Playbooks: The common to the obscure

Melissa Logothetis
Melissa Logothetis Member Posts: 22 Thought Leader
First Comment
Hello, Customer Success community!
There is always a lot of discussion around playbooks. What ones do you need? How do write them? How do use them properly? Well, have two questions for you.
1. What are the top 5 playbooks that you use excluding: QBR, Renewal, and Red account (high risk of churn)?
2. What are the 1 or 2 playbooks that you wish you had?

I look forward to all your responses.
Have a great day!

Comments

  • Ola Ogungbemile
    Ola Ogungbemile Member Posts: 3 Navigator
    edited August 2021
    Hi Melissa,

    I'm a big fan of playbooks! As the onboarding team lead, the first thing I set out to do was create an onboarding playbook for our team. Right now, I'm working with our CSMs to create an outreach playbook, as we transition to a more scalable approach. In addition, a playbook I wish we had is an advocacy playbook that would help turn our best users into our champions and ambassadors. If you or anyone in the communications has some tips on creating such a playbook, I'm all ears.

    Best,
    Ola
  • Shareil Nariman
    Shareil Nariman Member Posts: 9 Seeker
    edited August 2021

    Onboarding and Lifecycle playbooks have been critical for me and my teams. 

    With onboarding, their are 2 main focuses - guided onboarding (1:1 traditional human-led onboarding) and self-guided onboarding (1:many and product-led onboarding). This type of playbook covers the different pathways of onboarding in each section, what information to capture and how the different pathways work together. The goal of something like this is to give instructions for how to successfully onboard customer while giving visibility into the process for the rest of your organization. Here is a list of metrics you can consider tracking when it comes time to building your onboarding playbook. 

    With Lifecycle playbooks, I've taken a holistic step back from onboarding and look at the other phases in your customer journey (sales, onboarding, adoption, retention, renewal, etc) to make sure you have plays for hand-offs, information sharing and timelines to ensure the end-user experience is a great one. This is also a great way to introduce new motions within your current Customer Success team while providing context as to "why" this new direction is important (hint: driving retention and revenue).This type of playbook can get robust very quickly, the key is to take individual phases of the journey and work towards programmatically improving along the way. For example, if you have a big churn problem at day 180 of your customer lifecycle, focus on understanding why and designate a chapter or two of the playbook here. Starting with some obvious challenges or problems, you can reverse-engineer your plays and playbooks to have an impact. 

    Curious to hear and learn what others are up to. And always happy to chat more if anyone is up for it!

    Shareil

  • Adam Pierce
    Adam Pierce Member Posts: 5 Seeker
    First Anniversary Name Dropper First Comment
    edited August 2021
    Interesting questions! 

    Top 5 I have used/seem personally (in no particular order):

    1. Customer Health 
    2. EBR 
    3. Advocacy
    4. Risk Mitigation
    5. Account Segmentation (to decide if high touch or tech touch)

    Top that I wish I had:
    1. Voice of the Customer (feedback in general)
    2. Data Analysis (Internally focused on what is collected, why, how, by whom etc)
  • Melissa Flygare
    Melissa Flygare Member Posts: 17 Thought Leader
    First Anniversary Photogenic First Comment
    edited August 2021

    Playbooks - commonly used: 

    1. Executive/Key Sponsor Turnover

    2. New User 

    3. New Product 

    4. Onboarding (depending on complexity)



    Playbooks - wish list:

    1. I think it would be cool to have a playbook around re-engaging customers that have gone dark or ghosted you