Going Rogue: Goal Setting As An Individual Contributor

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By Amin Akbarpour

Being a Customer Success professional is hard enough given the nature of the job: Engaging on behalf of multiple internal departments with the client, ensuring the client is successful in accomplishing their goals with your solution, navigating fires, creating advocacy, and ensuring an overall great experience for all involved. As CS rep, there will definitely be times where you feel like you aren’t even an employee at your own organization. You’re an extension of the client that happens to have a badge that lets you into another company’s office. With the growing level of CS standards in most organizations, it still surprises me that many individual contributors in customer success don’t have goals communicated to them from leadership down. Goals, when they are in place are typically seen as executive-created for the benefit of the company. However, goals are tremendously helpful for individual contributors too. Let’s discuss a few ways to create some structure in your life if you don’t have any, and build SMART goals.

SMART
It wasn’t a coincidence that I capitalized “smart” in my previous sentence. If you’re not familiar with SMART goals, I strongly suggest you read up on it. The Sparknotes here being that any goals you set must be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. Here’s an example.

Stay away from:

  • Increase customer advocacy from current client base

Aim for:

  • Create five customer case studies for retail and travel and hospitality sector clients by end of H1 2021

Remember The Golden Rule
The Golden Rule here is actually not the one you may be thinking of. I learned this one during a business law course in undergrad – this golden rule goes, “the ones with the gold…rule”. Always try to tie yourself to revenue. If you look at most organizations budgets, you’ll see that marketing and sales departments get sizable allotments. That’s mostly because they can build a very strong business case for the ROI they can deliver on every dollar invested in their department. You need to do the same thing and luckily for you, it’s not going to require mathematic gymnastics to do it in CS. Two common metrics here.  

·      Renewals: Take the ARR of the book of business you manage. If you’re a one person show and thus are only focusing on the top X% of accounts, feel free to focus there as opposed to the entire pie. Now shoot for a renewal target or a churn % goal. Similar idea here but different ways to express it:

o   Renewal Target: You have a $1M book of business. You aim to retain 95% of it. That means your goal is to bring in $950K of that $1M at the end of the year.

o   Churn Goal: You have a $1M book of business. You want your churn percentage to be no more than 5%. That means your goal is to lose no more than $50K of your current book at the end of the year.

·      Upsells: For some organizations, this actually may be owned by Sales. Even though I personally can’t stand that, I would still position this internally as something you influence. After all, you cannot expand an existing partnership with a client unless the onboarding went great, the current level of service is excellent, and those new opportunities to do more were not properly discovered, fleshed out, and identified as mutually beneficial. For those in CS who indeed own this piece, the math would work itself out as:

o   Upsell Target: You have a $1M book of business. You aim to bring in an additional 20% in revenue through expansion opportunities. That means your goal is to end the year with a book of business of $1.2M.

The Intangibles
There is a lot we do as Customer Success representatives that doesn’t always translate into direct dollars and cents, but that you can still turn into a goal and use to demonstrate the value you’re bringing to the organization. Here are some examples:

·      Product: Think of recording featured requests from your customers and having that be organized based on customer type, size, and urgency (aka: how big of an issue this lack of feature is for the client). You can help your product team tremendously by getting insight into what the customer is asking for and how to prioritize it internally. You can create this into a KPI by positioning it as de-risking $X by properly addressing some widely requested product updates.

·      Marketing: We can always use some more promotion. Customer advocacy falls into this bucket and you can easily set goals around getting customer quotes to be used externally, referrals, case studies, press releases, webinars, and to speak at events. Most of these materials are essentially used for acquisition and you can tie them to campaigns (which your friends in Marketing may already do) so you can make that a goal too. (ex. Get three customers to lead a webinar by end of year. Then at end of year, check with Marketing to see what leads came by virtue of those webinars and you can tie the related ARR to your actions.)

·      Sales: I already mentioned the possibilities if Sales manages up-selling in your organization. In addition to that, having customers be available as references for your sales colleagues to use with prospects who need a little nudge to get over the hump is also helpful. Diversify here and think of your customer personas and try to get a reference for each one (i.e. could be by role, industry, use case, etc).

All in all, there are plenty of ways to set material goals for yourself as a CS rep at any organization. Goals that will hold you accountable and show the value you can drive for the company. If you’re at an organization that doesn’t currently provide CS specific goals, use this as a launching pad. Once you start showing to your executive team what type of revenue impact CS can have, you’ll start the gradual culture change needed to have your organization become a Customer Success-led company.

Needing more help creating goals in CS? The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers a Certified CSM Training Program that includes classes like Business Strategy for CSMs and Renewals & Churn. For more information on this and our other offerings, please visit our website at TheSuccessLeague.io

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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. Amin is a University of San Francisco alum who now calls New York City home.