Discover the benefits of customer success pipeline stages for Management

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hey everyone glad you could join us for our first webinar of 2021. can everyone hear me okay maybe just give me a quick heads up plus one something in the chat pane looks like richard says we're all good carol everyone says we're all good perfect so really glad everyone could join us if this is your first time joining one of our webinars to introduce myself i'm mark stoddard i run sales and marketing here at client success and really excited to welcome amelia danzika founder of growth molecules on today amelia really glad you could join us thank you for having me mark so excited to have you how was your how was your holiday how was your new year's i guess it's probably too late to be asking how's your new year's we're way too we're way too far into the new year at this point right i i think so but you know what i keep working towards those new year goals so those those are not far behind i'm just proud of myself for saying this is our first webinar of 2021. i finally have dropped the 2020 in my mindset so that's uh that that's my win for today so well cool so we'll go ahead and get started a little bit of housekeeping um just so everyone's aware we're going to be recording the session so afterwards i'll share the recording we'll share the slides if you have any questions that come up during the kind of presentation portion pop them in the chat pane i'll be monitoring the chat pane as always and so what we'll do is we'll we'll kind of share content for the first half and then we'll have a little bit more of a q a in the second half and with that maybe i'll i'll go ahead and get started the first thing i always like to say at the top of these is every time we have one of these we have a bunch of new folks who don't know anything about client success and so first thing i want to do is i want to introduce you to client success tell you who we are what we're all about why we like to do these sessions and for a lot of you you might be familiar with kind of other customer success platforms and when you think of client success what i hope you think of is that we are the easiest to use easiest to implement complete customer success solution that you're going to find and so we're going to help your csms do everything they need to drive customer success better drive better onboarding adoption renewals growth anything that your customer success team needs to provide a great customer experience take insights from your customers roll them up to your leadership team collaborate on behalf of customers of course as we're all trying to do moving toward better net retention better growth again always with a focus on ease of use usability fast time to value and so you see here on the slide we're a leader on g2 and what i find is that about over half of our g2 reviews talk about ease of use usability and those are reviews directly from customers and so i'll give you maybe one or two examples so fran she's a great customer of ours she says in her review i like how easy it is to use how simple the layout is it doesn't take very long to get new starters up to speed and that's so important because you know adoption's so much easier when the product's not overly complicated um i could give you more and more all day but um i got there's we know there's other solutions out there and our advice is if you're tired of let's call it overly complicated systems that have kind of perpetual rollouts come talk with us we'd love to to show you what what ease of use is all about in the customer success game so those are my bills paid if you want to talk to me talk to my team find us at clientsuccess.com email me directly i'm mark with a k at client success easy to find and with that i'm going to turn it over to amelia i'm going to stop sharing my screen and turn it over to you amelia you can go ahead and start sharing oh right like i said i'm gonna i'm gonna monitor the chat pane and if you have any questions comments i'd love to just hear where where everyone's calling in from it looks like you know christina's from chicago i see kloss he's there he's a he's a he's a perpetual he's a he's a repeat attendee i think from denmark london florida colorado toronto berlin awesome that we have a real international crowd i'm canadian exactly exactly we got the canadians we're all good to go so well cool so i'll let you run with it and um like i said i'm i'm here to help but let's uh let's get started all right well thank you so much mark and the whole client success team for having me i'm super excited to talk about this topic and how mark and i uh came to decide on it is because we had an inauguration yesterday and just like the president is putting together his 100-day plan he's actually i think already announced a lot of it i thought it would be fitting to talk about why when i when i've built in my past and when i work with clients why a 100-day plan makes sense so the first thing that 100-day plan can help you do is not get lost in the weeds because often as leaders we're just thrown in to the fire and we forget to start building from a strategic perspective and that means putting in place a business goal that you can all work towards so my first piece of advice is get cut out the noise and focus on building that plan and i want to ask the team because this is going to be interactive for everyone who is on the call how many of you have built a 90-day plan or 100-day plan for 2021. see i'll let folks start filtering in i got first one i got a note i got a yes i got it in progress so it looks like it's a miss to some extent a bunch of yeses some notes yeah yes no in progress doing it now work in progress yes but it all got blown up at the end of the year so yeah it sounds like it's a mix wow okay good well i hope that you're able to have some some key takeaways today that you can start implementing if you've already built a plan or if you're in progress you can have actionable takeaways so the first thing i want to talk about are common blind spots not only that my clients have as a customer success consultant but blind spots that i've had in my 20-year career in the sas world then i'll dive into a customer success 100 day plan that you can implement you're getting a recording of this today so there are slides that you can actually start using immediately and then why you should update these plans on a regular cadence and what does regular cadence even mean so let's dive into it first your blind spots the i i always think that when i've worked with leaders or i've done this myself that this is how you fail really quickly and that is not implementing a process by first understanding the product and the customer need that also means in the current processes and the team when you start working with a team that maybe you've inherited for example and you start rolling out a process and you haven't built their trust yet suddenly that process is going to fail so you really want to take a moment of first month and really understand if your company has a certification program put yourself in that program and just like companies like drift they have all of their employees work as a support manager when they start whether there is vp or a customer success manager they're working on the front lines as a support manager so really take that time to really understand your product secondly you need technology to implement a playbook uh so many times i've seen companies try to roll out process but it's all over the place it's not actionable you don't have reporting to really show the insights to drive your decision making and that can come back to to hurt what your plans are for the team for the customer and for the year and i find that such a fine line because some folks will wait too long to even think about their plan until they have technology and or some folks like you're saying they they just try to to put it in place without anything and so it's it's a fine line i find that that a lot of folks walk and it's oftentimes important to have a little bit of a plan so you know what the technology needs to do but not wait so long that you know your plan's already out the door before you get any technology in place yes and mark when we get to the final section of this presentation i'm going to talk about uh the technology piece and what you should be really thinking about when you're when you're guiding your team and so that's the third piece is companies or leaders they put together a plan but i often don't see a budget and if i see a budget a huge void that i immediately call out is the lack of enablement it's great if you have technology it's great if you have process but if you don't have an enablement plan for your team then suddenly you're blaming the technology is not being good enough or something's wrong with your team but is something really wrong with them or have you failed to enable them with proper education and time to really learn the skill sets and the technology that you're rolling out so measuring success no matter what you put together a strategy it has to have a goal in place and your customer voice needs to be part of it uh i love this step from bain and company they say that 80 of companies believe they're delivering ex superior experiences but when you talk to customers or when i'm working with clients and i'm building playbooks i always send a survey to the customer success team and i ask them for feedback and often they don't they admit look we're not delivering exceptional experience to our customers and that's when you can really start building a playbook that's actionable so make sure before you start measuring your success or putting process in place you really understand what is superior experience for your clients and for your team so this is why i think we're all here today the how and the why and you have to start with the framework i didn't really know much about frameworks until i joined bright edge where uh the founders of the company come from the world of salesforce and my manager or my leader was a huge advocate of the mark benioff v2 mom and so every quarter we put one together and then we reflected on it and that's why 100 days is so important i'll dive deeper into the hundred days in a moment but what we've been using at growth molecules and one of my partners paul reeves and i developed this one page strategic plan is really starting with your clients and your team your executives and really understanding what is that one goal that you really want to achieve over the next 100 days how are you going to communicate it to your executives to your team and to your clients how are you going to operationalize this playbook and then where are the different relationships that you need to develop to really make this strategy successful if you're building a strategy and you have goals in place and you need engineering's help and products help to make it successful then you better start building those relationships in the first hundred days because without something like a framework then your execution will will not actually happen no matter how great your plan is so make sure when you're building a framework if you if you choose to use one of these make sure that it's transparent easily accessible to your company when again use bright edge as the example every single leader whether you were a director a vp or had a c title we all had a v2 mom it was in a drive and i could log in and see what engineering's v2 mom was what products was and the customer success one broken down by team now these these the other thing i think about what those frameworks is you always want to make sure that not only are they transparent but they're talked about frequently so oftentimes i see a company that puts that framework together great it's on the drive it's on the wiki you know it's in the drawer and we're gonna pull it out at our next planning meeting and forget about everything that happened in the next in the 100 days in between them so that's the other thing that i think is extremely important on that yes and with the with the last company where i was leading the team once we had built our plan together we went through it together as a team on thursdays and then on friday at the all hands we updated the team on where we were at in terms of progress with our strategy for that particular quarter so it was definitely all hands on deck we were all aligned and we knew that we'll go into it we had executive alignment the executive team had uh had signed off on it at the beginning of every quarter and everyone was accountable so from the the finance head who had given us a budget who had helped us make sure that we were going to be able to be accountable for ourselves and they were going to support us that was really important for example and the team enablement anytime you have a strategy that your team is behind that has helped you build it instead of you announcing it to them you suddenly have a team who is more enthusiastic wants to have an impact wants to be part of the success of that strategy and they're eager to learn if you're rolling out significant new processes and then what i really think is important as a leader you are pulled into so many different directions you have slack messages you have emails you can't keep up with you have client fires that you're trying to put out and you're trying to build a team so your calendar is potentially full of interviews so having a strategy that you can look at every day once a week and really block out time make sure you use that time to focus on you are you taking care of yourself and are you holding yourself accountable to this strategy instead of focusing on noise and things that don't really matter for this quarter so in your first 30 days how do you get started well you start with looking at what do you have in place your people so your team your leadership around you the team you need to help you and then your processes that are in place or that need to be built and then which systems are going to enable everything that you're putting in place so we'll start with uh the client for example when you're putting this together do you have a self-serve strategy when you're thinking about segmentation and if you don't ask why maybe your product isn't ready and the perfect example of i'll give of this is a company i was working with had a csm managing almost a million dollars all of their uh customers and it was a series a company and they were very worried because they had read some book that said no each csm should be able to manage over two million dollars but the the product wasn't ready for that yet it needed a lot more hand-holding and they were at a place in their maturity where they needed more csms because they were experiencing such significant churn so unless you're ready for self-serve i would caution you about putting that in your 100-day plan too early in your 100-day strategy the low-touch and high-touch this is typically where where executives will start they'll start looking at how do i build a low touch strategy at least so that i can start scaling and then for our top clients who are willing to pay for additional customer success hands-on white glove approach you need to be able to to write this out for your team and again hold each person accountable for what they're focused on building for that quarter so beyond just kind of thinking about so so so that one client you talked about they were just looking at okay the amount of revenue means per csm are there any other like top three or top four things and maybe you get to this but the things that help you decide should i be a b or c on this because i think every cs leader out there is trying to figure out what what is the right model and for most companies is going to be a hybrid right i was just talking to a friend of mine this morning and she was saying okay i'm building out a self-serve tech touch model but we also have enterprise clients and so like any kind of thoughts or frameworks that you think about help make that decision where you should be yes and now i am wishing that i had included this this slide that paul my my partner uh and i always include when we're doing an assessment with our clients is we look at their maturity model where are they in their their um maturity of their customer success organization and often if you're really new to customer success you're building your company you might be in series a and you're very reactive then you're very it's way too early to start self-service self-service you want to get there when you have a product that has been refined to really understand the client needs and you have just in time guides for example i worked at walkme for three years i'm i'm obviously biased to that i i think it's a great platform of any of these platforms out there that will help clients through a platform if you have something like that in place you can start putting more light touches or low touch strategies in place so just really making sure you understand and testing do some maybe testing with your clients to see can they possibly be onboarded for example with webinars and with self-guided walkthroughs through the product so we look at all of these different factors uh when we're when we're evaluating is a client ready to move out of the high touch and more into a low touch and self-serve strategy in general one of the things i find is that the best companies tend to kind of start kind of that mantra of like do things that don't scale first so you end up kind of like starting in high touch just because that's where you're talking to your customers you're figuring out the systems and process that you need so that you eventually build the right low touch and tech touch systems if you if you go the other way you oftentimes start building technology but you don't actually know the system or the process and so you don't even know what things customers need at certain stages of their life cycle so like just if if you're at a baseline i my advice typically is start with higher touch and work your way down from there would you disagree or argue with me on that i i love that idea because it allows you to have more touch points with your clients that gives you an opportunity to get great product ideas from your clients as well if you are starting with a tech touch i i think of slack i think of calendly those are very much tech touch platforms where i've never talked to a csm yet i pay for the service and they started with the tech touch if you have a product like that you better be investing heavily but if you have a more complex product a higher maybe more enterprise product then yes you need to start with a higher touch model and i want to just end that i really am a strong advocate of really thinking about where are you in the customer's life cycle in your own maturity before you start talking about ratios people ask me all the time what is the right csm to ratio this is a made-up number in a book that i'll i'll skip mentioning um but but i think there's this is just like the wrong ratio to look at so now i want to move into on a part of the assessment which again is what we do in the first 30 days i like doing it from a one to five um uh model and i really look at i start with the leadership start assessing what kind of leadership do we need to scale the organization are there any metrics defined currently what is the account management process if you have one at your organization what about the the head count and the organizational design do you even have one does it make sense for your organization and then this one is really important often when i work with companies there are silos they're often doing the same thing and they don't even know it um they're touching the client with the same questions unnecessarily and so i really let's focus on what kind of partnership is across the organization and how do we improve that uh we've already talked about segmentation and resourcing and then the technology technology can be the foundation of how you scale from that high-touch to low-touch model and the next one is for your um oops let me move forward the next one is for your 60 days you want to make sure that you're building once you understand me in your first 30 days you've realized okay on a scale of one to five i have an organization i've inherited at 3.5 what am i going to build well it's your people your people are going to help you build your organization and you want to make sure that you're defining the right rules and for the people who you have in your organization maybe they need more support maybe they need enablement so really understanding who who are the eight players on the team why aren't the others eight players how do we get them there in the next hundred days i want to move into the processes next now that we've talked about the people and this is just an example again the maturity model of what is your customer's journey even very large companies that i've worked with when they bring me in to do workshops they may not have a customer journey or the tech touches along it and so just getting on a whiteboard and show and talking through what what happens when we're reactive versus proactive during implementation the growing and the renewing can really help your entire team not only get aligned on what is a good customer experience and then what happens when we're in that reactive mode what is our risk strategy to get out of it and back into proactive the the 100 days you really want to be talking more about the why i started with the why why have 100 days and what are you going to build when and the cost this is what your finance team your ceo this is what they need to see and this is what you need to get your budget for so really understanding but by that by the 90 days or close to you should really have this in place to really understand and i find when i'm working with executives they love seeing the big picture so you can start with the year uh you may not have q4 here but then you can say this is what i'm going to accomplish in the first hundred days i've done my assessment in the first 30. this is what we're going to to sign up for the team has agreed and then this is what we envision for the second third and fourth quarter but please note this may change because on day 90 we're going to look at where did we land on our initiatives in the first hundred what did we do well what didn't we accomplish and what do we need to change and only then when you spend those 10 days with your executives with your team on self reflection then on day 100 you can go back to the organization and say again what worked well what didn't what needs to change and this is what's going to go into the next 100 days and if you build a mindset for your entire organization around this type of framework which again we call score then it's very simple you start training your entire organization okay we're in 100 days sprints we break them down by month and on day 90 we are going to spend a week really reflecting on what went well and what didn't so defining measurements the last piece of advice because before um we'll start taking questions you really want to define the measurements for success like i mentioned i always say this when i i'm in involved in building an onboarding program for a company i ask the clients why did you purchase the product and what does success look like a year from now that allows you to start the renewal the renewal conversation at kickoff but you should be thinking that way as well when you're defining your measurements for success with your own team your team are actually your clients as well as a leader so you want to ask them that question what does success look like in 30 60 90 days a year from now because those are the questions the who the people who hired you as a leader they're asking you that as well and then the the technology piece why why do you need technology i i mentioned the technology piece is the foundation it allows your team to really understand what are your customers doing um and what what do they need more of what part of the product isn't your customer using and then for as a leader when i talk to leaders about well how are you using this technology they need a way to manage their team and they need a way to manage the customer experience if they don't know that then how can they possibly be effective high impact leaders in your organization and then last but not least the technology will give your csms an opportunity to act in a way that that is best practices for not only the team but also for the client and this woman i'm coaching she's in month two of her role and she said to me amelia we don't have a playbook i don't know what to do i don't know how to organize my day so if you have technology and a playbook that you're building in your first 100 days you can really give your team actionable insights into how can they really plan their week and their day to be effective because no one wants to end a week and leave on a friday saying wow that was just a whirlwind week i'm just so glad it's over i'm dreading monday they want to know this is what i planned on sunday night and i got so much accomplished i touched customers i helped close renewals those are the kind of feelings you want to leave your team with as a high impact leader and if you start with this 100-day plan then you can really focus on the the next quarter so as a final thought for all of you i'd love to say no matter how great your plan is really make sure you're working on it on a regular cadence on reflecting on it because plans aren't helpful just like your nps score there it's not helpful unless you actually hold yourself accountable and do something with it so with that mark i think um we'll we'll take from q a cool yeah so so other questions we've got four or five to start with and other questions that come up please pop them in the chat pane we'll go we have technically blocked to the to the top of the hour but we'll go kind of as long as the questions come your your last point there actually feeds really nicely i think into brody's first question and it's funny i i find that every time we do one of these webinars we get we get a version of brody's question and it's it's all about the buying so his question is you know our struggle is getting buy-in at the executive level to drive to drive forward customer success specific initiatives so is there a best way to position the roi of things like setting up you know internal data structures investing in more robust customer success like i guess for you emilia like how do you start that conversation how do you think about the roi or how do you position the roi of those discussions maybe just kind of unpack that a little bit more and how you help clients and think through that yeah so as a leader i think it's really important to understand the company's bigger vision and and mission and once you have that in place you can start thinking about okay what do i really need to put in my strategy and where where are we going to fit in and so i think it's really important to just start with the bigger picture and then really understanding the client needs if you start with that and and you have to actually i i don't know how else you can go to your how to finance and say i need to hire 10 csms unless you've built a business case around it you always want to go back to the company's vision and the values and how you're going to fit in the the other piece i'll say is measurement what does success look like at the end of the 90 or 100 days if you're able to tell them hey here's our goal and in fact we even have a stretch goal a lot of companies like putting a stretch goal in place that will get your finance team really excited about okay this is why we're making this investment here the expected outcomes make sense and we i guess probably about four or five months ago we actually did had a session with uh mark bissell another well-known kind of customer success leader and his his whole session was on you know how do you get buy-in to these initiatives and one of the points that he made that's really stuck with me is so often the customer when customer success leaders or csm's are trying to drive forward some customer success specific initiative they use cs language they don't use the language that a cfo or a ceo speaks and sometimes it's just almost the nuance of being able to talk about how how this thing will actually impact not adoption metrics not these other metrics that we talk about so often in customer success this is how it's going to impact revenue this is how it's going to impact profitability and you know back to your point of understanding the the entire company framework the entire company vision also understanding just the the people that you need to sign off on your thing what's that thing that really matters to to them and making sure that whatever initiative you're trying to push forward is in that context yeah especially once you get to the c level you better understand the metrics behind any organization and that means sitting down with your cfo asking her to spend 30 minutes or an hour walking you through what is important from a financial perspective and really understanding the language they speak their cfos are probably not going to learn your language um they they don't understand all of the jargon we use you probably have no interest in understanding all of their deep insights um in platforms they use but you have to have a common ground around goals that you can both align with if you want us to achieve um a 95 net retention rate and this is my current team and this is the current ratio this how much we're spending on clients and this is what we need to get there you need to explain it and you need to have stories case studies there is no excuse why you can't go find some stories on net retention rate articles on it um if you if you if you attended any of the saster events which i know client success always um sponsors those are great events and recorded sessions that you can go listen to to really understand what does cfos care about how do you speak their language and then how do you keep them updated on a regular cadence so that they are continually supporting you as you're growing your organization awesome um the next question i want to jump to so so class asks a question kind of about like the framework and when you're doing when you're doing your reflections so his question is with the hundred day sprints when you do a reflection at day 90 you know wouldn't you have forgotten about what it was like 60 or more days ago so is the reflecting at day 90 is that is that too far into that is that too late have you already forgotten what you remembered at day 30 like what's your thought process yeah so i think you should do it on day 100 and i don't think it's just you do it on day 100 like with the last team i was leading we reflected on it as a team every thursday we pulled it up in in our um at the time we were using a confluence page for our our sprint and we pulled it up everyone was responsible for updating where they were and then on fridays i would update the whole organization so you can't forget it's all in documented somewhere you should absolutely have your framework documented and be be looking at it minimum once a week but i would say you should be starting your monday what is my mission what how am i planning my week and then on friday reflecting on it where did i get to on the plan and what am i going to set myself up for to achieve next week if you look at it that way once day 90 closes the quarter's done you can look at the the metrics then you have a whole week to work with your team on how are we going to present this to the whole organization in a way that they understand and then what are we going to do for the next quarter so that's what those 10 days are about not enough companies reflect and you need reflection and learning before you start building something else otherwise you find yourself in a rat race i just thought what i like about it is you're so deliberate about you kind of have the two different mindsets you have the planning mindset and you have the executing mindset and they're and they're different right they require a different skill set different mindset but you've got time you got time blocked out for each of them and without you know planning all you're doing is executing and that is what oftentimes i find results in oh we're just working for the sake of working we don't really know why we're working but if all you do is plan you never actually get anything done so i i really like the framework because it helps kind of bridge bridge both of those let me see here the next ques let's see so so emily asks a question a few of these are a little bit more tactical questions which i think is totally okay um her question is how do you go about setting shorter term goals you know if we have an 80 renewal goal and there's a very specific time of year when the renewals occur how do we go about setting goals for 30 60 90 days so it's like we we only know if the if the renewal is out six months and i'm setting a 100-day plan i don't actually know whether my my renewal rate increased on on that account how do you think about kind of the the shorter term milestones in the middle yeah well i i mentioned earlier that i i like to ask during a kickoff call what does success look like in a year from now and then getting the client to agree to three goals we want to achieve over the course of let's say a quarter and if you know those goals by month six you should absolutely be setting up an executive business review with the client to let them know what's going really well where are you on achieving those goals so that the renewal that six months out is no surprise if something's wrong at month six you already know you have six months to fix it so um i think it's at six months you should absolutely be having that executive business review so that your um customer success platform you know exactly are they planning to renew in six months that's when you start the conversation i argue it's on the kickoff but if you if you miss those key questions you can't have a meaningful executive business review at month six so what do you do when you ask that what does success look like in a year from now and you get a mediocre answer a wishy-washy answer we haven't really thought about it or the other version of it which is i don't know joe bought this i'm just the one implementing it like i don't know what success looks like i'm just the one using it right how do you how do you think through that are there any kind of playbooks processes you you think through there yeah so this really takes everyone creating a slack channel for your team enablement practicing doing role plays we do this with our clients we do role plays where we talk about okay well what happens if a client says i haven't thought about it or i have no idea what your product does i'm just the project manager and i've been told to implement this as a customer success manager it is your job to educate the client so if they don't know what the what the platform does take the time to either invite them to an uh training session or at least you should be able in five minutes to give them while our platform is going to make you more efficient reduce support costs whatever it is it's almost like you're doing a mini resell if the person's hearing about your platform for the first time and then if they don't know as a csm your job is to lead the client you have stories about all the other clients you've worked with and if you're new at the company go read all the case studies on the website learn what makes a great client successful and then educate that client on what is success look like and lead them through that journey there there is no excuse for your customer success platform to have blanks for goals for the client you need to have goals for the client that are measurable so that you can be working in partnership to achieve them i'm so glad that you mentioned that like in a lot of cases that does involve a resale a re-education because you know so many things happen you think about the amount of companies that that bought something in january or february of last year then the world goes crazy they completely forget about everything that they bought in january or february you're finally they're finally coming back up for air in june or july and you have to go back and re-educate on everything that that that the reason that they bought you and there's probably new players in place so you're going back extremely like all the way back to square one um and and so that that idea of having that framework of there's some times where i've got a not only resell but you know continually sell because you know all sorts of things happen so i and mark yeah i'll just add one more thing if something like covet happens or a big event for the company you you almost do not only have to resell but you have to start with questions ask the client about where are you right now have your business goals changed and how how can we fit into these new goals so it's really taking a step back and doing a re-evaluation i think all of us did that in june right we realized uh oh covet's not going away anytime soon whatever was valid march 1st is no longer valid june 1st we need a reset so you need to do that instead of forcing goals down their throats that just are so irrelevant it makes so much sense because i think what a lot of csm's and i saw this happen is they didn't come in with a let's let's discover let's understand how the world has changed for you they kind of just did the standard oh i'm just checking in just checking in haven't heard from you in six weeks haven't heard from you in eight weeks um and and that doesn't lead to a good conversation in june or july that just leads to how this person just keeps hounding me to have a conversation um okay cool um i'm trying there's a bunch of new questions in here so i'm gonna jump to serena's question so she said i like the insight regarding not being ready for self-service so what are some markers that customer success can look at to determine when you are ready to scale self-service yeah so building a customer success journey for example and all the touch points that you have with the client is really the first step understanding how much time is a csm spending on each call for example and what are they discussing each call should have an agenda so building that customer journey and seeing all right well the csm early in a customer maturity model might be doing training for every single customer because they don't have a training team yet if you're finding that you're doing so many of the same training sessions it's time to start thinking about how can we automate some of this put it right in the platform for them to access on demand in the moment they need it because as human beings we forget everything we've heard on this webinar today in 30 days from now except maybe 5 so what do we do we have to practice it and we have to access the information when we need it and that's what you have to think about when you're building a low touch high tech touch model is drop the customer journey what can we automate and then start testing it don't just roll out a program start testing it start testing it with some clients um i think that's really the first step in more automation yeah that makes a lot of sense to me i mean you're kind of looking at what are the things i'm already doing on repeat and the other one that i always find is like just looking at my faqs what are the questions that i get constantly and so how can i how can i more proactively answer those what i what i find interesting about your idea about the testing is sometimes you're testing the message sometimes you're testing the method so sometimes it's you know when at this point in the customer journey when this happens i should maybe send an email or maybe i should schedule a call or maybe i should have an in-app chat pop-up or some combination of all of those or you know sending i've even seen some people say at this point we send you know a physical thing to their office something like that when people still worked in offices and that was a thing um but no i i really like what you said there um there was one point in there where you talked about maturity and there was a maturity question here from anna that i thought was interesting so she says you know what if the company's vision is scattered and with very little delivery how little delivery sorry how can i help my team feel clarity ownership and pride in what they do other than just go and answer tickets or hold training sessions you know they kind of sound like they have a bit of a conveyor belt like outlook like how how do i help them come up and think more about this thing i'm doing is contributing to something larger than yeah just answering tickets so a lot of the companies i work with they don't have a a framework for the entire organization they don't have a north star for the the more of the startups i work with what i would say is do not wait for your organization to create one uh when i work with these clients i just go in and create it for them i get the ceo to sign off on it and then they may tweak it for the larger organization and i'll build it for my team that i'm leading i did that with walkme i built the the vision and the values and i put put it in place i got the team to buy into it and then when you're having a conversation with someone on your team with a colleague it's not about the person or that you disagree uh it doesn't have to be a friction point it can be look at the beginning of of the 100 days we agreed that this is our north star this is our one goal we want to achieve these are the values we're going to hold ourselves accountable to i'm having a challenge with this particular situation and you go into it in a very business-like way where you're not it's not about offending the person or getting into a um a friction conversation it's about there's an issue it it we're holding ourselves accountable to this goal how do we get past it so we can keep working together towards that north star and i think that's my one major key takeaway for leaders you don't need a ceo or an organization to build your model you need to build it so start and then people will start saying hey can i do that for my team too i really like what's happening i like the energy that's being created in your team yeah i find it's it's helpful if the folks above you have you know a mission vision that you can tap into but it by no means you know stops you from doing it like every team i've been a part of you know we've got a mission we've got a vision we've got you know a team name or a team motto or you know stuff like that that you know you can do regardless of whether whether your executive team has done anything on that um jake has a has an interesting tactical question about the high touch low touch so he says what are the risks if any in moving from a high-tech high-touch to a low-touch model as the product matures and doesn't require as much engagement from a csm oh there's so many risks that's why product absolutely needs to be part of this program and you need to be measuring there are just so many platforms out there that can show you the hot spots of where's client getting stuck what do we need to improve uh you should be serving your clients understanding what went well with the new experience what didn't and then only once you have buy-in you need to proactively educate your team on the changes in the customer support model or the customer success model if you just spring it on someone and there's changes and suddenly they can't contact their csm you're you're destined for churn so it has to be a proactive thoughtful approach with any of these major changes that you're making and for an organization that's growing at scale you probably always and i think of cisco uh i don't know maybe 80 85 of their business is all through channel partners but they reserve csms for that 15 of the high touch sales force has done the same thing they laid off so many csm's this year and said you have to spend a certain amount of money to get a csm okay well how are the others helping themselves they have all these different channels before they made that announcement interesting um so so tom asked a question here that um i think probably for probably companies that are a little bit further along maybe maybe in cisco's bucket um so he says we have 30 plus products some are pretty complicated we don't have time to you know have an onboarding csm for all of our products not even our top 10 products so is it wise to then have a csm per product or per group of products which would result in maybe a customer with multiple csms what are your thoughts yeah oh that that's a pretty big question and i have um there there's no one answer i i think it starts with the sales to customer success handoff and understanding why did this client purchase the product what is their main pain point and what are they expecting it as their first key milestone event so really understanding why why are they a customer if you have 30 products i doubt they purchased 30 at once they may have said let's try one or three or something so you want to make sure you understand their pain point you want to show high value early in the experience and you want to ensure that they're adopting those platforms once you have that executive business review to sign off that they're up and running they've adopted the platform then you can ask them about the next pain points and educate them on your other products there is nothing worse than having an onboarding of every single bell and whistle that your platform has when i don't really care about it i just care i have to look like a hero to my organization i need this platform up and i need to be able to report out of it the rest let's talk about it another time i'm not even listening so that's my advice um yes you should have product experts but it's really odd to have 30 csms you should have one central person who guides the relationship and bring in export experts if you're a larger organization you probably have an enablement training program for your customers put them through that get them certified get them talking about your product but i think it's a little odd to have more than one central person who that client can go to with the exception of support they need to be educated go to support for technical issues i am your central person when it comes to um adoption and enabling you to be successful so to use kind of a football term i've got a quarterback and then i've got other folks that all that all that i'll bring in as needed the one thing that i find that a lot of companies think about and i just see them screw up and i've screwed this up myself which is we think internally we think what's the best way for us to operate to to build the best operations to build the best cost efficiencies and we forget to actually just like ask the customer like okay we have 30 products that you bought from us we have 10 products that you bought from us like what's your preference would you rather work with subject matter experts or would you rather work work with one person who knows a little bit about five things right and that oftentimes leads to some interesting insights so we've got five minutes left we now that i'm looking at we're gonna have we're definitely not gonna get to everything but um if there's any last questions um maybe let me see here we've got elise's question [Music] i guess um maybe i'll ask i'll ask this one question here and then like if there's any just last words that you want to share with anyone amelia before um so this this question is just you know can you use this framework the 100-day framework if you're building your cs team from from scratch and if so like help us understand that um i assume your answer is yes but um yeah yeah i'd love to hear your thoughts yeah absolutely um so i i do coach leaders who are building a team from scratch they are the team and now they they now have to hire someone so i think first how do you get great talent well you show them that you're organized you have a vision you have a strategy so of course you should have this in place and again it's to hold yourself accountable to focus you to help your executive team be aligned behind what you're doing i think that's really important so the strategy that you put in place will help you achieve your goal uh it also will help you tell a story we're humans we love storytelling if you have a strategy in place you can sell your vision to great talent to your organization to your customers and that takes a communication strategy so that's part of the score you how are you going to communicate this to your organization and to your clients how will it help them so remember your strategy is achieving your goals but it's about enabling others as a servant leader put that put that at the top uh the the operationalizing is important if you don't have a strategy to operationalize everything you're doing you're going to burn out so fast and then you will become an ineffective leader it will help you build relationships they'll see you as someone who's got got themselves together who is focused and then you're able to execute faster when you have a strategy in place and again that's that's why we we built this score uh one page program awesome really appreciate it i learned a ton about maturity models about getting buy-in around obviously the 100-day plan and so i think everybody else will will echo that you know this has been a great session they've learned a ton i will just to reiterate we'll we'll send out the recording we'll send out the slides so if you're if there's part you missed we'll we'll get that to you um amelia any final words of advice any final calls to action anywhere you want to point folks um before we before we wrap up yeah i i think the two things i'll say is any strategy starts with you make sure you're focused make sure you take care of yourself if you're running around frazzled you don't have a strategy in place a frame a framework a pla um a playbook how can you enable your team as a strong leader they're looking to you to be calm and to lead the team and that takes having great leadership communication skills that takes processes hence the framework and then that takes technology to really help you scale as an organization awesome well i like i said i learned a ton on that last one i'll just put a plug in if anybody wants to talk about customer success technology i'm i'm more than willing to to have a chat but i learned a ton really appreciate you taking the time amelia