CSM Summit - Agenda Ideas

Darko Kankaras

What topics would you bring up if 30 CSMs gathered for a three-day summit? 

Jeff Breunsbach

First, I would ask them what they would like - typically will get some good responses and they feel more invested. 

Second, I'd gather your management team and see what skills would be good to develop...based on current team skillset and the strategy you are implementing. 

I'd imagine these are a few of the key topics: 

• How to build and engage customers during a meeting
• When to identify a customer as an Advocate and how we can ask them
• Key ways to tell a story using data from our product
• Helpful ways we can engage our customers that goes beyond our product

Just some examples. 

William Buckingham

@Darko Kankaras

I'll second much of what @Jeff Breunsbach  said.  

I think it also largely depends on the maturity of your CS organization.   Often people focus on going broad or going deep on a few topics.... what matters most is you make it actionable.  If you present on topics which are ahead of your organization's CS maturity, none of it is actionable till you reach that maturity - they'll likely forget by that time.   

I think the greatest impact an in-person CS training can have is to look at the most important evolutions you want the team to make in the next 4 quarters based on your current and planned maturity state.   

It is easy to fall into the trap of (given the investment a summit requires), of trying to make the summit boil the ocean, trying to make it a 3-day bachelor's degree on CS.... it's too much for a CSM to soak in and actually action on.   Much more effective to just hone in on the three needles you want to move in the next year - hitting these goals in 3 vs 4 quarters.   

A few very oversimplified examples:

Current: inconsistent customer engagement. Goal: consistent customer engagements focused on driving adoption in pursuit of customer outcomes.
    CS Summit Focus:  A. Gaining Regular Engagement Buy-In.  B. Conducting Strategic Engagements.  c. Identifying and Reaching Outcomes. 

Current: Good adoption and engagement, but low realization of outcomes.   Goal: Outcomes and ROI achieved and confirmed by all customers. 
    CS Summit Focus:  A. Core Outcomes.  B. How to pitch and drive to core outcomes. C.  Quantifying and presenting outcome ROIs.   

Current:  Adoption and Outcomes commonplace both in quality and quantity, but Expansion is low.  Goal:  110%+ NRR 
    CS Summit Focus:  A. Identifying key pain points for primary expansion plays.  B. Quality discovery questions.   C.  Strategic Requirements Gathering/Quality Lead Generation for sales.  


Just my take.  I'm putting together a CS Summit/Bootcamp for November with a similar size audience.  Happy to discuss further if helpful, I'm sure we've each got ideas worth swapping. 

Kevin Mitchell Leonor

A 3 day summit should tackle what are some of the gaps the team is experiencing that could be solved by training, a roundtable discussion around current gaps that require more planning, and give inspiration to some self-driven initiatives.