11.11.2024 How to use Active Verbs in my CV and highlight my experience.
A ready Achievement Matrix with active verbs aligned with the Customer Journey.
Just put your numbers in!
- achieved / improved / reduced / increased / optimized / streamlined / generated
- in Onboarding, Retention, Upselling, Customer Training, Product Adoption, Customer Feedback, Churn Reduction, Customer Communication, Process Improvement etc
🌀 Plus ready ideas how to wrap them all together: "Achieved a 30% improvement in support ticket resolution time by streamlining the ticketing process and enhancing team training".
Link is here.
Value Framework - that's the way we demonstrate value to our customers:
Time
Money
Information
they spend / increase / get / save with your Product.
For example, they save 20 hours in a week because they automate manual tasks with you. Or they increased their deposit rate (=revenue) using your product.
4.11.2024 Provoking debate between two industry giants, Nick Mehta and Jay Nathan, as they tackle one of the most pressing questions in the SaaS world: Has Customer Success (CS) run its course - link.
My key takeaways:
- While a customer satisfaction score increasing for years, retention has been falling - customers can be happier but they are leaving faster. One more point, for many SaaS companies customer acquisition costs have increased dramatically so the same for costs for retaining customers. Traditional CS model can not handle scaling issues and become very expensive.
- check the importance of the CS function in your company - you have a Product person, Sales person and Support person - is it enough to drive retention or something is missing?
- Sales is revenue today, and Customer Success is revenue tomorrow. Who thinks about Revenue next year?
- Urgent goes more important than Important. Support ticket vs Success task.
- We lost the definition of Customer Success. Company grows and what CSMs do? we have a cost, but do we generate revenue?
- If no one understands customers' use cases, how we are going to deliver value?
- Adoption is the key.
- The loudest voice in a conference room is about the biggest customers, but we must focus on Product.
- Fundamental issues if CMS doesn't understand the Product well enough. You should be able to do a product demo!
- Your Customer Success team is too costly during scaling? as any other function! (Nick, we love you!)
- Cost of Acquisition raised much more rapidly than Cost of Retention (Greg)
- As a leader, YOU need to tight the problem you have (retention rate) to very specific actions your team works on.
- Measure leading indicators. What key metrics of Customer Success in your Company?
- What matters now? what will matter in next year? it is constantly changing. Review your metrics constantly.
- Start with Digital Self Service, do it yourself inside the Product, personalize the Customer Journey in the Product and after that add Customer Success (I wish my CEO would not read it).
- Product should be designed and adopted! (Jay)
- A customer stays with us when we provide the best experience at the cheapest price (Nick)
- Collaboration is the key, partner with other ecosystem players.
Recording is there: https://streamyard.com/watch/GKDWPPUyNyes
19.10.2024 108 Post-Sales Metrics in B2B SaaS and How to Improve them
What are key metrics in Customer Success? we LOVE this question 😜, because there is no average or unified answer, it all depends.. 🤷♀️ Jay Makarov did a great job, he prepared a comprehensive guide on how to measure and improve outcomes in post-sales. The result? 108 key metrics for Customer Success. 🔥
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐠𝐮𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬 7 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭-𝐬𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐬
- Onboarding
- Adoption
- Support
- Renewal
- Expansion
- Advocacy
- Operations
𝐄𝐚𝐜𝐡 𝐦𝐞𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐜 𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐥𝐮𝐝𝐞𝐬 15 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐬:
𝑮𝒆𝒏𝒆𝒓𝒂𝒍 𝑰𝒏𝒔𝒊𝒈𝒉𝒕𝒔:
- Post-sales Stage
- Metric Name
- Description
- Why is it Important
- Formula
- Priority
- Frequency
- Benchmark
- Exceptions
𝑾𝒉𝒐 𝒊𝒔 𝒓𝒆𝒔𝒑𝒐𝒏𝒔𝒊𝒃𝒍𝒆 𝒇𝒐𝒓 𝒐𝒖𝒕𝒄𝒐𝒎𝒆𝒔 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒉𝒐𝒘 𝒕𝒐 𝒊𝒎𝒑𝒓𝒐𝒗𝒆 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒎 (𝒘𝒊𝒕𝒉 𝑩𝑩𝑩𝑩 𝒔𝒕𝒓𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒈𝒊𝒆𝒔):
- Roles responsible (CS Leader, CSM, AM, …)
- Buy (what experience and CS Archetype to hire)
- Bot (what tools to use)
- Build (how to upskill)
- Borrow (which experts to involve)
💪 Check them out, maybe something is missing in tracking your Customer Success Journey now. Measure, optimize, review and measure again.
The summary: link
The guide: link
02.10.2024 Sharing interesting insights from Customer Success Collective report 2024 - State of CS Leadership! Please find the full report at the link.
What I took note of for myself:
➡ Finland is not presented in this report at all, hope to see more CS Leaders there in the cohort in 2025
➡ Half of the represents are from the US (not a surprise! knowing how well-established is CS there)
➡ A good gender ratio, 50 / 50 between men and women, we are proud that our function brings more diversity to the Leadership teams!
➡ The most important skills for a CS leader are: 1. to make quick insights from data (data analysis and reporting)
➡ ..and 2. strategic planning! of course👌
➡ churn rate is still #1 KPI for our teams
➡ Emotional intelligence, coaching of own teams, and customer empathy are must for a CS Leader profile
02.10.2024 European Salary Benchmark for Post Sales Professionals (CSM's and more) - link for full report is here. My biggest surprise is that the average flat salary of CSM in the report is 55-60k / year (=appr.5k / monthly) in Europe, and the average in Finland is.. 45k (=appr.3.9k monthly).
Guys, we have the issue here.
We MUST change it!
30.09.2024 There is no such thing as a retired Sales Manager - I still follow Sales interesting resources (worked 15 years as Sales Manager, FMCG and IT SaaS). Found a cool summary of interview questions for entry-level sales representatives from Hubspot, sharing here - link:
27.09.2024 Can not say better! from Graig Daines (link).
16.09.2024 Impact Drivers in Customer Success, a webinar from CS Connect.
My takeaways:
It is not a secret that once we focus on strategic objectives, we achieve our goals easier and faster. You can call them Impact Drivers, but in simple language, they are key objectives for Customer Success professionals. I like the library of Impact Drivers, major KPIs are there and very well described. Also a few slides:
An actual Customer Journey:
The idea of Impact Drivers.
An overview.
A template for an Account Plan.
15.09.2024 Webinar from Jan Young "Unlock Your Customer Success Career Path to the C-Suite". A couple of useful slides:
a good shot for the lifecycle of startups, from seed to unicorn. What I like, is the simplicity and clear stages, plus how we estimate a company's profitability on every stage (rule of 40, EDIDTA, etc).
a good slide when to scale a CS team and what to consider:
20.06.2024 Webinar Balancing Profit and Growth: Does the Rule of X give us the answer from SaaSiest (link to recording), my keynotes:
2021 was the year of growth in all costs, 2022 profit is the most important, 2023 SaaS learned a lesson and looked for a moderate balance between growth and profit
KPIs: 2021 - a main KPI was LTV (lifetime value), in 2023 a main KPI is cashback period. You focus on harvesting and returning investments quickly
Don't focus on high profitability, it doesn't matter much to investors. What matters is to break even as soon as possible. When you achieve break-even state, focus on growth because it is what defines the value of a company.
19.06.2024 Big thanks to Saahil for creating the concept and running a Career Clinic by CS Connect! I loved the sessions (I attended 4 from 9). What I love the most:
- every session was dedicated to one specific career-related topic;
- small group of 15-20 people on every call, so, you can ask questions;
- very relevant topics that challenge many CSMs in recent circumstances.
Today we spoke about Solidify your position as a CSM - Vishwas, I took note today of a very simple idea to update C-suite (or stakeholders) weekly about what CSM is doing in the team, in words C-suite will understand (revenue, churn, success stories). Also, know your math at any time - how many customers, what is ARR, churn rate last year that I covered with upselling. Simple, but important.
In a way, I feel that all of us (CSMs) must have elevator pitch ready, for our customers and our team internally, at any time 💪
15.05.2024 Customer Advocacy guide by Marija Skobe-Pilley - link:
Again, she is talking about the importance of strategic planning even for customer references and success stories. Love that. Good and simple tutorial what to do and not to do.
09.05.2024 What makes a Customer Success a world class Customer Success? I think a lot about that recently. The reason, because I love this field and feel it as my purpose, so, then, what does it REALLY mean to build a Customer Success on a world class level?
What I formulated for myself for now:
What makes a Customer Success a world class Customer Success?
Business impact. CS has a measurable impact on a business overall as revenue uplift because of upselling or decreasing churn rate.
Efficient measurable processes. Having on place proper Onboarding (self-service, academy, onboarding trainings and calls); Renewals (90 days prior the date, with touchpoints, combination of automated emails and business calls), Tech touch journey for customers with no CSM.
Value Concept. We measure product usage and show it INSIDE our product (value that customer gets from our product). We do collect Voice of Customer (feature request, product feedback, NPS) and we transform it to visible changes on our side.
I am asking this question (what makes a Customer Success a world class Customer Success?) in different communities and getting the feedback and different views. Interesting question.
07.05.2024 Will add here also a few slides from the deck from our last event about Churn and Churn Prevention - I talked more about them there.
22.04.2024 Very well said - summary of Onboarding - from here "Expert Tips and Best Practices to Nail Customer Onboarding in 2024":
I would add - how we measure the progress / success?
21.04.2024 Watched this Gainsight + Buildertrend webinar (link) - "How Buildertrend Created Actionable Data and Improved Logo Churn 140 Basis Points". My key take aways:
To understand correctly, how a customer progresses in Product Adoption, Buildertrend uses a funnel "acquisition" => "implement" => "adopt" => "expand" => "advocate".
On "Implement" stage, they make sure that a customer uses Main Sets of Features. Not all features (20+ of them), but 2-3 Main Sets of Features, for example: Project Pipeline, Financial Invoicing etc. (depends from your product).
Feature Set Reps: inside every Set of Features (= streams inside the Product), they have 4-5 basic features.
On "Adopt" stage they showcase to a customer how other customers use a Product, they compare a customer with other customers and share best practices, industry success stories. They make sure a customer uses Average Main Features.
On "Expand" stage they compare a customer with themselves and show the progress a customer made so far. And make Product Adoption deeper by introducing other features.
10.04.2024 A Customer Journey (I took it here), I love the simplicity!
10.04.2024 Generic, but visually simple Customer Success Plan (I took it here) - save it here, I don't use it now in my work (I don't have hundreds of customers), but I liked this visual!
1.4.2024 Very interesting! measuring and improving Customer Health from GitLab (link):
PROVE Value approach:
Product: License + User Engagement + Use Case
Risk: CSM Sentiment + Opportunity Renewal risks
Outcomes: Success Plan + Verified Outcomes
Voice of the Customer: Support + Surveys
Engagement: Customer Engagement + Executive Sponsorship + Events + Certifications
1.04.2024 Webinar from Planhat "It's worth the risk: Identifying and managing risks in CS" (link). What I take from there for myself:
if you handle all information in your head, you already lose. Create a Handbook (example: GitLab - CSM Strategies for Mitigating Risk In Customer Accounts (link));
describe major risks and how you prevent them.
27.03.2024
Engagement leads to Adoption,
Adoption leads to Outcomes,
Outcomes lead to Retention and Growth
26.03.2024 Will save this diagram about Renewals from Daphne, Hubspot, Director of CS - clear and sharp, and I follow the same strategy:
26.03.2024 Planhat webinar "Data-driven customer success: Powering customer retention in 2024" (link)
Speakers: Chris Regester, Planhat, CCO, Will May, Pendo, CRO, and facilitator Ambera Pualani Cruz, Planhat, Head of Marketing.
I am very interesting in this topic, because I know FOR SURE how the quality of my decisions improves when I have enough data! My usual approach is to get as much data as I almost lost in woods, and once I immerse myself in, I trust to my gut feeling to make a good decision. It works the best.
Why we all can not just rely on data?
we all know how to reduce weight, but we don't do it;
we all have too much data;
also, we should use unusual sources of data too, in addition to well-known data sources. Intersection of qualitative and quantitive data.
How we fight churn:
product usage of the customer with outcomes they would like to achieve;
customer uses your product the way it was intended (!);
think about time in product usage: current state of data vs future state? what was usage consumption 12 months ago and now? (I love the idea of high level trends, baseline what is good for this type of customer)
What I really liked, Ambera went into details, asked for use cases!
Signals for uncovering expansion potential using product usage data:
customer consumption consistency - it is a good sign;
using product analytics to see the white space - show the opportunity to the customer, similar customers to you love this feature and they use it for A, B, C - check it out;
PLG product led growth, check data of freemium, try-before-you-buy, where customer tries your product and product self-sells itself and it is a good opportunity for upsell.
Collaboration with other teams:
data can be used to attack or blame; we need to make sure that we use data to create bridges, not to defend my own point of view.
Concept 40 / 70:
- if you have up to 40% of your data that you need to make decision now, it is not enough, but if you wait until you have 70%, you are way too slow.
At what point does data stop having value?
rely to people who actually TALK with your customers not just exchange emails with them;
when data loses the context - for example, we had the idea to build a churn predictive model, and CS team was looking for red flags, and data science team didn't have a business KPI, so, the result data didn't have any context;
when the data is not trusted - for example, when influential people in company ignore it, data loses value.
08.03.2024 Gainsight webinar "Transforming CS into a Lead Gen Powerhouse, While Maintaining a Trusted Advisor Status" (link) about commercializing Customer Success function - hot topic in 2024! Speaker: Riccardo Composto, Sr. Director CS, EMEA, Sitecore.
The approach of CSM when we identify upsell and cross sell opportunities is fostering trust throw customer centricity.
Main responsibility of CSM is to ensure our customers achieve their objectives and they are successful. We ensure they adopt our product (and get outcomes from our product).
How do you measure CSQL (customer success qualified leads)?
- pipeline generation - how many upsell opportunities CSM passed to sales;
- conversion - how many opportunities sales closed.
7.02.2024 Listened webinar from Growth Molecules and ChurnZero "Mastering multithreading: Strategies for expanding customer relationships and revenue".
Speaker: Emilia D’Anzica from Growth Molecules (Customer Success consulting firm with the mission to protect and increase revenue).
I would recommend this webinar to everyone who would like to learn how to build relationships, this process described very well by Emilia! All this concept of multithreading in CS is about building strong relationships (my strength and favorite topic).
My own key takeaways:
What is multithreading in Customer Success?
Mistakes - when we lose the customer:
Relaying on a single contact on customer side - weak position, the one person dependency (customer);
Not asking enough questions - we can easily confuse and not deliver what the customer expected and why they bought our product;
Not taking time to document relationship in CRM - again, the one person dependency (CSM);
Not establishing relationship early enough on LinkedIn - make the connection personal, so customers stay with you no matter what.
Customer Success started to be commercial, CSM generates a new CS leads (upsell, cross sell with customers) - expansion is the KPI for CSM in 2023 vs 2015:
Major failures for churn:
Mistakes with the onboarding (focus on features the customer doesn’t need and don’t deliver the value asap)
Losing the champion (key person on customer side)
Emilia also shared the playbook for multithreading, but I am yet to read it :)
08.01.2024 Daphne said it so sharp!
CSMs should be compensated for value delivered, not effort. There are two tiers of value: 1️⃣ Customer Value (customer outcomes) 2️⃣ Company Value (retention)
Comments