is never solved, documented, or figured out, you will have horrendous post-sales issues and churn problems coming your way.
How can you implement this? Come talk to us, and we will help you get this done.
Your Customer
After understanding what onboarding means to your company, your next step is closing the loop with your customer and creating the first success plan. This plan should have its roots in the sales discovery process and handover. There are 6 main questions you need to ask the customer and confirm with them. If you are familiar with the MEDDPICC approach, these questions should be a natural follow-up to that sales process.
What milestones do we need to achieve?
What metrics will we measure to ensure those milestones have been achieved?
What timelines do we need to accomplish those milestones?
What does our customer tell us their metrics of success are?
How are we verifying those results?
What value does this product create for the customer?
Whether you have Customer Success people or not, you’ll need to know some form of these questions. Even removing the lens of CS for a moment, if you know this about any project you are working on, you’ll be in a strong position to deliver value.
And think about what answers to these questions mean to you, the business, and your customer. When answered, you have laid the groundwork for the first business review, a solid success plan, mutual understanding, and, when fully executed, the beginnings of the renewal statement for the customer.
Another important question to ask yourself is, does this plan match what THEY expect and want? If not, and your customers often tell you your version of initial value doesn't match what they get value out of, you have a disconnect from your prod/eng teams & the customer. Getting a customer advisor board with the prod/eng leadership teams will help begin to bridge that gap. If your prod/eng teams pretty much refuse to meet with your customers, I don't have much help for you on that front. That's a culture issue.
Wrapping Up
Correctly identifying the specific measures on what it means for your customer to be onboarded, the data that ties the value your products & features create, and finally, the prescriptive approach to their implementation process creates an incredibly solid foundation for your business. We all know it's more cost-effective for the business to keep a dollar than get a new one, so why not start your customers off on the best possible road to success?
Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for our next article covering the stages of the customer journey.
Stephen & John
Snowise Technologies
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