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A day in the Life of a Sr. Customer Success Manager
Author – Jeremy Donaldson 5/12/2021 One morning I decided to ask my 4 year old daughter, “What does daddy do for work?” “Daddy, you wake and have meetings. You take a break to have breakfast with me. Then you take me to preschool. You go back home for more meetings. You pick me up from preschool. We have lunch then you go…
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Customer Success Maturity Model & Answer
Author – Jeff Breunsbach 5/18/2021 Recently @Bora Lee and I joined forces to talk through our new Customer Success Maturity Model. We got more questions than we could answer in the webinar, so I’m answering some of them here. ChurnZero got the rest on their blog. After you read the model, I’m curious: Did we miss any big…
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Psychological Safety: An Introduction
Author – Russell Bourne 5/19/2021 In recent years, the concept of Psychological Safety emerged as one of the most important factors that make a business sink or swim. Psychological Safety plays an important role not only as a factor in good DEI policy, but in the performance of Customer Success organizations. Let’s begin…
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Onboarding Stages...What Happened to Orientation?
Author – Marcus Sparks 5/27/2021 Customer onboarding is hot! We all know that the first 90 days post-sale are critical to the customer experience. Recently, many bright minds have focused their attention on ideas, philosophies, process models, frameworks, and methodologies designed to define and optimize new customer…
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CSM Retention Clinics - Internal Hackatons That Help Mitigate Risk
Author – Ashley Harpp 6/10/2021 The following article comes from Filipe Rufino, a GGR Member and Lead CSM and Mentor at Gartner, Inc. Filipe shares how his team leverages CSM Retention Clinics to help mitigate risk prior to renewal and encourage team collaboration. CSM Retention Clinics What are they An internal hackathon…
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Engagement Month: "Not Strategic Enough"
Author – Russell Bourne 7/7/2021 Gain Grow Retain proclaims July 2021 is “Engagement Month” and in this week’s blog, I’m going to start us off by discussing something I hear often from frustrated CS leaders: “my team isn’t strategic enough”. At its core, this complaint is a little bit about a CSM’s mindset, and a lot about…
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Engagement Month: Stay Out of the Friend Zone. Keep customer focused and engaged
Author – Ashley Harpp 7/15/2021 Customers don’t buy your product because you have a great personality. As great as you might be individually, they buy more because they have received value or believe they will at some point in the future. A friendly and personable attitude can go a long way but if you don’t understand your…
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Engagement Month - Adding Energy
Author – Russell Bourne 7/21/2021 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…
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Quick Hits: Things that Aren't Scary
Author – Russell Bourne 9/29/2021 October is Halloween month, the month of all things scary; before we get there, let’s briefly examine some things that are not scary. Selling Unrealistic quota is scary. Rejection is scary. Having someone think you’re pushy is scary. So selling is scary, right? Well, it can be if the…
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Something Scary: "We're Good"
Author – Russell Bourne 10/13/2021 Readers, we’re into October, and just as my last September article was about non-scary things, brace yourselves now. This one is going full Halloween, because not only is it scary, it’s in a disguise. I’m talking about the sneaky bad-news phrase a customer can say to you: “We’re good”.…