Measurements around Proactive Behavior
emf83194
Member Posts: 1
I am solidifying my team's goals for Q4 and one of our key objectives is ensuring we are being proactive with accounts and bringing valuable insights, materials & discussion to every interaction. What types of measurements have you put around this or do you suggest putting in place? I want to ensure it's a clear, quantifiable goal that we can track against. Thanks for the help!
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Hey there! We just started tracking engagement metrics to start. We ultimately need to get to more insight mining but first wanted to make sure we understand the basics. Things we are looking at are: have we talked to our champion or buyer in last X days. Are we talking to enough people and expanding our reach into the account. And lastly we are really hawkish on running QBRs etc... when necessary.
We saw engagement as one of the things we can tell our reps to change that day which almost became our leading, leading indicator.
We had to build our own software to keep up with most of this, but this is allowing us to go to our reps and coach on engagement before coaching on using that time to value capture.
Hopefully that makes sense!0 -
Often there's a wide range of preferences and expectations regarding these measures across accounts. What one customer sees as valuable, another might see as unnecessary. That's why many of our clients are focused more on measuring the outcomes, such as high survey participation and scores, retention/renewal/expansion, overall engagement (i.e. receptive to regular calls, business reviews, serving as a reference, etc.).1
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We measure relationship depth and breadth in an account, using our own Waypoint's TopBox SaaS to do the heavy lift. Per Evan's comment in this thread, measuring the right leading indicators from the CUSTOMER's perspective -- not the internal view / what the CSMs think or assume -- is the key.1
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I think the most critical element is this part: "bringing valuable insights, materials & discussion to every interaction". What keeps customers engaged and retained and successful isn't a touchpoint, it's the value that's delivered in that touchpoint.
A lot of companies forget that, and set up things where the CSM emails you every week to say "Just checking in! Everything good?" It doesn't take long before that's basically a spam email and the customer just stops opening anything the CSM sends them.
Another common mistake is a one-size-fits-all touchpoint schedule. Like @Evan Klein said, some customers see a weekly chat as valuable, and some see it as a waste of their time. Let your customers define the best cadence for themselves. When I was at SnackNation, we grouped them into Dogs, Cats, and Bears - the dogs want to hear from us a lot, the cats want to hear from us now and then, the bears don't want to hear from us unless it's absolutely critical.
So I'd argue that the common metrics, like "talk to the customers X times per week/month/etc", are confusing the cart for the horse. Step one is to figure out what provides genuine value for the customer, like a call one month after they go live because your platform is complicated and people usually need help figuring out the more advanced features.
Step two is to build your cadences around providing that value. If you aren't providing customer value, you don't get to reach out. (The key word there is customer, because every department wants you to reach out to the customers to get info that's valuable for Marketing and Tech and so on.) Step three is to track these interactions and make sure CSMs are accountable for completing them.
At SnackNation, we had a handful of universal touchpoints that took a customer through onboarding and then to about 6 weeks after onboarding - that applied to every customer. The value there was in getting them onboarded and then customizing their preferences based on how they felt about their first and second month's deliveries.
From there, we had different cadences for Dogs, Cats, and Bears, but all three of those cadences were still built around value we could provide. Dogs get all the power-user tips about how to make the most of their membership, Bears only get quarterly emails where we lay out the ROI we're seeing on their accounts (and give them a chance to let us know if they disagree).
Lastly, we had certain yellow flags and red flags that could trigger a touchpoint, and in those cases the value was "I see that (stuff about your account/activity), and this usually leads to (problem the customer doesn't want). I'd like to make sure we stop that before it becomes an issue that you have to deal with."
You do need a process for customers who never respond, because you'll probably have some of those, so we counted it as "complete" if the CSM had done something like make four calls and send four emails over the course of two weeks. Sometimes customers will let you know they're too busy or something, in which case we'd try to lay out the value we could provide and make sure they still felt that way. For example, "I know you wanted to reach X goal by Y date, and right now you're a little off-track to hit that goal. I wanted to go over how we can get you back on track for that - would it be worth twenty minutes to make sure you can hit your goals?" That usually works, and if they still say no, there's no sense trying to twist their arms. If it doesn't work most of the time, it's a great sign that you're either not providing enough value or not communicating the value well enough.
Once you've built this process, don't forget to adjust workloads to accommodate it. If you end up saying that each CSM is going to average eight new touchpoints per week, and a touchpoint takes 45 minutes when you factor in post-call/post-email notes and account adjustments and so on, then you also have to remove six hours of work per week from each CSM.
Hopefully this hasn't all been too off-topic! The end result is that we had clear quantifiable goals for the CSMs: for each account, we know all the touchpoints that should have happened, and all we have to do is check if they did happen.3
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