By Chad Horenfeldt
“I hate working out of ten systems to do my job.”
“I have way too many Google Sheets.”
“I can never remember when I should do my executive business reviews.”
“I had no idea that client was struggling.”
Do any of these sound familiar? These are just the complaints and challenges that customer success managers face daily. Leaders in customer success (CS) have their own challenges. These include:
Attaining a holistic understanding of client health with data in multiple systems.
Trying to orchestrate and standardize the many touchpoints along the customer journey.
Taking a digital communication approach in customer success when appropriate but being able to switch to a human approach as needed.
This was the predicament I found myself in and realized that I needed a customer success (CS) platform. These products include Gainsight, Catalyst, ClientSuccess, Churnzero, Strikedeck, Totango, and many others. The challenge for CS leaders is that it’s not a given we can get the budget to buy technology - especially a CS platform. Customer success is not on the same level as some of the other established functions. It’s well established that sales will get a CRM and that marketing will get a marketing automation platform. Even support tools have become a standard purchase for most teams of a certain size. Customer success platforms are still relatively new and have just recently gained more prominence with the overall rise of customer success.
In the most recent CS platform purchase process that I went through, it took over a year to get the right buy-in and go ahead. My goal in this post is to shed some light on my own journey of purchasing a CS platform to help those who may be in a similar predicament. There are three areas that I’ll touch on: documenting the use cases, providing the justification on why it’s needed now, and aligning the necessary resources.
“But why do you need a CS Platform?”: Documenting your use cases
As a starting point, you need to clearly communicate why a CS platform is needed to your boss, the head of finance, and whoever else needs to sign off on the purchase. The first hurdle you may face is that you will be pushed to use technology that you already have. For example, you may hear this: “if you need a 360 view of your client, what can’t you leverage the CRM and BI tools we already have?”. Answering, “well, because that doesn’t work” won’t get you anywhere. You need to make the “case”.
It’s important that you provide detailed examples of your requirements to demonstrate that a CS platform is the only tool that can meet your needs. Creating use cases is an excellent way to do this. A use case is defined as “the interactions between external actors and the system under consideration to accomplish a goal” (source). As I wrote in a previous post, “It’s important to write out your use case in the following way: As an “X” (the type of user), I want to “Y” (the desired action).” By writing out your requirements as use cases you will be able to more clearly communicate the reasons why you need a CS platform and why the current technology you have isn’t sufficient.
As an example, I crafted the following use case: As an administrator, I want the ability to set the client health score based on multiple criteria that combines data from different data sources which includes data from our CRM, application, and support software. When I added an additional use case that included creating alerts based on this data it was clear that a CS platform was the right solution as nothing else could deliver the results we wanted. These use cases would help me later in the evaluation process but for now, I had a list of the outcomes that I needed from the CS platform.
“But why do you need it now?”: Providing the justification
Crafting your use cases is a start but you need to justify why you need to buy a CS platform at this exact moment. “Can’t we just put this off?” is something you may hear from your head of finance or the CEO. You can use some of the metrics you have such as low adoption rates or higher churn rates but it can be challenging to make a case that a CS Platform will solve those issues. Here are a few methods that I used to drive home the need to act quickly:
Gainsight’s Maturity Model. Gainsight provides a free assessment to assess the maturity of your customer success department. It was clear that the maturity of our team was below average at the time and that many of our processes were basic and manual. We were not in a place that would allow us to scale based on the planned growth that we expected. We needed to change or we wouldn’t be able to keep up with the influx of new customers.
Time & Motion Study. My colleague Elisha Carsrud helped me set up a time and motion study which is a survey that determined where my team was spending their time. From the survey results, it was evident that they were focusing too much on reactive activities rather than proactive ones such as understanding our clients’ outcomes. This data along with the maturity model assessment provided more evidence as to why we needed technology to assist us.
Provide examples of companies similar to yours. Fast-growing startups typically don’t want to be left behind. Listing out other companies that are similar to yours and that are on the same growth path and that have also purchased a CS platform provides the social proof that can help you make your case.
These methods can create the right urgency you need to push the purchase process forward. You will still face roadblocks though unless you line up the right resources.
“But who is going to implement and run this tool?”: Aligning the right resources
This is probably the most critical part of the entire purchase process. As part of the maturity model discussion I previously mentioned I focused on the need for customer success operations. I even pushed for a customer success operations resource before purchasing a CS platform. This was part of the reason that it took so long for us to start our formal evaluation process. It’s extremely important to have operational assistance that will help you configure and run your CS Platform. It’s too time-consuming to have one of your CSMs do this as their part-time job unless you have explicitly reduced their client management responsibilities. I was successful at obtaining a CS ops resources as part of our revenue operations team and I was off to the races.
I then focused on our product and engineering teams as I would need their help to automate the data integrations that would be necessary to make this project a success. I took the time to meet with these teams and explain why these tools were needed and how they operate. I also outlined how they would benefit their teams. As an example, CS Platforms could help us increase product adoption and thus improve the effectiveness of the features that the product team was delivering. You may also need to get your IT and security teams involved early so they have no issues with these types of technology. The more champions you get on your side, the easier it is to secure the budget when it goes before your executive team.
As you can see, the journey to purchasing a CS platform wasn’t easy and it took many months before we secured the green light to start our evaluation process. The prudent approach outlined above is recommended. It will help you better understand what your needs are when you get to the evaluation process, it will give you time to create your processes before you are forced to build them into your CS platform, and it will ensure that you have the resources you need to make your implementation successful.
At the end of the day, the purchase of your CS platform isn’t the goal. Making your team, your company, and especially your customers successful should be your ultimate outcome. I hope that my advice can help you in your own journey. While the path is arduous, it’s extremely rewarding and it’s what turns good customer success teams into great ones and good CS leaders into world-class executives. I wish you the best of luck.
Is your company due for a big change but you're not sure where to start? The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers customer success evaluations that are a great way to see what is working well and what needs improvement. For more information on our consulting services and training classes, please see TheSuccessLeague.io
Chad Horenfeldt - Chad is a customer success executive with 15+ years of experience building and developing high performing teams. Currently, he is the Head of Customer Success at Kustomer. Prior to Kustomer, Chad held CS leadership positions at Updater, Bluecore, Influitive, and Oracle (Eloqua). In addition to writing for The Success League, he also writes regularly on the topic of customer success on his blog The Enlightened Customer.