Best Of
Strategies for GTM Teams
The market and financial fluctuations impact your customers, and it is important that you identify any risks to deals or renewals and create a relevant POV to create effective messaging and engagement.
An example for increasing your knowledge without having to become a financial expert is using ChatGPT prompts to see if and how your accounts are effected.
What are some ways you are combining marketing info and customer impact in your health scoring?
*by the way…GGR just released a blog on this topic if you want to get some chat prompts.
Re: Help! Strategies for Value and Sales Alignment
Hey @Kevin —
I suggest you start with what your new GM cares about: revenue and cost impact. Frame the team's contributions in terms of increasing the likelihood that customers will stay and buy more. Improving the odds by even a small percentage typically pays for the entire team, makes a substantial margin contribution, and generates attractive ROI—even without counting upsells or cross-sells.
You might want take a look at an excerpt from one of the modules in my self-paced Udemy course, Advanced Customer Success, that describes how to make a simple, intuitive business case. It gives some top-down guidance for CSM coverage as well. I can send you the spreadsheet if you wish. If your environment is tiered or you need to show your team's impact empirically with hard data, I'm happy to help with that as well.
Ed Powers
How do you identify and measure successful client engagement?
We are planning virtual sessions for our community members to learn best practices for use of our technology and network with their peers. I’m curious how other organizations support networking for their community members.
I am also wondering how other success organizations measure if the client networking session was successful in the following areas:
- response rate
- level of engagement during the session
- increased use/adoption of our technology, evidence the client found value
- sales opportunities/securing renewal
- improved CSAT
- improved client health
Any other areas you would measure?
kmcgrew
Re: Hiring Assessment for CSM
Hi there!
Our CSM hiring process consists of three parts:
- Practical Assessment - Candidates receive access to a demo instance and watch a demo recording. They then answer some questions and build some practical items in the demo instance. This allows us to test their logical thinking and ability to learn tools quickly.
- Strategic Conversation - Candidates with a good score are invited to a strategic conversation. We discuss their experience in detail and assess them based on practical examples of soft skills and job requirements to determine if they are a fit.
- Final Interview - This is a "how things would look if you were hired" conversation. The candidate is invited to our office (although it can also be remote) to meet potential colleagues, see what a normal day as a CSM looks like, understand the challenges we face, and share ideas and thoughts on practical situations to assess their fit within the team.
I hope this helps!
A Fresh Invitation to Write a Blog for GGR
Hi everyone,
Heather and I revamped our Blog Hosting Instructions for 2024 a little while ago. We invite you to review them and consider contributing to the wealth of information we already have.
Sharing your experience and skills with a large CS audience can increase your industry profile, helping you build your personal brand.
• Your blog will be posted in our active community with over 11,000 members.
• We will share your blog post on the GGR social media page with over 25,000 followers.
• You will receive a link to the blog along with a social media graphic to share with your personal network once published.
Click here to get started.
Re: Staying out of the weeds and in the strategy
ChatGPT can be very helpful here. Plugin the details of your company and team size and have it ask you questions on what you should be considering based on your role. This can help ground you and pull you out of the weeds. You can also ask the question: If someone was hired to replace you, what is the first thing they would do?
In addition, ask other functional leaders for input.
Re: Beyond Per-Seat: Exploring Alternative SaaS Pricing Models
Usage/Consumption Based
I am navigating the firm I'm at to a consumption-based model. I like it because consumption is a strong economic indicator of perceived value. High consumption levels of anything typically suggest that people find significant value in the thing they are purchasing — product, feature, time, leisure, etc.
Challenge:
- operationalizing our backend to make this happen — we're not set up to track and charge in this way… yet.
Training:
- it is easier for the team to wrap their head around this model. If you use more of something, you should pay more. I started with a metaphor of eating adobo (my team is based in the Philippines): the more adobo you consume the more you will likely have to work out to burn the calories. I then said, we want our customers to eat more adobo, and in the same way we have to work out to burn the calories, as our customers consume more they'll pay more. It clicked. At that point, I simply shared how we intend to operationalize it.
Price-Based
I am navigating to the consumption-based model from a priced-based model. We upsold clients by increasing the value of the goods they paid for. We showed that the customer lifetime value-acquisition cost ratio of consumers acquired through our service outperformed other acquisition channels and made the case to consolidate their spend through us.
Challenge:
- I developed a strong partnership with my counterpart in sales. Our ability to have a price-increase conversation post-sale was a function of his team's ability to get information pre-sale. He and I spent time over-communicating the importance of discovery questions like: what is a new client worth to you? How much do you spend to acquire new clients? What is your most efficient channel of customer acquisition? How do you measure that efficiency?
Training:
- This falls into the challenge category too — many of the CSMs I encountered did not have experience with this growth-by-price models; engineers and people with supply-chain backgrounds seem to latch onto this model right away.
- I trained with metaphors — the cost of buying apples that will be converted into apple pie. The training goal was to train theory first and then show the applications of that theory. CSMs learned how to ask these pricing types of discovery questions during renewal motions AND then execute a price increase pitch.
- To get the CSMs to pitch on price, I had to get them to understand lifetime value (LTV) and acquisition cost (CAC) and how to quickly see the LTV:CAC ratio from our service stacks up against the client's next best alternative.
Outcomes
- Price-based model worked; however, our successes were not repeatable due to product>sales overestimating delivery — which has since been corrected.
- Price-based model was good for keeping saving at-risk accounts. While we may clients may have renewed flat, they renewed because they perceived the economic efficiency of our service.
- Usage-approach, customers repeatedly tell me "I'm happy to pay for what I use". I interpret that as a signal that there's demand for this type of approach for the firm (we do growth marketing). I also believe this is how more of our competitors operate.
Learnings:
- I wish I used a price-based model at a firm I once worked at — SaaS that built a agency-management software that included a lead gen/quoting/CRM component. My hypothesis is that the LTV:CAC storytelling framework would have led to more SMBs renewals. The reason is, most people don't stop to think about the long-game… so there's a strong opportunity cost play there: "why would you give up the potential for long-term benefits for short-term and more-risky gains?"
- The usage-based approach (which I've done twice) is the model I love most because it directly maps to consumption which is a strong economic indicator of perceived value. At one firm, we did a usage-price-tier model.
Hope these ideas are helpful! Feel free to ping me if I can create more clarity or share more thoughts… or, if you have critiques or thoughts for what I might reconsider — I enjoy making Bayesian-style updates to my worldview.
Thanks for the prompt, @Keith P !
Re: TLC - Is AI a 3-Dimensional PLG?
I found Chat GPT as a good source of information. I can also use parts of the content as a baseline and it does require some edits. Many people shared very positive experiences with tools that save time in writing emails and presentations. Other tools will create clips/videos very quickly and more. Technology will eventually catch up with what we expect it to delver.
Re: CRM & Project/Task Management
Hey @Michaela Wieand . Thanks for the question, and welcome!
- CRM: Salesforce. Like @Keith P , our use-case is similar.
- Project Management: We use clickup. Similar to monday.com. I was using clickup's document feature as a wiki; though, we recently decided to move the wiki function to notion.so.
- Both notion and clickup have slack integrations that we use.
Hope that helps!
Starting from scratch: lessons learned
With more than ten years in Customer Success and rebooting a program from scratch and fresh to a new role, here are some of my lessons learned on how to start (or restart) a successful digital program.
1) Do not call it scale, tier three, digital touch, tech touch or anything that brands it low value, low cost, and automated. It's a strategy, not a tier, that promotes self-service, data driven campaigns and crowd sourcing solutions. Whatever branded will be repeated throughout the organization and then outside and you will hear customers told things like "you’re a low ARR customer," "it's a bunch of automated emails," etc... and it will filter down to customers. You will also be looked at as less than, not real CS, or a cheaper version of CS that does not deserve or need resources assigned to it.
2) Get buy in across the organization and over communicate every step of the way. One part feather, one part hammer, you bring in all key partners and make sure they know exactly what you are doing, why and how it will affect them. It’s a kind partnership that you are unrelentingly pursuing and won’t stop until every partner understands your vision, agrees to it (or at least accepts it) and knows what you are doing why. Leave anyone out or be limited in communicating with them and expect that they won't know, or care, and watch your program wither or worse, be undermined with inconsistency.
3) Start with a few easy wins. Look for where you can pick off a win or two and go for that first. One win and you can then tackle some of the harder parts. Automate the CSM introduction or onboarding messaging, or another manual task. This will help drive partnership and morale and set the foundation for success as you tackle difficult problems like bad data, poor internal adoption of systems and tools or missing pieces of the program you need to create from scratch.
4) Do not segment your program. Your entire CSM team and the organization are part of your scale and efficiency program. It's a company wide initiative. You need the expertise that is already on your team and if you segment (Enterprise, Mid-Market, Other) it becomes problematic to get the first two tiers to be engaged and supporting the "lower tier" or to try develop that expertise independently. It's not my job. I have a portfolio I own and am not touching that! I don't want more work. Everyone participates in the community. Everyone will be part of a customer issue if and when their expertise or availability warrants involvement. Think of it like Trader Joe's. No one specializes and is strictly a cashier. They might be a cashier on Monday, doing cart duty Tuesday and split between re-shelving and cashiering on Wednesday. You have your portfolio and will not own other customers, but you will play a role managing campaign responses, working with customers who do not have a dedicated CSM when your expertise is needed and supporting other team members on occasion. It's one team. This is how you scale effectively.
