By Amin Akbarpour
The day-to-day of a customer success professional can be taxing. We’re tasked with finding time in the day for client meetings, creating client deliverables, attending internal meetings, and much more. One of the things that is critical to helping us achieve all of this is leveraging the tools and resources we have at our disposal. Far too often I see CS representatives make their lives overly difficult by not proactively using the tools that are literally at their fingertips. Easily the most underutilized item in our tool belt is the CRM or customer relationship management system (think, Salesforce). Here are some tips on how to get the most out of your CRM:
Reporting
Ever have your leadership team ask you for a report on…
…accounts that require executive help?
…customers that have existing technical issues?
…companies where there is large opportunity to grow?
…key contacts that we need to build a relationship with?
…LinkedIn profiles of really, just about anyone?
You can leverage a CRM tool to track all of this so the moment the request comes in, you can quickly provide either a link (if the tool is widely adopted) or download and send a report. The amount of time and energy customer success representatives spend fulfilling leadership requests is astonishing. I know some have resorted to keeping Excel or Google Sheet files up to date, which is a step in the right direction. However, you cannot maintain one massive workbook that serves as your one-stop-shop as efficiently as a centralized CRM can.
Personal tip – if you’re using a CRM tool that doesn’t currently have the ability to track certain data points (like account health, usage of your offering, or relationships that need nurturing) you are being asked for, work with your sales operations team to customize it. Chances are if you have a need then so do your other comrades in customer success. Most of the major systems in the market allow for enough modification to support all the data points that you’ll need.
Client Interactions
This is my favorite part of leveraging a centralized solution; using it to store every client-facing resource as well as track all client interactions. Why? It serves as a single place to view all interactions (imagine wanting a refresher on the last conversation you had with a client) while also ensuring all materials the client has ever seen are in one centralized place. If you’re not convinced of the benefits, let me pose this in another way. Have you ever…
…been asked by a colleague to share a recent slide deck?
…had to provide the history of an account to leadership or a colleague?
…been wanted to access another colleague’s spreadsheet but were unable to find it?
If you answered yes to any of the above, then you could benefit from the use of a centralized system.
Reminders
Far too often, I see customer success reps get very creative when it comes to monitoring activities and to-do lists. This includes:
Setting reminders on the calendar
Using post-it notes (virtual and physical)
Sending unread emails to themselves
I’ve even seen some CS requests for a project management tool to help with all of this. This is the equivalent of having one reusable water bottle for tap water and another for sparkling – absurd! Did you know you can set both tasks and reminders in the majority of CRM tools? Imagine logging in, and the first thing you see is your to-do list for the day. You can set up reminders so that you’re always on top of what needs to be done. Not only do these reminders help you, but they add transparency so that anyone can open an account and see what needs to be done. Remember the leadership reporting requests? Imagine cutting those down significantly because they can instantly search for an account and see exactly how far along the customer journey they are.
I do want to call out that if you utilize a CS platform (think Gainsight, Strikedeck, ClientSuccess) as opposed to a conventional CRM tool, then there’s even more reason for you to utilize these functions in your day-to-day. These tools are designed to manage tasks and activities, provide places for you to track and report on important data points, and also feed customer success-specific functions like health scoring and playbooks.
Even in a case where you’re unable to get CRM adoption across your team, there are still many positives to using a centralized tool as your personal customer success book of record. Leverage your existing tools to help streamline your daily efforts so that you can free yourself of administrative tasks and focus on what really matters – making the customer successful.
Looking to add to your CSM toolkit? The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers a CSM Certification Training Program that teaches the skills that it takes to be a top-performing customer success professional, including a class on using CRM and CSM Systems effectively. Please see TheSuccessLeague.io for more information on our training and consulting offerings.
Amin Akbarpour - Amin is a customer success coach and architect. With relationship-building at the core of his practice, he molds teams by instilling the necessary principles to transform them into trusted advisors. Amin is one of the founding advisors to The Success League and currently serves as an account manager for Persado. Amin is a University of San Francisco alum who now calls New York City home.