Aligning Customer Success to Enable Your Customers' Lifecycle

Editor's Notes

• #4: InsightSqaured was founded in 2011 by Fred Schilmover, Sam Clemens and Bryan Stevenson. Originally the company aimed at targeting folks that used Bullhorn ATS for staffing. Today we have diversified a bit and provide Go-To-Market analytics for high growth sales driven companies. We have experienced triple digit growth over the last 2 years and added over 100 employees in the last 12 months. I have worked with my fair share of teams over the past 5 years, (2 Acquisitions of my company and 10+ acquisitions of other companies), there is no other team that I would rather work with.
• #5: We talked about this in our original vision. Depth, subject matter expertise, configurablity. Yes there are other analytics solutions out there (Domo, Tableau, Birst etc), but none of them do what we do as well as we do. When the primary focus of the buyer is analyzing their Go-to-market teams, we win all the time.
• #6: Spring Outing
• #10: One of the traps that a lot of customer success teams fall into is that they all of the effort in the first phase of the customer journey. While it is true that this is indeed a pivotal part of the journey, it is important to transition both your effort and the customer’s perception away from on-boarding after they realize “first value”. Following on-boarding you and your team should focus your effort on being value additive throughout the customer lifecycle. Our team meets individually and as a group often, and I tend to hit on value addition often. It is so much easier to create a relationship with someone if they see you as adding value rather than seeking value from them (try to teach them something every time you talk to them.)
• #11: Our onboarding process was 140 days on average back in January when I joined IS2. Through a number of initiatives that we will discuss a little later our configuration and CSM team have been able to whittle that down to roughly 50 days. While steady state was coming a lot later prior to the change in Onboarding, it didn’t really mean anything for the customer, due to the overwhelmingly workload and inefficient onboarding process, the CSM teams spent most if not all of their time concentrating on the onbarding and renewal clients and were happy to be free of the steady state clients. Today, our CSM’s spend time with our steady state clients through a number of mediums (Quarterly-ish business reviews. During the QBR our CSMs will do the normal process of talking to the customer about their teams usage as well as features in the product that they could be using. However where an IS2 QBR differs from most other vendor QBR’s is that we come to the table to add value. In this case we pull a few reports from IS2 and show you your results from either month over month or qtr over qtr and point out a few reports that will help you identify issues before they become one or help you further accelerate the growth of our organization. We also hold a bi weekly webinar series that alternates between functionality training and best practices for wrapping IS2 into your business. Over the next few weeks, we will be launching INSIGHTSQUARED ACADEMY. This customer facing portal will be hosted by members of the CSM team and offer functionality and best practice training webinars, while also acting as a library for our customers to browse through the amazing content that we have published without having to leave the IS2 APP.
• #15: As you saw 2 slides ago our customer success team was set up in a relatively basic format earlier this year. I am strong believer in keeping things as simple as possible (let’s be honest I am not that bright). However when you over simplify the model you create a world where no one is clear on where their job starts and Ends. Real world examples of this would be, our customer happiness team, they are responsible for configuration and support. If you don’t have a clear delineation between a customer’s onboarding and when they are in support (Steady state) the configuration rep will continuously be pulled in to service the support queue. In this model our support folks start every ticket with the intention of closing it out. Should they need assistance from the config team or even the actual rep that worked on the configuration, they are able to pull them into to discuss/troubleshoot but that config rep is not responsible for client contact or queue mgmt. Example 2 – Now that we have what is essentially 4 different types of CSM’s, you don’t have the same rep working on an account that has 10 employees and another account that has 10,000 employees. These accounts have very different needs and typically greatly varying expectations of their CSM.
• #19: This is probably the biggest change that we made suring
• #22: You may remember earlier, I mentioned that we were to focused on the beginning of the customer journey early on during our creation of customer success. While overall we were to focused, we may not actually have been focused enough on GETTING PEOPLE TO FIRST VALUE. Today we are acutley focused on delivering this first value as soon as possible. During the welcome call we discuss client configuration and ask them explicitly for the top 3 things/goals that they want to get out of InsightSquared. If this Welcome call is on Monday, we are typically back on the phone the following Monday delivering on at least one if not more than one of those goals. After we deliver the top 3 (or more) initiatives – we move on to INCREASING value by introducing additional feature and reports to the customer. The 30 day check in is a good indication of how the customers lifecycle will shape up. We review usage, confirm whether or not they feel we are delivering on the value promised during the sales cycle. If yes we introduce additional features, if no we work towards delivering that value based on the customers requirements.
• #24: Chaos theory…I chose this graphic because it represents a mathematic principle that holds very true for customer success. Firstly does anyone know what chaos theory represents (Free drink on me *Starbucks card)? Chaos theory is the study of dynamic systems, in which VERY small changes in the condition during the cycle can cause extreme differences at the end. In other words, where you are today determines where you end up however a small change to where you are today means that you could end up in a very different place. This is very true in customer success not only by relative position and perception but also in the small nuances that each customer success manager brings to a customer interaction. So if a small change can have a massively different outcome, imagine what vastly differing approaches can do to the outcome of a customers account after 12 months. Imagine this, one CSM is constantly teaching their account about your product. New features, existing functionality, how to apply it to their business etc, and another CSM is spending 90% of their time pitching additional products and services available through your business. While expansion is never a bad thing, if your CSM’s are tasked with developing adoption and preventing attrition, CSM #2 might have a hard time applying their effort towards these 2 goals.
• #28: Developing a North Star is simply giving your customer success team something to navigate by. Right now our team uses this concept to drive their daily activity. Is what you’re doing right now related to Retention, Extension, or education? If not, there is probably something that you should be doing related to one of those activities. A more abstract application of this concept is something else that we use at InsightSquared – Will it make the boat go faster? If what you’re doing is not going to help us retain or upsell a client move on and leave that on the dock.