New KPI Tracking

Andy Swansburg

My company is beginning to track CS Rep meeting activity and engagement metrics. We are mostly looking at:
Are our QBRs happening?
Have we met with our champion in last 90 days?
Have we had an exec-to-exec meeting this year?
Are we single-threaded (relying on one person in our customer)?
How quickly are we responding to emails etc...
And a handful more.

2 Questions,
1. Is anyone else tracking this stuff? And is it valuable? Seems like a lot of work to set up. 
2. If so, how are you doing it? Is it within your CS platform and custom reporting?

Would love to know! 

Ed Powers

Yes, I've tracked these things before, in the spirit that "you must inspect what you expect." Collecting data and providing consistent feedback helps to create new habits, either when a change has occurred or a new employee has joined. Once stability has been achieved, collecting and reporting cadence can reduce down to periodic audits in many cases. You may find analyzing your data that some of these metrics covary with outcomes like retention and growth. Those become KPIs that can be used in customer health score computations, and emphasizing and tracking them becomes key. 

Data like this is pretty easy to collect in Salesforce, but I've found using Power BI or another tool to extract and analyze data much easier than standard SFDC reporting. I have not tried this Tableau recently, but since their acquisition by SFDC, perhaps the tool offers some new advantages.  

Hope that helps!

Andy Swansburg

Thanks Ed! Did you find any of the metrics you tracked particularly correlated with key business outcomes. I have a suspicion that executive engagement and how we are managing our champions are going to be important. Would love a thread to pull on from your experience though! 

Ed Powers

Hi Andy--Generally speaking, "single-threading" is a risky proposition. Developing more and deeper relationships with all the members of the customer's Decision Making Unit typically has significant impact on customer retention and growth. However, the specifics vary greatly by circumstances, so in consultant-speak, "it depends" how much impact you will see in your particular case. I recommend you state your hypothesis, collect data, and conduct factor analysis or build a predictive model to determine your answer. 

Sarah Patel

Engagement data is very useful as a leading KPI, and to provide insights into if the teams are following best practice (and if it's making a difference), it's a great non-financial metric to track, and it shows the company really values CSMs investing in time with their Customers. 

However/And... <everyone> hates the administration of logging and filing and filling in data.
Aiming for granular and perfect can lead to revolt and unhappy CSMs telling you it takes too long, or having every e-mail and 5 minute conversation filed which is just too much noise, or turning your CS Ops or line managers into a team of naggers (which is not fun for anyone)

I suggest initially focuses on Business Reviews (or other key CSM-led customer meeting):

• What's the best practice cadence for your company / this client segment? - set this as a target
• Track if the meetings are happening 
• File the PPT & minutes in consistent location as contents valuable for the rest of the Customer Team 
• Maybe add a flag 'Is executive present?' or 'sentiment' 

And / or where CSMs are leading Onboarding

• What's the best practice 'Moments that Matter' meetings for your company / this client segment
• Track...
• File...
• Collect sentiment / other key data point

Andy Swansburg

So helpful! @Ed Powers I am going to take a look at that course!
Sarah, thank you for the thoughtful feedback. Curious in your first paragraph, you mention some best practices around engagement. Any list off the top of your head of ones that jump out? Things like "single-threadedness".

Let me know!

Sarah Patel

@Andy Swansburg -
In general I say 'best practice' in terms of your company's best practices - like I would definitely say that having business reviews is best practice - but the shape of that, cadence, audience etc... would need to be tuned to your company, Customers, CSM capacity, partnership with Sales etc...

As categories of engagement best practice my thoughts are:
1) Key meetings - are they happening? cadence? right stakeholders? provide Customer value? filed?
2) Customer sentiment - via NPS, CSAT, maybe a survey sent before a business review. Sentiment needs to be logged to be a data point, and in a culture where we value what we measure - if we say customer intimacy and strategic engagements are important (and drive results) it's good to have a way to measure this. Might need to experiment. It can be a good counterpoint to other Customer Health data based on usage metrics etc... 
3) Right Stakeholders - who are the personas you want your CSMs to engage with? The users? influencers? decisionmakers? are you engaged with them? are they engaging with you? Do you find some stakeholders attend webinars, some never attend meetings, some constantly call? This might help with your single-threading question. You might be building a great relationship with the IT manager, but if it's the CTO calling the shots on the renewal then that needs to be looked into

A pivot on 'single-threadedness' in terms of 'us' relying on a single stakeholder at the customer side, is where the Customer relies on a single person at the software vendor side. This isn't good for business robustness. If you find this is the case then you might want to crystalize who the Customer should call for different questions, and also ensure your teams have processes set up to cover each other so that if one CSM is sick or rides off into the sunset, their Customers are still well looked after.