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The CS Leader's Guide to Community Content
Today’s zeitgeist for scale has drawn Customer Success teams’ attention toward customer communities. This is great! When thoughtfully built, community programming pulls all the right levers: Organizations know where to deliver resources; customers know where to find them. Self-sufficiency = scale. Customers know where to…
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The Importance of Post-Sales Discovery
It’s not about your software or solution. When a customer decides to buy your product, it’s not because your software or solution is amazing (even if it is). Customers purchase because they believe your solution can help them solve a specific business challenge or problem more quickly, efficiently, and effectively than…
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How 2023 Has Been for Customer Success So Far
Hey all! Let’s talk about how 2023 and how it’s been for Customer Success. For starters, not great. January and February were rough. It seemed like every day I saw at least 2 or 3 “Open to Work” posts on LinkedIn. Companies were freezing their hiring, especially for CSM roles. With all this came more budget cuts, more…
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Three Practical Ways to Collaborate with Your Product Team
In our previous blog, “Why Customer Success Teams are a Product Manager's Best Friend," Marc did a great job highlighting the importance of Customer Success engaging with Product Managers to create a win-win. Now let’s take it one step further, and look at three ways to put this into practice: #1 Be mutually responsible…
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Measuring What Matters: A Guide to Discussing and Measuring Customer Goals
In Customer Success we measure a lot: NPS, LTV, CSAT, Churn, Retention, Customer Health…. I could go on and on and on. And lately, the hot topic has been around ROI and Value Realization. Customers are combing through their spend with a fine tooth comb and weeding out the “nice to haves”. This has me thinking, “what if we…
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Adding Energy
We’ve probably all had the experience of calling a customer - scheduled or not - and feeling like they’d rather not be on the call. Or, you’ve probably been in the middle of a call and suddenly thought, “I don’t know why I’m in this call, and neither do they”. Needless to say, when a customer doesn’t know what they’re…
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Why Customer Retention is Difficult
Part 1 of a 9 part Customer Retention Story ‘Price’ is often the reason given for why companies are seeing customers churn. The reality is usually very different. Research shows that feelings/emotions are the primary force behind decisions, and justifications follow. This means that your customers leave or stay based on…
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Empathy and Alignment: How to Support CSMs and Prevent Quiet Quitting
It’s a difficult time to be in the workforce right now. An estimated 47 million people quit their jobs last year[1]. In customer success, the stats aren’t quite so dire, but CSMs still show the same signs of being dissatisfied with their jobs. According to a recent survey, 69% of CS teams have quiet quitters[2] - i.e.,…
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Change Management Strategies to Improve Software Adoption
Deliver change management for maximum software user adoption in a large user base. Get your people involved in the roll-out. Day 5 – Last Day Of Training “This was great training, and I am not going to use this software!” Did I hear that right? We had been together in a classroom of 20 salespeople learning Sales Force…
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Why Customer Success Teams are a Product Manager's Best Friend
Being an effective CSM is hard. In some ways, being a Product Manager can be harder. How do you collect and synthesize all the data from the market at large, competitor strategies, and the needs of your existing customers into actionable insights? Then, how do you augment and balance all this with your internal company and…