The Four Cornerstones of Customer Success

There are a few foundational CS operational requirements upon which there is wide agreement. Because of their importance, I will mention, but not belabor, these:

In addition to the above requirements, I would like to offer four principles — often not considered by senior executives, new or aspiring CS hires, or even very experienced CS vets — that I believe are critical to optimizing a B2B SaaS organization’s chances of achieving CS excellence.

The number one question any Head of CS or CSM gets asked throughout their career is “how is Customer X doing”. Turns out that’s not as easy a question to answer as the one asking the question often thinks….

Customers are complex entities, made up of many different personas — decision-maker, influencing users, day-to-day users, and even the account itself (i.e., individual-agnostic qualities of the customer, such as overall business health). Each of those personas have different needs that change throughout different phases of their lifecycle with your company and product. For example, decision-makers may be the most regular point of contact during Selection, but more infrequent during Maintenance (for more on the lifecycle, see #3).

As such, it is critical to ensure that your employees are intentional with how they think about and act toward customers — Product Engineering should consider “which persona are we building this feature for?” just as Marketing may consider “which persona are we targeting with this campaign?” These questions help organizations more accurately evaluate the ROI of particular decisions, as they adjust your focus to just the relevant subset of your customer base.

Similarly, a CS organization should be built to optimize across personas — developing governance structures and engagement models that cater to the appropriate needs of each persona during the respective lifecycle stage. Establishing these clear structures reduces friction for both the client and within your organization — eliminating the question no one ever likes to ask…“whom do I go to for this?”

Recommendation: Develop a health scorecard that addresses the key personas — Decision-Makers, Influencing Users, and the Account. Determine which metrics demonstrate utmost satisfaction of those personas and relentlessly pursue maximizing those. If you find metrics that are subject to data scarcity, create playbooks to address those scenarios and hold team members accountable to following through on them.

Far too often, CS is viewed as the sole organization responsible for being the voice of the customer and for remediating all customer issues. While that is certainly part of the CS mandate, they should not be alone in addressing that responsibility.

Remember the earliest stages of your company, when everyone banded together to make sure your first customers were wildly successful? Didn’t that help take your business to the next level?

Well, that is precisely the client-centric focus that the whole company needs to maintain throughout its lifecycle. As companies evolve — developing new products, services, ecosystems for their customers — it must be CS’s primary objective to ensure that customer-obsession remains the north star, and making it as easy as possible for other parts of the organization to tap into that customer-obsession.

This approach must be demonstrated to be non-negotiable. One easy way to do this is by regularly asking “how does this initiative (new product/feature, service, meetup) improve the customer experience?” The Board should be demanding that question be answered at each board meeting; the CEO should be coming back to that question during every management and all-hands meeting; and team leads should be making sure their individual contributors are evaluated with this question in mind during reviews.

Recommendation: Establish a client-focused weekly meeting between the CEO, Head of CS, Head of Sales/Marketing, and Head of Product/Engineering to dive deep into the customer-focused metrics of each team. Circulate the content from that meeting regularly across the company — via internal blog post or at an all-hands meeting.

Almost every CS organization experiences a point in its development when it shifts focus from addressing client needs in an unstandardized way to operationalizing their functional playbooks. This process begins by breaking down the customer lifecycle into a handful of finite stages — Discovery, Qualification, Selection, Implementation, Adoption, Maintenance, Change, Renewal/Churn — and evaluating the work that needs to be executed within each stage.

Shortening your time-to-close/value/deploy/etc. must always be an organizational priority, but firms must be careful to minimize the negative impact of these (if any) on the customer experience. And, while the aforementioned organizational process is necessary for scaling excellent customer experiences in the long-term, it is by no means sufficient. Getting a customer back on track after a breakdown within an implementation requires small adjustments. But clients who feel that they were oversold or can’t adopt the software may be lost forever — or take months of work to win back — and cause your whole company to be constantly fighting uphill battles.

Expressing that “I feel oversold” is a customer’s way of asking “how could you not ensure my needs were met when you transitioned me from Selection to Implementation?” Similarly, “I’m unable to adopt” is their way of asking “how could you not ensure I was ready when you moved me out of Implementation?”

Nailing these moments, the ones so prone to friction, will set your organization apart from the rest.

Recommendation: Journey map the client experience — from Discovery through perpetual Renewal. Highlight the key transition points and build transition playbooks that create a frictionless experience by establishing overlap between stakeholders and highlight why the customer is ready to move onto the next stage. Understand existing barriers to optimizing your transitions and incentivize the respective stakeholder teams to execute perfectly in transition periods.

Would you hire your real estate broker to architect your home? What about your interior designer?

Would you hire a head of Sales or Marketing who has never sold or marketed before?

Yet, time and time again, we still see CS organizations created by internally promoting the employee with the deepest product or client knowledge. This certainly has merit — no additional training, no risk to company culture, no new dollars, to name a few.

However, it also has clear downsides. Does that individual know the right tools required to scale with your growing client base, or have experience implementing them? Does she know the metrics with which to evaluate her team’s success? Is that person viewed as an equal to their more tenured/experienced counterparts on Sales or Engineering?

Recommendation: Two heads are better than one. When you embark upon establishing your CS organization, start with a team of two; seek the experienced leader who has seen it all before and pair them with the rockstar employee to form a kickass team to spread and demonstrate your company’s CS philosophy. If you’re strapped for budget/headcount, work with a CS consultant/advisor in the senior role for 6-months.

Planning to start a CS team at your company? Struggling to take your CS team to the next level? Love philosophizing about CS and want to dive deeper into any of the above points? Email me @ josh dot eisner1 at gmail dot com

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