Practical Advice for CS — Not clickbait “thought leadership”.
I’ve seen a lot of people on LinkedIn and Twitter lately pontificating about how to be successful with Customer Success. The posts are well written and thought out, but are pretty fluffy. They SOUND great, but when I think about it, I have absolutely no idea what I’m supposed to do tomorrow to change things. The advice I’ve seen has been too theoretical and not practical. So, here’s my take with an attempt to make it practical.
“Drive adoption across the business! They won’t renew if they’re not using it!”
OK… well… obviously? This phrase isn’t advice at all, it’s actually just the point of CS. Isn’t that why we’re all here?
My first piece of advice here is to really clearly, and deeply define what adoption looks like. How do you know if a customer is 1) using your product and 2) the product is solving a problem.
Is Your Customer Using Your Product?
I’ve done extensive blog posts before about this, but you need to identify what metric is tied to your pricing — that should be the primary indicator of adoption.
Beyond that, you need to start measuring things like specific feature usage, log ins, accounts, etc. We even developed a metric called “Category Breadth” — RudderStack can connect to over 200 destinations so it’s hard to know how sticky the platform is. A customer might have 8 destinations connected, but if they’re all just advertising tools, we aren’t embedded as broadly or powering as many use cases compared to implementations that have us connected to a CRM, Ad tools, marketing tools, product analytics, and a warehouse. That means our data is going to multiple teams. If one team decides they no longer want the data stream, we have downside protection because multiple teams have to agree to remove us.
Get detailed and creative on how you think about adoption. Think about it in terms of measuring 1) usage 2) engagement and 3) breadth.
Another creative way might be to simply match account names with Linkedin and start tagging people to different functions. You could even measure how long sessions are in your product. Anything that tells you information on the three points above will be helpful on understanding if someone is using your product.
Is Your Customer Getting Value?
The second question is harder — is the customer getting value out of your product.
To really answer this, you have to understand either 1) what decisions you’re powering or 2) what operations you’re enabling. I’ve seen advice around this asking the customer stuff like “what does success look like in 12 months” or “what would make you want to renew?”. This, to me, is a B- question. It gets a little bit toward the use case you’re powering, but it leaves room and judgement for your buyer or user to define “what’s useful”. You also don’t want to be powering something that isn’t core to the business. It should be central to operations — can the company function without it, or would they be severely set back without it? That’s the goal for any good product — solve a real problem.
Focus on the Corporate Strategy
The reality is that your buyer may not be aligned to larger business strategy. Ultimately, when people are reviewing costs, if you’re not deemed business critical infrastructure, you’re on the chopping block.
No one is really going to care if your tool is saving Jessica hours of time organizing her files, or helping her follow up on meeting notes. They will care though, if you’re helping them save costs, book demonstrable revenue, or make decisions about either of those levers.
The questions above also assume that the discovery process pre-sales was sufficient to keep your product in place for years. It probably wasn’t — it was enough to close the deal (which they’re supposed to do!). Now it’s on CS to help expand and make sure OTHER people in the company see the value. Sales got you in the door, now it’s your job to go make yourself at home in their house.
I’d recommend asking questions that are more specific, such as “What key decisions is this driving?”, “Does this roll up to a specific c-level person?” “How are you thinking about return on investment for tools like this?”. Even better, you should try and pivot your talk track away from being a “tool”. Ask the hard questions, and offer to help them track it down if they don’t know the answer. Have a slide in your kickoff where you ask these questions in the first meeting, and write it down live on the slide. Ask the same questions and review the prior answers in every QBR.
Look at the News
Another way to make sure you’re driving adoption is to keep a pulse on public information. Look at news stories related to your customer and ask specific questions on how that will impact their strategy.
They just raised a ton of money — how are they thinking about growth? Are they looking at new geos? New product lines?
They just did layoffs — how are they thinking about cost cutting? Are any stakeholders no longer there? Are they centralizing focus on key products and trying to drive customer retention vs acquisition?
They’re a crypto-company — how are regulatory changes expected to impact the business?
Asking these kinds of relevant questions make sure that you broaden your value beyond your stakeholder and keep you aligned with the business issues.
Literally Build your (Business) Case
Finally, this is very tricky to nail, but the dream scenario is actually working directly with your champion to quantify the cost savings or revenue lift you’re directly responsible for. Build a business case with them. Have them be your internal champion and help you get assumptions internally.
If you ask what improvement is in marketing performance, don’t just leave it at “click through conversion will improve”. Ask them “That’s great, what’s your baseline now? What is the target? Have you guys measured that? Who is looking at that now? That’d be a great metric for you to show your boss!”.
Help turn your buyer or champion into the hero — anyone who can quantify their work is going to gain a lot more credibility internally. You also win by turning your product into an essential part of the business. You are now an investment, not a cost center. Make it your goal to not be a line item expense.
If you’re not able to do that, then ask yourself some really hard questions about what you’re selling and why it’s important. As the great Carrie Bradshaw once said “This is not a good economy in which to be whipped cream.”
“Just identify users who will be advocates!”
This advice is not wrong, it’s just…. not helpful. How am I supposed to magically identify them? What does that mean to be an advocate?
I also hear variants of this around identifying people with power and influence. How on earth can you accurately do this via a few zoom meetings? You’re not enmeshed in office politics, and I 100000% promise you’re bringing your own bias to the table. I can’t count the number of times I had someone selling to people on my team, and they didn’t realize I was the actual buyer. I even had someone ask to speak with my boss, and when they did, the boss said “Why are you talking to me, Katie is deciding this”. Don’t assume this kind of stuff.
The way I approach this is to think about 1) who SHOULD be an advocate and 2) who happens to love us?
Who Should be an Advocate
This one is less of a mystery and is more directly related to titles. You can look on LinkedIn and on the company’s leadership page to piece together who the different levels are. For really big companies, you have to straight up ask about this. One way to phrase it is “Is there anyone else in your org that needs to be included in this decision or have formal approval?”. That gives your direct contact the option to feel inclusive, and also helps them think through the internal approval process.
You can also ask questions like “Who is going to be consuming this?” or “Are there teams that are dependencies we should loop in here?” — this opens things up from an operational perspective to identify any dependencies, and define downstream stakeholders.
It can often help to use your recent roadmap releases as a great reason to engage with those other stakeholders. If you want to meet Marketing, explain to your champion that this feature has a great use case for marketing and you’d be happy to demo it for them. Have some data points or anecdotes about how other teams have used it and the results they’re seeing.
Who Happens to Love Us
These folks are what make working with customers worth it. They actually partner with you. They’re the ones who are happy to talk to you, ping you with ideas and questions, and you have DMs going with on Slack. Sometimes, they just personally really like you.
These folks are amazing and you need to help them as much as possible. Arm them with data. Build business cases with them. Proactively give them decks that are pre-made and they can share with their boss. Ask them to be references to other customers. Invite them to panels to speak. Do a case study with them. Work with them as much as they’ll let you.
When you find these folks, think about why they love you and what you’ve done for them. Did you save them time? Did you make them look good? How? What are commonalities on why they’re such champions. Look for those trends and try to extrapolate that to new customers.
Identifying champions who will advocate for you is actually really hard, especially in a zoom environment. You don’t just bump into people by happenstance — you need to have a real reason to go and speak with them. Do the homework, and make the ask for the intro.
“Focus on renewals! Renew early! Minimize churn!”
Oh, I should focus on renewals? You didn’t say! I thought I was supposed to MAXIMIZE churn! Thanks for setting me straight!
Again, obviously, everyone is trying to do that. What does that actually mean? I have touched on this in previous posts, but I think about looking at both ends of the renewal spectrum.
- Who is in the worst position and a risk of churn?
- Who is in the best position and needs to expand?
I don’t spend as much time worrying about the middle of the pack group. They’re likely humming along and until I get the extremes settled, there’s not much time for that. The reason those folks churn also are rarely things I can know ahead of time, and will require reactive, 1-off triage strategy.
Who is in the worst position and a risk of churn?
This requires you to have a clear view of adoption and engagement. On a weekly basis, you should look at your entire portfolio and sort by ascending on adoption metrics. Go through line by line, starting with the worst, and figure out what is happenign with each account.
Are they engaged? Was their contract oversold? Are they missing resources? Your first goal is to understand WHY they’re struggling. Then, come up with a triage plan for each of them. It could be that they handoff didn’t happen — get the AE involved and get them back on track. Are they missing resources? Go find them a partner. Keep a standing meeting with them until they get an action plan in place. Person who bought has left the company? Ping them on LinkedIn and ask if they know who took over, or ping other people at the company. Pro tip — Partnerships people are ALWAYS on LinkedIn and tend to answer stuff quickly. Send them a message and ask for an intro to the new owner.
This is where you should escalate accounts and bring in other teams to help. AEs should be included and help remedy anything relationship or contractually driven. Include product or solution architects if they’re struggling with technical issues.
Look at this list every. single. week. Set aside 1–2 hours every week and do it. You should know this list and you should have a plan for each one. Your goal is to get them using the product — that’s it. You don’t care about business cases and all that stuff yet. You need to see adoption.
Who is in the best position and needs to expand?
Similar to your low adoption score, in your weekly review time, sort your list by descending order. Look at everyone in overages or getting close to overages. Are they using all their seats? Great, they probably are growing or have a need for more people to log in.
Hopefully you’re meeting with these folks already, but if not, don’t immediately go in for the kill with a new contract.
Celebrate their success. It goes a long way to ping someone and say “Hey! We saw you guys turned on XYZ function and have data flowing! Nice job! We should catch up on what y’all are doing with the product. We’ve released some new things that could be great for your team to use!”
Your customers have likely spent a ton of time getting things set up and it’s a nice recognition of what the champion has invested. Offer to help them, not just milk them for more.
Review features they’re not using and come prepared to the meeting to ask about their use case, and have 3–4 things prepared that you wanted to show them. If they’re not aware they’re close to contract limits, it’s a great opportunity to make sure they know that, and give them time to make sure they’re getting value out of what they have set up.
This helps you qualify a real expansion. Do they have a real need to buy more? Are they feeling good about what they’re consuming? Set up the expansion so you, the renewal manager, or the AE can come in and close it quickly — at that point it’ll just be paperwork to help continue their success.
In getting folks to renew early, you can also offer incentives. Pricing cards change every year — give your customer a chance to lock in an early rate. Grandfather them into a legacy packaging structure so they keep access to a feature. Grant them access to an early beta feature. Make sure there is something in it for them so there’s a REASON to renew early. Sometimes it even makes sense when holiday or vacation times are coming up — just get it out of the way so they don’t have to worry about it!
Summary
At the end of the day, advice is just that, advice. What I’ve learned in my experience in CS is that you have to be creative and willing to invest time. Review accounts. Pull the data for the customer. Hand it to them prepared to be shared internally. Anticipate what they will need and what objections they’ll face internally. Take the mental load on for them. They’re your client, but they have a day job and it isn’t their focus to think about how to help you keep an account.
