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What's a "Customer" in B2B?
Customer Success Folks: Agree or disagree?? In B2B, end-users (generally speaking) are NOT "customers" because they don't influence buying decisions. Sometimes an End User can be part of the "Stakeholder" team/buying-committee, but in that context they are wearing a different hat, not having an "end user" posture. That's…
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Liaising with stakeholders in the NON SaaS world
Hi everyone, During the Office Hours webinar yesterday I brought up this topic and would like to get some feedback from a wider audience: I'm gearing up to work with a custom engineering and development company and have also ran into this scenario while working in the Healthcare IT space: Each client may have a different…
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Customer Advocacy
We, like all companies, want to be able to leverage existing customer relationships to accelerate our ability to grow at other current customers and bring new logos in the door. As with many younger startups, we were hesitant to push back on customers who would redline the logo rights clause and are thus trying to dig out…
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Are you doing "Success Marketing"?
I had an interesting conversation with a CXO on Marketing and its imperative on Customer Success; which left me with a compelling concept - "Success Marketing" Today, marketing gets involved with customer success for the case study, a testimonial, and in few cases a joint PR. What can we do more? – to help reduce churn,…
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Mastering "Strategic conversations"
Hey GGR Team, I am back after a short hiatus and need your advice on this :D As a CSM, you need to be more strategic in your conversations... #customersuccess leaders, how does a CSM become more "strategic" I've heard a lot of noise around this one word, but I'd appreciate if you all can to help me understand how I can get…
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Is anyone holding cross-functional meetings to triage key customer issues?
Following on from today's CS Leadership Office Hours discussion on separating and clarifying the roles of customer success and customer support, is anyone using a cross-department forum to regularly triage and highlight key customer issues? If so, curious about the format (e.g. daily stand-up vs. longer meeting), agenda,…
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Welcome to the new Gain Grow Retain Community
Welcome to the new Gain Grow Retain community! This is a natural next step in our evolution for Gain Grow Retain and all of our members. We're upgrading platforms to Higher Logic, the premier community platform in the space. We're always looking for ways to enhance the experience and keep a high level of excellence, so…
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Generating Meeting for CSM's
Quick question! What do any of you do to drive up meetings for your CSM's? We have a process that works well when a customer actively works with a sales rep and gets handed off to a CSM but I am looking to drive up engagement with our current longer tenured customers. We have task based alerts that trigger opportunities…
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Stakeholder Mapping
Hey All, Does anyone use any specifc tooling to map stakeholders within customers, explain relationship and manage governace?
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Reference Customers
Has anyone here developed a reference customer program? If yes I have a few questions.* What process do you use for sales to request a reference? * What, if anything, do you give to your customers for being a part of the program?* gift card * discounts * etc. Appreciate any guidance on what has worked/not worked for you.
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Renewal Calculation with early renewals
I have a question about looking at churn and renewal data for a relatively unique purchasing model. We sell a product that is both tied to an annual contract, but is also consumable. Our customers are purchasing not per "seat", but per assessment. A client will purchase a quantity of assessments that get used. The contract…
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How would you teach CS to students in 90 minutes?
I have been invited to teach a class to students in their last year of Business about CS (which they don't even know exists). * How would you teach CS in 90 minutes? * What topics would you definitely cover? * What fun exercises could we do in class? * What content should they come prepared with before the class? Thank you…
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Customer Success Team Training Options - Does anyone have any recommendations?
Hello All, I lead a small team of CSMs who all come from varied backgrounds at a local startup. I am interested in having a baseline training for my team to ensure we are all approaching CS with a common unifying experience and I came across a product called Success Coaching. I am curious to know if anyone has had any…
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Contact Goes Silent - What's is your Strategy
I wanted to start a post for everyone to share their playbook for when a primary contact or decision maker goes silent (if there is an existing thread please link). Example: Client A, cancels weekly call two weeks in a row. Client A responds to follow up email "sorry we've been busy with new launch, lets chat next week."…
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How do you approach CS territory planning?
We've hit August and that's always been the kick-off to planning season for me. I'm starting to think about team structure, customer tiers, and territory assignments. I'd love to hear what others are doing in terms of the following: Customer Segmentation: How many tiers? How do you determine tiers? Territory Assignments:…
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Customer Success Under Support Org
Has anyone had experience managing a CS team that sits under a larger Support organization with Support leaders? What were the pro/cons of this set up for you? Did you find this to be a good long term scenario or did your team ultimately move into its own org or under sales?
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Asking for a friend of a friend :P
@Jay Nathan you mentioned in today's office Hours having a CSM segment starting up I think in August. Where would I find details about being included in this initial call? Additionally some feedback for your team, the conversation was great today! But I always feel like I have to show up in order to know what we are…
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Up Level CSM Presentation Skills
Hi GGR Community, I'm looking for a program or resources to up-level my team's presentation/story telling skills. We're a revenue focused CSM team, heavily focused on driving account spend. We spend a lot of call time pitching new features and telling customer stories about what's worked well from a strategic standpoint.…
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Health Scoring For Tech Touch Customers
I'm taking lead on the tech touch segment at Gainsight (aka "Digital Led"). I've created a preliminary health score and would love your thoughts/feedback on it! Here at Gainsight, we use something called the D.E.A.R. framework: 1) Deployment - Has this customer been deployed at a fundamental level? 2) Engagement - Have we…
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Developing an Ideal Customer Profile
Hi all, We are looking to build our Ideal Customer Profile - to help our revenue and product teams to align priorities and strategies to execute on. From a Customer Success point of view:* What has been valuable to you in having an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)? * What customer data and metrics have you looked at when…
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Refferal Program
How to build a successful Referral program which is not only effective but brings in results. Would anyone like to share their experiences and the challenges they have faced for refferals.
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Asking for a friend of a friend :P
@Jay Nathan you mentioned in today's office Hours having a CSM segment starting up I think in August. Where would I find details about being included in this initial call? Additionally some feedback for your team, the conversation was great today! But I always feel like I have to show up in order to know what we are…
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Any recommendations on the best way to conduct an internal quarterly/book of business review with CS
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Interim CSM/Customer Support Model during a hiring pause?
Recently our team had a CSM leave on the West Coast who was managing around 25 customers. Since we are currently on a hiring pause within Customer Success, we elected to move someone from an acquisition of ours over to help with these accounts who is located in the Mid-West/East region. Ideally, for the longer term, we'd…
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[CSM Office Hours] Tuesday August 4, 2020
Good Morning, We're looking to establish a CSM Office Hours that is separate from our CS Leadership Office Hours. The goal is to create a space for CSMs to discuss tactical topics that can help to navigate their day-to-day jobs. Here is a 3-minute survey so that we can get some feedback from the CSMs we have in our…
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Customer Operations
I have recently been given the opportunity to take on creating a Customer Operations function. I am transitioning from a career of managing Customers and CS Teams, to now having internal stakeholders (CS and Partner Teams), and acting as the product owner for our post contract tools and processes. CS Ops seems to be…
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No Subject
Janet, Would love to understand the question further but a two things I look for in team members that translate well to B2B. * Curiosity: A genuine interest in understanding how business works. The more curious an individual is the better, as in B2B we need to truly understand the business dynamics of our customers. *…
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No Subject
I have my cell phone number on my email signature so customers can reach me anytime :) I've even told a customer that they can WhatsApp me and it was an amazing response! Internally, we discourage using mobile as the primary way of communication; we mainly do it for strategically important, enterprise customers.
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Office Hours recordings
Is there a place on the community where the recordings of office hours are posted? @Jeff Breunsbach
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CS Spiff programs
We are interested in rolling out a CS Incentive Spiff. What sort of programs have worked or are working for you?