Customer success pipeline stages for facilities

How to create outlook signature

hello my customers with his friends Erie trips here from CSM practice today I have with me Chris Singh global head of customer success for sa P thanks Chris for joining me how could the beat here how could we have so Chris and I just had an amazing session at TSW where we talked about the essential guide on how to launch a customer success program Chris tell me a little bit about that experience with launching your own customer success program and what are some of the main learnings that you had from that experience sure thank you you know in the event we had yesterday when the question was asked how many people are engaged in either actively launching a customer success program or have launched one already 95% of the attendees put their hands up so clearly an area where a lot of interest lots of investments from companies focusing in on it we had the good fortune of doing this well over a year ago of converting for us a very support oriented thinking to a much more success oriented thinking in the launching of it we wanted to make sure the customer was at the center of everything that we do so we orchestrated really driving not only customer outcomes but making sure that we could quantify back so Chris what I've noticed and we talked about it in this session is that when companies are moving towards developing a customer success practice they have three types of challenges one is how do you get the customer success managers adopt the playbooks and I'll talk about some of the challenges there how do you adjust everybody in the company to understand what is it that your team does and how to play with them so that we can maximize value together and then the last LASIK sometimes clients there used to work with the company in a certain way and they don't get it they don't give you the right level of engagement if you will so I wanted to kind of tap into each one of these layers and from a customer success management perspective or the CSM perspective you start with the fundamental question what's in it for me you know the basic principle to anybody from a value perspective is how does this affect me how does it benefit me so I think one of the defining things you can do is really be clear with the CSM what the role is and what their inputs are into that and how they can make it successful when you drive out things like a playbook what you can't do is have somebody in isolation create those play books the playbook is really cross relational you have a lot of dependencies and the CSM is at the center of artists ratio for the customers so if you don't listen to their input and make it their playbook right versus a playbook then you're gonna start to have some trouble we did that very effectively where they felt they own the playbook and that has worked very well for us and you did another very interesting thing which is roll it out in phases so once you've developed a playbook you typically sort of almost doing an a/b testing you take a cohort of customers or a region and you implement in there tell me about that process why did you do that and what kind of results did you get yeah no hey look it was really important for us not to go with a big bang because we're big banks if you lack the certainty that it was going to hit the mark then what you're gonna end up doing is confuse a lot of people waste a lot of money and time in getting things out and then people lack the conviction in in believing we took a much more regional approach to make sure that we proved it out and why did we want to do this we wanted to make sure we first answer the internal question of single or a CSM could look and say my goodness in my region we piloted certain kinds of thought leadership change management governance for customers benefits that we were bringing and I saw firsthand as a CSM that it worked so I go from from a belief to faith to conviction and once that CSM has that conviction then it became really powerful for us and after we did that and made sure it worked not only for the CEO sound but from our customer feedback we then made sure we went down on this mass rollout where we spread it to other region that way we didn't have to go back and do a lot of correction and confuse a lot of people so that helped big-time one of the play books that I hear the most pushback is about the QPR and having valuable play books where the customer success managers all of a sudden need to start talking about strategy and understand what is the strategy for the company because then it elevates their conversation from talking to the admin or even the business lead to having developed a relationship with the executive decision maker and that's tough if the company as a whole never really had that kind of relationship except for the salespeople what are some of the tips you can share with our audience to say you know how do you overcome that within our company or customers organization changes happen so you may form a relationship with somebody couple months later that person promoted are gone and then you have to re-establish that that relationship again so it can't only be predicated on a relationship it's about what value you're bringing to the organization in a quantifiable way we wanted to make sure that at QB ours is an example we elevated the conversation from tasks that were done to business value outcome that we were able to drive for those customers in essence not only replaying it back to the admin's but going one step up because we were finding that there was a disconnect between the admits and senior executives within the company so we wanted to make sure those QPR's were very focused on what value did we bring with this customer success management and so that's how we were able to really shift our focus from task based the value base within those QPR's and driving it in a very templated way because we needed consistency and a template was really important to give the consistency not only with the CSM on a globally distributed business but also making sure that the customers had a sense and feel because they speak to each other and they're also global globally distributed and we wanted to make sure we have hit the mark with consistency good consistent values so what I'm hearing is you have to have consist see of experience you have to define it and the templates create a consistency in the customer experience what I find also the templates do is just create a more systematic way of doing things instead of each CSM's trying to come up with our own templates it's very time-consuming it's very experimental and so just save that time save that busy time from the team and make them focus more proactive and less busy work absolutely prior to launch you have to make sure that people within your organization senior executives understand what's in it for me is it more renewals we're seeking is it stickiness of solution it's really expanding the solution adopting and consuming much more so that way we can increase or renown numbers at the end and sisa very important for us to make sure that we get that executive buy-in and once you get that executive buy-in you then have to make sure that you have the right talent pool up front because we went hard and fast over 400 and something see a sense in a blink of an eye we needed to hire and get on board so really securing the right talent having a real distinct focus on the customers and how you were going to onboard the customer and employee in a systematic way all of that has to be determined upfront in a very good way that will when rubber hits the road you can get off really quickly what you're trying to do so the last impact of launching a new customer success program or even a major initiative within the customer success practice is to address some of the overwhelming experience that the customers might have with your new program and so a lot of times I hear that customers are resisting to change or they think that the CSM is really about I don't know addressing escalation tickets or just being tactical about this one thing that they wanted to do and and so the the whole engagement is not optimized what what what would you recommend customer success teams that are just thinking of making the relationship with the customers better and managing that risk of clients resistance what would you recommend so a couple key things in there we wanted to make sure right from inception the way you sell or position what customer success is is very important whether you monetize it or not it's very important that up front you set the expectation of what the offer is secondly you have to make sure that once you land that customer the onboarding is really really important in driving out what value you are going to give that customer what they can expect from the program we as a customer coming in you can expect quarterly release release planning you can expect a qbr and you can expect these kinds of attributes from your CSN's and if you don't get that come see us or see the leadership team so it was really important in the onboarding process to really tell the customer what they can expect the other thing too you know sometimes what you don't know can harm me and our customers sometimes is not aware of what it takes to succeed in the SAS environment a lot of them may have come from on-prem or hybrid scenarios where they don't have a keen understanding of or knowledge of what it takes to succeed in the cloud so we wanted to make sure that from a change management perspective governance employee engagement on their side that we were also giving prescriptive guidance farley an upfront even in as early as their onboarding we were doing it but once you've moved past that onboarding the early interaction with the CSM will be to bring the elements of helping the customer build the right cloud culture so they can consume an adopt the cloud solutions and having the right sets of governance in place really really critical to the success and changing the customer mindset up front because that's on day one the true value of cloud solution is not an implementation it's after they go live right so once once that gets launched we want to make sure we put the right habit and play immediately and you set the tempo right upfront so that way people can start with the right cloud mindset or muskan start with the right focus so I'm hearing really the way I like to call it is just cultivating the clients sense of accountability Brooke correct setting were the right expectations right at the beginning of the customer journey and guys if you already have a lot of clients already that I have already started with you you want to read and reset expectations with everybody that's critical for your customer journey and sometimes that takes a lot of work to just get all those stakeholders in a room but clearly absolutely it always comes back to this fun fundamental principle come back what's in it for me it's that fundamental thing that we all humans have with what is in it for me and there are men's that our customers and we're cloud solutions are trying to be heroes within their organization and justify the reason why the solution exists and the reason changes over time it's not static we have to find out what those reasons are and continue to adjust you all right so if you're in the process of launching your own customer success practice within your own organization and you just need a few more tips look at the comments below I'm gonna leave a link to the essential guide on how to launch customers successful initiatives in general so not just from scratch but even if you're on the process and you want to know how to launch these initiatives in a no really good way that sticks with your customers and your CSM's and your cross-functional organization it includes the framework on how to launch so that you don't get overwhelmed and down below the ocean and it has a lot of checklists for each one of the areas that we've talked about so that customers that cross-functional as well as CSM's if you're interested to learn more about how to develop customer accountability I think it's an it's an area that's uncharted I didn't think a lot of teams don't address it enough I highly recommend listening to that podcast I did with service rocketry if you enjoyed this video go ahead and subscribe and I'll see you at the next video Thank You great no thank you auntie si a it was a very successful event and it was great being here and customers there was receptive to the message in Iran how to successfully launch your customer success management program we certainly did it and you can too right thanks guys [Music] you