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Early CSM Organization Tips - surviving those scrappy days, pre-CRM
Hi! I'm curious to learn how you help CSM teams managing 25 - 60 accounts, the most at risk segments who require advisory services more than a product in order to ensure success (product value is there but renewal success is dependent on an indirect variable related to customer building a type of sales motion). This is…
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Churn: Post Mortem
Good day GGR team, I am in search of a churn Post Mortem template . This would be some kind of analysis to submit to upper management. As well, I was thinking, it could be archived and used as lessons-learned and use cases. Long game, it would be very cool if we can use the info to creae data point to help with risk and…
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Customer / Partner driven Success Planning
Has anyone driven customers / partners through a digital onboarding experience to initiate the joint Success Planning? Meaning, introducing the customer / partner to their customer portal experience, establishing goals and objectives and planning outside in. I see a ton of threads where internally organizations initiate…
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Stakeholder Mapping - Any hubspot apps or other digital tool recommendations?
Hi community, Any recommendations on tools to actively map stakeholders (customer) , relationships, etc.? Hubspot has orgcharthub ...anyone use it? any other recommendations that include visual representation/mapping? Thanks! Elkin
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T&M Billing
Is it just me, or is choosing to bill for SAAS professional services / support by time & materials a choice that is begging customers to have issues with invoices? How do I prevent my CSMs from needing to use all their valuable customer engagement time addressing billable “hours” and invoices? Customers know the CAM and…
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Death by email
We are a long-established SAAS company in the fintech industry. We've always had high email traffic in our CSM team. This can range from straightforward correspondence to more complex queries. Whilst we can upload and reply to emails into our CRM, this relies on our CSM remembering to do it. Also, it's creating a culture…
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Land and Expand questions/tactics
Hey All, I'm looking for some resources to help build a framework of questions and tactics to help our CSMs expand within their portfolio. I'm hoping for a little more beyond "Who else would your organization would benefit from this product?". Every industry is different, so having some general guidance as to how to build…
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Any alternatives to a big and ugly Excel file during onboarding and setup of your solution?
Hello brilliant minds of the CS community! I'm currently working on improving our onboarding process for our enterprise segment and I'm currently focusing on finding an alternative to the current way we collect the customer needs for the setup of our solution. Our solution is highly customizable to fit regulatory…
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Automation - Tech Touch Email Best Practices
Hi all - we're early stage CS and working on implementing automated engagement and tech touch journeys. Can anyone share any resources, best practices, tips, or examples of really effective email templates/formats for CS engagement? Even just principles or guidelines you use. I'm obviously trying to do some research on the…
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Architecting an LMS - Trying to Build a 'One Size fits Many'
Question to the community. As I work with customers across a variety of programmatic service areas regarding the deployment of an LMS I find myself wanting to get away from customization and begin using some kind of template(s) for those that are in parallel with various 'marketplaces'. Does anyone know of a good resource…
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Defining Cadence: Letting the Customer Decide
Question to the group: our team has long struggled with setting/maintaining a QBR schedule with our strategic customers. I've long held the position that in our industry (the nonprofit sector) they are essentially pointless; as IT staff and other key decision makers are typically overwhelmed by other work-related duties…
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Creating Strategic Account Plans
Hey all, I wanted to gather some feedback here around creating strategic account plans. I find that Success (& our sales partners) is often reactive rather than proactive and we are beginning to think about how to create proactive account plans for our clients (i.e. only come up with a game plan/strategy when there's a red…
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growing my "strategic thinking" muscles in CS operations
My boss has challenged me to contribute strategically in my role leading the customer success operations team. Searching for inspiration, I came across a table at https://www.smartkarrot.com/resources/blog/customer-success-ops/ that I adapted to what I aspire for our team. I'd welcome pointers on my journey to more…
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Emailing users vs buyers
Newer CSM here... I am working on crafting cancellation emails to group users as opposed to the group admin (more likely the buyer). I am trying to do research on this, and just getting general cancellation email advice, but what I am looking to learn about is how to differentiate the email when contacting the head of the…
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Has anyone formalized a customer executive sponsorship program within their CS org?
Curious as to the processes. To be clear, this is a process where senior ( V or C level) executive team within your organization, develop an active role or relationship with the executive manager (usually C level) of the customer. It's worth mentioning that this is specifically for top segment/enterprise customers, since…
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Customer and Internal Referral Program
Hi Team - we want to roll out a referral program both internally and to our customers to help boost our word of mouth marketing. Has anyone tried this and what was successful in terms of prizes/reward and roll-out?
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Churn Analysis
Hi GGR Community, I am in the early stages of exploring a process to conduct exit interviews from churned customers. The thinking being learn from your churn. As part of the process, I am toying with the idea of having a 3rd party vendor conduct an exit interview with the customer. Reaching out on here to see if anyone is…
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When clients are dark or "ghosting" vendors
Hi all, I'm interested in hearing the thoughts and wisdom of this group around dark or "ghosted" customers. Despite many improvements to customer engagement, we continue to have strategic customers who ghost us for one reason or another. I welcome your insights on how do you re-engage these customers? I would love to…
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CS in Deal Reviews
Hi There, New member from this community. How do you ensure that CSMs are engaged consistently in large deals and the CS perspective is inputted prior to the sale?
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Charging for Professional Services..building the model
Would love to hear from other folks who work in a hardware/software business and charge for professional services for onsight implementation services and project management work. How did you think about building the SOW/contracting, what costs were passed through to customers, and how is that structured in the contract, if…
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Product Demo Survey
Hello GGR, Happy day! I'm currently working on improving our current Product demo process for potential new clients and want to hear their opinion. We would like to implement a survey for this. See below the areas we want them to qualify: Ease of Demo Request Process Efficacy of the Product Demos Relevance of the Resources…
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How to create a customer success environment in my company?
Hello everyone, I totally recommend GGR as a great place to learn and help :) I'm working on developing a customer success framework in the company I currently work in, which is a Saas company. I have never developed a framework before so I'm learning as a go, I'm just waiting for the green light to start the project. I…
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How to create an escalation process pathways document
Has anyone built an escalation steps document? I need to create a document in which I identify risk factors/flags, what's the impact of that flag, how handle it, how we mitigate it and success criteria. I have searched all over the internet for a template to build off of but most are support focused and not CS.
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New name for account plans
Hi all :) Happy Thursday! I recently initiated a task to align the WoW in our Customer Success Teams. One of the things, that I am looking into is the way the CS teams work with account plans. In that connection, I would like to change the name "account plan" to something less "salesy". It is important to mention that I…
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New role for me.
I am in a new role of Customer Success Coordinator to provide support and strategy to the team. What kind of help in your CS roles would you like more support in? Things I can do to get trust from the team as we move in this new direction. Thank you
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Best practices to track important future released
Hello everyone, I have had a hard time finding ways, without a CRM, to keep track of those clients who are waiting for functionalities that we committed to letting them know when they will be released. We don't do it always but sometimes we are in a meeting with an important client who needs a specific feature to…
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Premise to Cloud Migration Strategy
Hello there I am looking at designing a premise to cloud migration strategy for our large premise base. Does anyone have ideas they can share? Also what are some of the lessons learned and who are the best examples of company's that have done this successfully? Many thanks Steve
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Renewal process managed by CSM
Hi, I would like discuss about how a CSM can handle the renewal phase.🧐 For my side, I contact the client about three months before the renewal date. If the customer doesn't wish to renew, the subject is escalated to the sales representative for further analysis. In your company, is the renewal phase managed by the CSM? If…
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How to effectively automate a one-to-many webinar process
Hello All, My team is launching a fully digital onboarding and engagement process for our small market clients, and we are going to be leveraging Zoom Webinars, coupled with Salesforce and ChurnZero to drive adoption with our small market clients. Where I'm struggling is with the mechanics of how to track who signs up, who…
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Scaling CS leveraging customer journey templates
Hi everyone, This question is really geared towards a less mature growing/scaling CS organization within a business... What resources/templates have you utilized to build your customer journeys? Cheers, Grant