30–60–90 Day Plans for Customer Success Leaders
One trend I’ve noticed in interviewing for CS leadership roles over the past few months is companies asking for 30–60–90 day plans as part of the interview process.
On the one hand, it’s foolish to proclaim what you might do in the first three months as a new CS leader when you’ve never spoken to that company’s customers. I always caution that anything I lay out is subject to change based on actual conversations with actual customers.
But 30–60–90 day plans are a great way to lay out your process. How do you decide what to do when taking the helm of a CS organization (or creating one from scratch)?
Below I’m sharing a genericized version of my process in case it’s helpful to others. This is specifically for people interviewing for leadership roles, but some of it may be useful for individual contributors as well. I include the talking points I use when presenting the plan. This is a long post but hopefully it’s helpful!
You’ll see that I weave in some Lean Startup concepts and processes. If you’re interviewing for a leadership role, you are presumably coming in to either build a new organization or evolve an existing one. In either case, you’ll likely identify some new things you want to try. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND using the Lean Startup methodology leveraging Build-Measure-Learn cycles to identify what works/doesn’t work. After all, you are always experimenting, you just may or may not be properly measuring the results of your experiments. So be deliberate about it (I write a little bit about how to use Lean Startup methodology for Customer Success here).
I organize each chunk of the 30–60–90 day plan with the following categories:
— Customers
— Team
— Individual
— Company
— Data/Systems
— Outcomes/Deliverables
30 Days
THEME: LEARN
Customers
10–15 Customer Intro Calls
— I introduce myself as the new CS leader and have a wide-ranging intro call to get to know the customer, their business, what keeps them up at night, what they’re aspiring to, and how all of this corresponds to the value they’re getting from the product. After a dozen calls you’ll understand what the major trends are in terms of customer satisfaction/dissatisfaction.
— Note on this: I was giving advice to someone who was transitioning into a CS leadership role from a Services role and he told me I was the ONLY person of the half dozen CS people he’s spoken to who recommended starting with customer interviews. Blows my mind. Let’s do better people!
5+ sales calls/week
— Shadow the calls to understand how the product is being pitched, what appeals to customers, their objections, etc.
5+ CS calls/week
— Shadow a variety of CS calls (QBR’s, cadence calls, escalations, etc.) to understand how the CSMs and customers are interacting.
Team
1:1’s with direct reports
— Basic introductions. Keep it low key since you are just getting to know each other.
Team SWOT analysis
— Group activity with direct reports to get their thoughts on the current state-of-the state. This also makes your team feel heard and invested in the process of improving the organization.
Triage immediate needs
— Some decisions can’t wait until you’re fully onboarded, so understand what those are and make it work.
Individual
Product Training
— Get a basic grasp of the product/product suite. Have someone give you a demo, look at any customer education materials.
Start sketching a customer journey map (even If one exists)
— This is a good way to organize what you’re hearing from the teams and customers.
Company
Start attending Leadership/Team meetings
— Understand how communication happens within the company
Learn goals, processes, plans
— Sales/renewals motion, product roadmap, marketing strategy, etc.
Data/Systems
Log in and learn current systems
Review existing customer data
Review NRR/GRR data
— Look at any historical data, understand exactly how it’s measured and how it’s projected for a given quarter
Outcomes/Deliverables
Customer journey map (current, with any gaps you’ve noticed)
Initial hypotheses of CS strategies and processes you want to pursue
— New things you want to try that you will refine via the lean startup methodology mentioned above — you should be able to identify a few things by the end of your first 30 days.
60 DAYS
THEME: EXPERIMENT
Customers
Shadow 5+ customer calls
— Make a goal of conducting or shadowing at least 5 customers calls per week (can be a mix of types of calls, with CSMs or sales, or ones you conduct on your own)
Team
Identify up to 3 new CS initiatives to try
— Involve the team in this process
Set 1-month team goals relevant to these initiatives
— Make them realistic! You aren’t going to learn that much in a month but you’ll get some initial data and it rallies the team to have concrete goals.
1:1 career chats with team members
— I have a format I’ve developed for having in-depth “getting to know you” sessions with direct reports that really help you understand what makes a person tick and gives you the insight you need to know how to manage them and help them progress in their career. Will share in another blog post and will come back and link it here.
Individual
More in-depth product training
— While I don’t believe you need to be a product expert who knows how to turn every knob and button (and this is impossible for very broad and complex products), take the time early on to get to know the product well enough that you can represent customer feedback to the product team.
Set your own personal 1-month goals
— I don’t think you can look out more than 1 month at this point, but it’s good to get into the habit of setting goals.
Company
Get stakeholder alignment on your new CS initiatives
— Let them know how you’re going to measure and report on results
Data/Systems
Ensure you have measurements in place for all initiatives
— Impacts on NRR and GRR are too far out to be useful. Figure out what data you can get in the near-term to show if your initiatives are working (these could be customer and team surveys, for example, or product usage data).
Identify and get to work on any data gaps
— If you’ve identified any gaps in customer data, start working with internal teams to figure out solutions — even if it’s just spreadsheets in the near term.
Review NRR/GRR projections on a weekly basis
Deliverables/Outcomes
Account Health Dashboard
— Make sure you have a basic account health dashboard in place (can be spreadsheets if that’s all you’ve got!)
90 DAYS
THEME: REFINE AND PLAN
Customers
Continue with your 5+ customers calls/week
Customer Survey(s)
— At this point you’ve probably gained enough anecdotal feedback from customers that you can start to quantify what you’re hearing through structured surveys.
Team
Review the Build-Measure-Learn cycle for your initiatives
— What have you learned so far? What are you doing next? Decide if you are going to pivot, persevere, or abandon each initiative.
SWOT analysis check-in
— Review the SWOT exercise from your first 30 days. Are you making progress? What do you need to do next?
Establish quarterly team goals
— You have enough info now to look out over a quarter and make some plans.
Individual
Set quarterly goals for yourself
Figure out how to stay on top of new product releases/features
Company
Check-in with all adjacent teams
— What’s working, what needs to be adjusted, etc
Sales/CS SWOT analysis re: renewals
— Take the time to get the teams/leaders together to specifically focus on renewals
Data/Systems
Continue to work to evolve customer data
Outcomes/Deliverables
Plan additional CS initiatives
— Always be experimenting and looking to improve!
Start creating a resources plan
— You should have enough information by now that you can start to do longer term planning around resources and headcount.
Hope this has been helpful! Feel free to riff off of this and share it with others. And I’d love to hear what you include in your 30–60–90 day plans.
