The 5 Key Ingredients of a Success Plan

Hi all!

We've been talking to dozens of success teams while working on Arrows, and have seen a ton of different success plans at different companies. We've also talked to teams who aren't currently using a success plan, and they've asked us for some tips.

(sidenote: what is a success plan? a document shared with a customer to create consensus and mutual buy-in around your product)

So I thought I'd share the 5 key ingredients we've seen incorporated into the best success plans:

1. ? Goals

What are the high-level reasons the customer is using your product? Write these down because they're easy to forget, and the person who purchased may not be the one onboarding or using the product!

2. ? Outcomes

An outcome is how you tell whether a goal was achieved or not. What impact is your product expected to have? How do you and your customer measure success?

3. ???????? Key Players

Who does the customer email if they have a question? Who's responsible for driving the implementation on the customer's side? People need to know what they're responsible for, especially when there's a lot of folks involved!

4. ? Important Dates

How long will an onboarding take? How do you know if you're falling behind on an implementation? Dates! They don't have to be perfect, because dates will slip, but it's a lot easier to right the ship when everyone's on the same page.

5. ? Consensus

The most important piece of all-is your customer on board with this plan? Without consensus there's no mutual buy-in, and the success plan loses its ability to guide and support the customer relationship.

I go into more detail on each of the ingredients in the full blog post: The 5 Key Ingredients of a Success Plan

Would love to hear everyone's thoughts! Who else is using success plans with their customers? What are your must-haves when building a success plan? If you're not using a success plan, what's stopping you?

p.s. thanks to @Anita Toth for reading an early draft of this post!

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Comments

Aaron Thompson

Hi There - Anyone that's interested to learn how to use the SuccessPLAN Canvas for free, can download the tool, instructions and case study's about it here: https://successcoaching.co/successplan-canvas - We've taught thousands of folks this methodology over the past nearly 6 years and see great results from it time and time again.

Also, we offer an Outcome Based Selling bootcamp that goes through Outcome Development, Outcome Validation and eventual Outcome Delivery (by way of a set of step by step guides, like the SuccessPLAN Canvas). The next OBS Bootcamp can be found here: https://successcoaching.co/bootcamps/2020/september/outcome-based-selling-bootcamp (3-8PM British Summer Time).

Cheers!

Aaron

Benedict Fritz

Ooo yes this is a great one! Could potentially fit some of these pitfalls under the category of Outcomes (avoiding a bad outcome is still an outcome), but maybe it does deserve its own section.

Benedict Fritz

Hey Julie!

We've seen success plans in all kind of formats: Google Docs, PDFs, Trello boards, emails, within Salesforce, etc.

I'm of course a little biased in that I'm helping to build a tool that helps you manage a implementation/success plans called Arrows: http://arrows.to/

If you're curious about implementing a success plan in Google Docs or Microsoft Word we've also created a template that you can copy: http://arrows.to/resources/implementation-plan-template/

But in the end, anywhere you can store this information and share it with a customer can work great!

Julie Schifter

Hi @Benedict Fritz,

Thanks for sharing your 5 ingredients! I have a very low practical question in connection to your post. I was wondering if you could also share what are the best tools og places to make an actual Success Plan?

Best

Julie

Daniel Zarick

@Tracy Novello Hmm, no I never really saw that in our research. I'm sure it definitely is common, but I don't have any tips unfortunately. One of the reasons we started creating a tool for success and onboarding plans (Arrows.to) was so that teams could have visibility into all the plans being created and shared. However, there currently isn't an explicit approval flow, but I could see that being a good idea down the line.

tmnovello

Great question! Internal approval process prior to presenting and discussing with customer. This is a new motion for my team. I'm considering an internal approval process to make sure quality success plans are being shared. Thoughts on this?

Parker Chase-Corwin

This is a great template. Thanks for sharing! One additional area I'd also include (or maybe emphasize in another area):

Risk Management: Asking "what could go wrong?" is a great way to reveal all sorts of hidden landmines and make sure that there is a mutual plan to overcome obstacles from the start. I've seen too many success plans built on best case scenarios that never come close to coming to actual experience. Everyone is typically feeling very optimistic at the beginning of a project which leads to happy ears. Spending some time upfront on anticipating and preventing challenges is a great way to show your client that you are forward-thinking and that you earn permission to throw a flag out if things are going sideways.

Benedict Fritz

I haven't personally seen any success plans that had a customer-facing side and a separate internal-facing side. There's certainly often context and notes about a customer, but I've most often seen that data tracked within in a CRM or success tool, and wasn't really part of the success plan.

Jared Orr

This is great @Benedict Fritz. It's simple yet touches on everything that is needed for a successful success plan.

Question for you: Do you think it's important to have a success plan like this that is made to be shared with clients AND a success plan that is used for internal purposes in order to help CSM's succeed? The reason I am asking is that I recently posted my opinion about creating a success plan specifically to help internal CSM's succeed in their day to day efforts and have received some great feedback from the GGR community. Curious what your thoughts are.

Cheers!

Daniel Zarick

@Tracy Novello Can you share more what you mean by approval process? Approval by the customer, or for your team?

tmnovello

Hey there! Has anyone put into place an approval process for success plans? What is your criteria?

Benedict Fritz

Absolutely! We've seen some teams even share their screen with the customer while filling out a success plan, which I love!

Benedict Fritz

That makes a ton of sense, Adrian! Would love to hear more about how you integrate the enablement plan into the success plan. Are both tracked within the same tool? Do you track which enablement steps are taken (how many trainings they do, which office hours they attend, etc.) as a metric that feeds back into the success plan?

David Ellin

All great stuff, @Benedict Fritz. If I can add one point of clarity to your question, "Is your customer on board with this plan". I'd suggest developing the plan collaboratively with your customer. Sure, start with your own framework and possibly make recommendations but when it comes to Outcomes (especially), the customer's definition of a successful outcome is critical. Get them involved early and you'll have their buy-in. Plus, it screams #partnership right from the start.

Adrian Gahlot

@Benedict Fritz - thanks for sharing! These are the core elements of a customer success plan that we use too and I love the details you've listed out in your post. We also add an enablement plan (training, office hours, use case emailers etc) to it depending on the outcome the customer is planning to drive and the different teams that will be using the product.

Benedict Fritz

100% @Jenna-Leigh Couch! It's feels easy to stop once you've found a goal, but having an actual outcome to measure against keeps you grounded to reality. Moves you from "sounds nice" to "what do I need to do to get here?"

Jenna-Leigh Couch

Thanks for sharing @Benedict Fritz! I liked how you differentiated in your blog post about goals vs outcomes...

Goal: "automate repetitive tasks for the success team"
Outcome: "grow the average number of accounts a CSM manages from 15 to 25 without reducing time to value."

It is a good reminder to take goals one step further to an outcome, to show the tangible benefits/results of the goal.

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Jenna-Leigh Couch
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Original Message:
Sent: 08-12-2020 15:07
From: Benedict Fritz
Subject: The 5 Key Ingredients of a Success Plan

Hi all!

We've been talking to dozens of success teams while working on Arrows, and have seen a ton of different success plans at different companies. We've also talked to teams who aren't currently using a success plan, and they've asked us for some tips.

(sidenote: what is a success plan? a document shared with a customer to create consensus and mutual buy-in around your product)

So I thought I'd share the 5 key ingredients we've seen incorporated into the best success plans:

1. ? Goals

What are the high-level reasons the customer is using your product? Write these down because they're easy to forget, and the person who purchased may not be the one onboarding or using the product!

2. ? Outcomes

An outcome is how you tell whether a goal was achieved or not. What impact is your product expected to have? How do you and your customer measure success?

3. ??????? Key Players

Who does the customer email if they have a question? Who's responsible for driving the implementation on the customer's side? People need to know what they're responsible for, especially when there's a lot of folks involved!

4. ? Important Dates

How long will an onboarding take? How do you know if you're falling behind on an implementation? Dates! They don't have to be perfect, because dates will slip, but it's a lot easier to right the ship when everyone's on the same page.

5. ? Consensus

The most important piece of all-is your customer on board with this plan? Without consensus there's no mutual buy-in, and the success plan loses its ability to guide and support the customer relationship.

I go into more detail on each of the ingredients in the full blog post: The 5 Key Ingredients of a Success Plan

Would love to hear everyone's thoughts! Who else is using success plans with their customers? What are your must-haves when building a success plan? If you're not using a success plan, what's stopping you?

p.s. thanks to @Anita Toth for reading an early draft of this post!

------------------------------
Benedict Fritz
Building the high-touch onboarding tool at https://arrows.to
------------------------------

Daniel Zarick

@Nicolas Thatcher This is a fantastic point. Future training and onboarding is just as critical as the initial onboarding, especially since you always have the risk of employee turnover at your customer which is often a leading indicator of churn.

Love the idea of making it clear who is in charge of this.

------------------------------
Daniel Zarick
Building the high-touch onboarding tool at https://arrows.to
------------------------------
-------------------------------------------
Original Message:
Sent: 08-13-2020 13:08
From: Nicolas Thatcher
Subject: The 5 Key Ingredients of a Success Plan

Sometimes the most basic or moot topics are not discussed with customers because of assumptions being made on both sides. Great to have this outlined and shared between customer and CSM rep.

If I may add a point that ties in well with 'Key Players'

Agree on who is responsible for onboarding new team members after the initial implementation. This is especially important when there are a lot of users that are being added on a continuous basis. If the new team members aren't properly onboarded, the stickiness and value of your solution might not be as strong as when the customer first purchased your solution. This is often a leading cause of entropy.

------------------------------
Nicolas Thatcher
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 08-12-2020 15:07
From: Benedict Fritz
Subject: The 5 Key Ingredients of a Success Plan

Hi all!

We've been talking to dozens of success teams while working on Arrows, and have seen a ton of different success plans at different companies. We've also talked to teams who aren't currently using a success plan, and they've asked us for some tips.

(sidenote: what is a success plan? a document shared with a customer to create consensus and mutual buy-in around your product)

So I thought I'd share the 5 key ingredients we've seen incorporated into the best success plans:

1. ? Goals

What are the high-level reasons the customer is using your product? Write these down because they're easy to forget, and the person who purchased may not be the one onboarding or using the product!

2. ? Outcomes

An outcome is how you tell whether a goal was achieved or not. What impact is your product expected to have? How do you and your customer measure success?

3. ??????? Key Players

Who does the customer email if they have a question? Who's responsible for driving the implementation on the customer's side? People need to know what they're responsible for, especially when there's a lot of folks involved!

4. ? Important Dates

How long will an onboarding take? How do you know if you're falling behind on an implementation? Dates! They don't have to be perfect, because dates will slip, but it's a lot easier to right the ship when everyone's on the same page.

5. ? Consensus

The most important piece of all-is your customer on board with this plan? Without consensus there's no mutual buy-in, and the success plan loses its ability to guide and support the customer relationship.

I go into more detail on each of the ingredients in the full blog post: The 5 Key Ingredients of a Success Plan

Would love to hear everyone's thoughts! Who else is using success plans with their customers? What are your must-haves when building a success plan? If you're not using a success plan, what's stopping you?

p.s. thanks to @Anita Toth for reading an early draft of this post!

------------------------------
Benedict Fritz
Building the high-touch onboarding tool at https://arrows.to
------------------------------

Nicolas Thatcher

Sometimes the most basic or moot topics are not discussed with customers because of assumptions being made on both sides. Great to have this outlined and shared between customer and CSM rep.

If I may add a point that ties in well with 'Key Players'

Agree on who is responsible for onboarding new team members after the initial implementation. This is especially important when there are a lot of users that are being added on a continuous basis. If the new team members aren't properly onboarded, the stickiness and value of your solution might not be as strong as when the customer first purchased your solution. This is often a leading cause of entropy.

Anita Toth

Great stuff here @Benedict Fritz. ?