Customer success pipeline stages in employment contracts

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this is a very basic example of a customer journey but let's take through it let's walk through it and talk about specifically for i mean 90 of the folks that don't have this well-defined and are still working on theirs let's talk about this basic model dig deep maybe not dig deep but dig into each of the steps and talk about a couple of things that you should be thinking about as you go through this journey and put it together great examples here of different phrases you might have in your customer journey map you don't have to have all these phases in fact these are great frameworks and pillars of areas of activities that i would actually really encourage everyone to think through when we work with our clients there are actually eight of them so this is a good example of the five out of eight areas that i actually recommend thinking about when doing the journey maps and what i love most about this slide is that it starts with what is the goal for each phase and we actually have a template that we use with our clients to say all right what are the phases we might rename the phases because we know that when we have a name we're going to use it with our clients accidentally so we think carefully about how do we want to brand the name of the face so that the customer understands what the focus is for them define what is the objective what a success looks like at the end of that phase so that even csms would know when does this phase end [Music] one thing that i notice a lot of times is that we don't have clear accountability for each phase so if it's a bigger company a lot of times you might have different people different specialized roles owning specific phases in the customer journey so make sure you're very very clear about that and then of course you now that you have the objectives you have the key metrics for each phase you have the owner now it's time to outline the different activities you wish to include and then maybe before you design the activities you can start with okay what activities do i have now and then what are the opportunities and risks i have with these existing activities that i already have so what are the additional activities that i need to add to this space mitigate risks as well as promote upsell opportunities early on in the process i want to give brian a second to comment on just like the overall framework for for how he thinks through laying out this journey and then we'll go into each of the stages yeah great great comments from maria you know for me two additional items to add number one when you take a look at this roadmap and it's a template right that's exactly what it is each one of your roadmaps is going to be different depending on exactly who your customer base is right even in the same industry you might have a different ideal customer profile so you really need to you know find something a template that you like but then make it your own don't make it somebody else's make it your own based on what you feel is most successful for your organization the second thing i'll recommend everybody is as you go through not only the individual stages but the overall journey itself we always try to use our cue to start the end in mind and what i mean by that is what is it i want at the end of the path overall from my customer well most people would say i want them to either expand or retain right just where your company is and then break that down into each section what do i want at the end for my customer from an onboarding standpoint what is that singular statement i can make about how successful my onboarding is or how successful my my adoption is right so if you sort of have that north star if you will that allows you to really build out sort of the process the steps as you go through your through your map think about starting with that singular end goal both overall and with each areas so that and then work backwards from there do you recommend having journey maps for multi-year relationships for example your year one might be on boarding and then maybe in year two it starts at adoption or something like that what would you guys recommend when you sign the multi-year deal if you liked what you've heard so far that's awesome more coming in a second here but in the meantime i want you to click that like button so that youtube knows that this is great content and you can start sharing it with others 100 yes so there's different ways to skin this cat and i think sometimes what we're seeing is that the year one might have different phases than year two and then what happens in the real world is it quan customers might move from you know they might then opt into additional modules or additional products as your company grows and purchases or goes through m a's and then they might cycle back to that year one mode because now you need to onboard them to another solution or maybe the customer change and they acquired another company now they want you to implement and onboard this other region that they now have think about it the customer journey we really like linearly usually draw it but the reality is that customers go through it in a cyclical way very very often the reason i said year one and year two is because it's easier to think about it like that but a customer might have go through these phases again and again over time could sign somebody onto a new product and then you got to start with the onboarding again you could lose a power user and get a new person that you have to train and you're starting from onboarding again you're making it sound like this is like a very challenging role to be in it never ends and it always starts over like that's not fun customers might go you know after a year or two they might go back to an implementation phase with you partially or fully for a number of reasons so it's just important to say when we're just implementing a new module or a new product for them or even a new team you know are they in a more fragile state so i would actually develop one customer journey map for these phases in mind and think what are the inherent risks in that early stage or in a re-implementation process versus later on when we actually get them so to a value statement and and they're much more open for upsell and cross-sell okay now let's break these down into each of their individual buckets and just talk a little bit about how we should be thinking about each of these stages um so brian if you can lead us off talking a little bit about onboarding how do you think about the onboarding stage in this process what are the some of the markers that a customer has moved past this stage and maybe a couple data points of hey what people should be thinking about capturing during that step in the journey we talk about the most important stages and not to leave the the witnesses but onboarding to me is probably the most crucial part of your customer journey part you think about every first interaction that you've had either with an individual or a company a product software solution it's always important to get off on that right foot with that said what i would highly encourage you all to think about from an on-boarding process is is one word and that's simplification simplify your onboarding process are you gonna be able to show your customers everything all the product functionality of your app in the first 60 days probably not have a really good understanding of the value that they're looking for make sure you have a really good meeting with your your sales team your ae understand what was said in the sales conversation and design your journey map around doing that a marker that they have exited the onboarding stage and are now in the next stage like what do you look for and a couple data points that you might recommend people are tracking during this stage before we continue don't forget subscribe to our youtube channel and smash that notification button so that you don't miss out on any new videos to understand if they're out of the on-boarding stage i think it's when when your customers are getting results or some people might call it they're getting value out of your product no more are we sort of in the honeymoon stage we are actually being able to use your solution to drive our business to be better right and that can come from a couple of ways you can ask the customer directly call or voice a customer survey you can track it yourself right and provide reporting some organizations user iq is working on this right now we're working on an roi tracker right so we can actually go to the customer and say hey this is what you ask us to do this is what we see from our side is happening to you here's data to support that and so are they able to do essentially what you told them to do from a kpi standpoint what we look at at user iq so we we use surveys as a heavy indicator right are you getting value from our a solution yes or no a yes means that at that point they're probably they're close to at the end of the onboarding phase a no or no response means that they're probably still in the onboarding phase right because they're not driving value i think that when the customer starts talking to you about data and being able to report back to their organization i think that's a key marker that they sort of move past the onboarding stage because they've got the product set up they they're seeing the value and now they want to know how to report that value back to their colleagues their bosses their board stuff of that nature so i think those are the the key kpis one last thing to mention on this is the value kpi has to come from the customer so if you think that the value is coming in 30 days but your customers are saying it's 90 days it's 90 days it's not 30 days listen to what your customer is saying in there how do you think about onboarding i would love to hear your perspective first of all brian i really love how you capture the value via survey and then use that as a milestone to say when is the onboarding complete because i still find myself in conversations with new clients where i asked them when is your onboarding complete well after 90 days what if they haven't logged in in 90 days yeah like so sometimes they do that because it's a more complex system they want to communicate to customers that hey you have 90 days to complete this after that you need to purchase service i get that but honestly that's the external conversation that's fine but you can't really define the onboarding phase completion but by anything but delivering value or an initial value to customers and so i want to celebrate what brian said that even if you are very much into a tech touch a very low touch type of companies they even struggle more because with a high touch you can actually ask the customer because you have an assigned csm or an assigned professional services person and maybe that brian brought up around surveys are you getting value or not is a great way or having them ask about reports it's a great way to just do this in a more agile manner so i really love that that's something that i learned from this webinar thank you brian besides that i think that a lot of companies need to think through that first value delivered concept what should it even be what would you like to recommend to customers that they should opt into as first value because sometimes that's a big risk the onboarding experience they either think that they can implement everything in during the onboarding phase which is like the big bang approach get me everything until then i don't want anything or they're trying to say you know too many records too many accounts to be brought into you know whatever records they have too much database to be infused and actually it's good to start small um there's certain use cases that have massive value or even a little bit of value but they're just easier to adopt easier to implement faster we want to make those type of recommendations to our customers and say hey we recommend starting with this versus asking the customer what do they want and just being you know working towards scope versus working towards actual achievement and accomplishment of value i will say one more thing about onboarding is that you want to make sure that the scope of work if you have one for onboarding is being reviewed by the people who are supposed to do the onboarding itself and not just the sales team which is another pitfall that i'm seeing in the onboarding phase where sales dictates the scope of work and then now we're on the hook to just completely work ourselves out to make that happen as soon as possible and drives the team crazy how you think about the adoption stage in the journey and what is important from your perspective as people build that out just to clarify the way that i think about adoption is that phase right after onboarding you know the customer is very clear around the use case we gave them some features and functions and now our chief concern in order to get to the retention is just make sure that their end users are actually using it that leadership gets the insights they need so that they can do data-driven strategy decisions and i gotta say this is the main risk usually in year one usually not always but for like ninety percent of the time this is the main risk in year one we finished the implement gave them the keys are not using it so adoption is really about making our products sticky having them see the value and incorporate it as part of their processes ryan love to hear your perspective the adoption stage is really where you want to have a lot of your data on usage set up for for the customer how often they're using it how long they're using it what different features in the app or in your solution are they using and ensuring that what they're using again goes back to what they voiced to you to the sales team in terms of the value that they want to get out of your product right so that's very subjective that you can get from a multitude of different places starting the data gathering process here is crucially important that data also includes if you you know if you have a model it's a little bit more high touch and you have the csm connected to it making sure that the csm is regularly sort of defined by your organization following up with the customer and again asking are you getting what you need to get how can i help you can i show you something can i send you a help video can i do something for you record it and send it to you to add to your help library these are all things that we recommend doing and we practice here at user iq what question can help you lead the customer to quantify the value they're expecting because sometimes actually getting that information from the customer is not an easy thing to do so if you can give us maybe one or two examples of questions you can ask the customer to understand the value they're expected would be great first and foremost you want to think through to yourself and have like different things that you think you provided value to the customer in terms of impact to their business did you increase revenues increase productivity lowered costs you know we have like the different categories that are the usual suspects and then also work with sales on you know how does that articulate in your world through your product i think when you have this like list or buffet of use cases with a customer and you can show it even on a slide you can say i think we delivered this value to you and these are the type of things that you we haven't really addressed yet then you can have a conversation and that's typical in a high-touch model otherwise if you don't kind of like frame it for them they might not think about it in those terms not every customer is super sophisticated to articulate the value to you but if you suggest what the value is they could say that resonates with me or it doesn't yeah and hopefully you'd get some indication of that during the sales process if you get good hand over notes from sales about what they're looking to solve for i want to move on to retention i'm going to direct this one to eureka and let you talk about your goals objectives and how you think about the retention phase yeah so the retention is typically the that year or that moment where you actually need the customer to say yes we want to renew the contract for another month another year another three years i think the main thing about that process is did you do enough in the periods leading to that so a lot of times when we see a lot of risk in renewal we're actually impacting the adoption and onboarding phases rather than the renewal itself so what can you do you know three four five months before the renewal happens so first of all you may want to do a questionnaire to assess the customer's propensity to renew you may want to offer some incentives for customers to renew early if they refuse those incentives whether it's discount or additional features functions or additional receipts however the case may be you got a question do you really have a risk in the renewal because if they have already made up their mind three months before that they are going to renew they should opt to those early incentives to renew early versus later another thing that i noticed is that some very sophisticated companies actually have a very clear forecasting for renewal and they would create the renewal opportunity in their crm system as soon as the first renewal contract has been closed and then they will add fields to say what is the propensity of the renewal bill updated throughout the year not just very close to the renewal date and they'll also say you know if we have let's say ten thousand dollars worth of arr for this customer are we expecting nine thousand to come in meaning we are expecting a down sale or are we expecting an upsell and that could be updated throughout the year so that you can get a very accurate around the actual forecasted amount for renewals if that makes sense i'm gonna ask brian if you don't mind talking about expansion right so you've onboarded you've adopted they've adopted they're using a tool you just renewed them things are looking great thinking about expansion how do you look at that that's basically optimizing the results of that stage what are some of the indicators that you look for that says hey there's an opportunity here to expand the customer so you know retention expansion advocacy we i look at those as a result of right so these three areas are really a result of the adoption and the onboarding that your customers go through and the experience that they had in it for expansion when you think about expansion the number one key for me is how often are you asking questions of the customer and how often are you really listening to what they need sometimes we get into a process i do it more than i have to admit where i ask a question and i'm already onto the next question so in this case you know slow yourself down ask a question listen to their answer keep asking questions because you will get eventually to that additional need that they have in which case you can match that need with a potential solution that you have and then i would say that the only thing about expansion we're talking about customer journeys but expansion at times can be a little bit uncomfortable right anytime you go to sell something so the way i think about expansion from a journey standpoint is we want to make sure we have solid metrics in place in terms of their usage of the app what they said from a voice of customer what's going on with their organization right they can be using your app all they want but if their organization's not doing great it's probably inappropriate to go ask them for an expansion so you do need to be aware of how they're doing it don't be afraid of the word no because that's important in an expansion is you're going to hear no don't be afraid about about hearing that word and really focus on making expansion as a result of what you've done in adoption and onboarding brian one thing that i've noticed is yes if obviously you want to get to a trusted advisor relationship through successful onboarding and adoption however i can tell you that that's not enough we have to be first of all csm's are usually super uncomfortable with upsell and even the word upsell so instead the mindset should be can we offer more use cases can we understand what their problems are and offer more solutions and yes sometimes the solutions would require additional investment but the whole language of expansion shouldn't be about the revenues we can get but more about the use cases and the value that we can maximize for them and then the dollars will follow tools that we use to create those conversations in a value-based appropriateness is maturity models benchmark conversations best practices workshops methodology workshops you know webinars with other customers sharing their processes and strategies those are the types of things that solidify you as a trusted advisor next you want to create very clear paths to realize that value so in the conversation you might just exclusively talk about the use case and methodology and then you would follow up with this is the success plan that includes all the pieces and all the different widgets that you now need to invest in to realize those goals and objectives that we agreed upon in our other discussion so i think that i just like to emphasize to brian in the audience how important it is to invest in what we call value-based selling and then have the csm empowered with tools and templates so they can socialize what is that path to realize that value whether it includes additional revenue or not brian if you can bring us home with advocacy advocacy is a result of what you've been able to build through what you read has talked about and through what i've i've talked about in in my experience and read i'll be interested to hear your comments on this it's probably the hardest part of the journey because we have asked so much from our customers already through retention through their time through expansion and so asking them to provide a quote a review whatever the case might be right it's just another ask for their time when i think about it here it really comes down to again using the metrics that we have that it has talked about when you're talking about it with the customer make sure that you pick the right time and the place to talk about advocacy with the customer that'd be my number one item right the right time in the right place don't use one or two folks too often right i want to make sure that you're developing a wide breadth of folks that you can go to so you're not always having to go back to the same well and again same thing as expansion it's okay to have the conversation here at the appropriate time yeah and i think you mentioned like using listening for those signals or markers where it's appropriate to ask the customer to talk about like you know the next piece of you know your whatever it is that you provide or or have that conversation about would they do something that you ask them to do like the timing is right being sensitive and empathetic to things going on in their world will make those conversations be a lot less awkward [Music] you