Success Plan Effectiveness

Haley Miller

Hi everyone!

We have an initiative underway where we are working on measuring the effectiveness of Success Plans. We use Gainsight for or Success Plan tracking and our thoughts right now are along the lines of "It's great we have all of these success plans – but how do we know if we are executing and getting the results we(& the customers) are looking for?"

I wanted to get your insight on best practices or creative ideas on what you have seen on how to measure this?

Andrew Marks

What are the elements that make up your success plan?

Haley Miller

Hi @Andrew Marks, apologies for the delayed response. The elements in our Success Plans are our customers desired outcomes with our products and a timeline to achieve them.

Haley Miller

Hi, I like your thinking! You have definitely provided me with some things to ponder.... What I have really been thinking about is how do you ensure that the completion of the Success Plan are the most valuable to the customer? Is it purely based on feedback from the executive sponsor? We are trying to track the effectiveness of our Success Plans at scale for our CS Org - have you seen any/or do you  use anything within your CRM to help track this? IE added fields to the Success Plan page layout (Simple example: Success Plan Successful: Y/N or Red/Yellow/Green) 

John Henwood

Hey @Haley Miller,

In addition to the advice you've already been given, I'd also be wanting to try to determine whether it's the success plan making the customer successful or something else. As such, I'd look at outcomes by cohorts, those being who have/haven't completed the success plan. This will get to the root of:

- how well are we executing our plans?
- when we do execute them, have effective are they?

That will then help you identify where the clogs are and how much to double down on reinforcing the behaviours and actions in the Plans or evolve them.

Benedict Fritz

Yeah I hear you, it can sometimes feel tough to feel like you're really finding out what the customer *actually* wants.

I think the biggest marker that the success plan isn't hitting what the customer wants to do is if customers who are completing the success plan are churning. It's a painful way to learn, but has the clearest data. If a customer successfully completed a success plan, and they they didn't actually succeed, that's when you can dig in to try to figure out where the misalignment crept in, and how you might be able to change your success plan for the future so it doesn't happen again.

I've seen teams keep a marker in their CRM for success plan completion. But be sure you have a plan for what you're going to do with that data ahead of time so that the team is has a clear motivation for tracking the data. One thing you could do is track churn rate amongst the different completion types (red/yellow/green). From there you'll have a baseline that you can evaluate and improve your success plan around e.g. lower the % of churned customers amongst green success plan completion, lower the % of red customers, etc..

Haley Miller

Hi @Benedict Fritz - great advice.  Thanks so much for providing your insight!

Haley Miller

Hi @John Henwood - Great advice! Thanks for sharing.

Alicia Picard

Haley, your customers have different stakeholders (executive sponsors, those who approve cost, end users, etc) and each of those stakeholders may have different definitions of success.  During onboarding you should document what these stakeholder groups define as success, i.e. what does good look like and by when it should look good. Find out how they are being measured on success; it may be tied to your product/service.   While their timeline may not be feasible you need to know their expectations....expectation is the breeding ground of dissatisfaction.  Incorporate their feedback into the Success Plan and review it regularly (QBR / EBR) with each of your stakeholder groups to gage completion of customer defined value.  If you don't have this information make plans to discuss it with them; knowledge is power. I've never had a client tell me that they don't want to share their expectations and definition of success.

Haley Miller

Hi Alicia! Thanks so much for sharing. I will definitely share this with our CSMs.