By Amin Akbarpour
Last we left it, I walked us through how to create a customer-first mentality amongst your colleagues. Now let’s get into part two of my series on change management. This time, let’s focus on fostering adoption of your products and services with your customers. At first glance, it seems like a stretch, no? How is creating product adoption the same thing as change-managing other departments you work with to be customer centric? Quick trip down memory lane: with your colleagues you want to make the time to listen to what their goals and KPIs are to align with them on how the customer can help them achieve those. In that same vein, you want to listen and understand your customer with the same approach. Combine that with removing obstacles and you have your 1-2 punch for helping your customers embrace your offering.
Motivations and Alignment
Being Customer Success (CS) professionals, we are focused on constantly understanding situations and finding alignment in those moments. After Sales closes a deal and brings you in, your immediate responsibility is to learn as much as you can about the customer’s business, why they bought the product (i.e., what problem or need they are trying to solve), and who you’ll be working with. Now, just because leadership brought you in to solve X problem doesn’t mean everyone you’re going to be working with across the client’s team will care about that problem.
Focus on all your stakeholders: the power users, the strategy conductors, the operational overlords, and the tangential folks who may not directly impact the day-to-day but can create speedbumps. Make time to meet with them, understand their day-to-day, what’s difficult about their job today, and what they’re held responsible for. Don’t assume just because their leadership brought you on board and said they have to use it that they’ll magically be inspired to integrate you into all of their processes without a hitch. You’re going to have to align with them individually or else you’ll be setting yourself up for a combative relationship from the start – far from ideal.
Taking this from theoretical to actual, here’s an example: Your company provides a content offering, primarily Marketing content. Your buyer was the SVP of Marketing and now you’re going to have to help the entire team onboard and adopt your offering into their day-to-day. In an ideal world, your offering makes it easier to implement better-performing content for them, right? So, let’s look at the stakeholders. You have the brand side that dictates the strategy and calendar. They could be your main stakeholders since they’re held directly responsible for revenue targets that your better content is supposed to help. But don’t think you’re off the hook right then and there…
Who is going to implement and set up the content? The operations team, who are definitely not focused on revenue targets as much as they are on on-time delivery and pristine execution. The last thing you’re going to want to do is make their job any more difficult, so meeting with them and understanding how you can seamlessly pass off content without extending their timelines will be critical (fingers crossed for you it’ll be #IntegrationSZN). Now, your customer definitely has in-house content already. So they must have a content team today, and the last thing you want is to make them feel like you’re an outside agency taking their job away from them. Through connecting with them you can create a feedback loop where you construct content collectively and pass learnings back-and-forth to one another. You can be an asset for them just as much as you’re being an asset for the initial team that brought you on.
If you don’t take the time to meet with, understand, and tie your product into all of these different teams’ roles, then you’re only setting yourself up for bottlenecks and internal tension that your champions will have to go through. Do yourself a favor – do the homework, understand all the pieces that touch your products and offerings, make time to meet and listen to them, and figure out how to best align to their cares and needs.
Easy Does It
The place most CS professionals focus on is the aspect of making things easy for the customer. There’s a reason for that – everyone loves easy! Making things painless and having everything be easy to follow and implement can be the difference between a successful partnership and a quick and abrupt end. So how can you make things easy? There are usually a couple common areas you can focus on: hurdle jumping and communication.
Adopting your product and service involves multiple common obstacles, hurdles, and questions along the way. Understand these. Master these. And more importantly, build out comprehensive solutions that handle these seamlessly. Going back to my content example, that might mean the client team operates with very tight turnaround times (TATs) and can’t afford to tack on additional time to implement the content your service creates. First, understand the root cause. Are the TATs small because it takes Operations a while to get everything set up and the team is forced to provide content last-minute? Okay – then perhaps find an integration where Operations doesn’t have to manually set anything up; rather, once the content is ready, it’s uploaded and ready to go, and all they need to do is add it to the right campaign for that day and set it to launch. Maybe TATs are small because the brand and content teams have significant back and forth and can’t finalize assets in a timely manner. Fair enough – what if your offering is introduced during the briefing process so they get a head start at creating layout options - then, whatever the team decides on, you have content ready plug in. Whatever the case may be, you’re going to want all these solutions comprehensively detailed and tested so you can confidently roll them out the moment they’re identified. Speaking of “identifying” them, that’s something you would do as part of understanding the responsibilities, cares, and needs as outlined previously. Do your homework.
We can’t forget about the significance of communication. You may have all the answers but if you do not communicate things effectively and efficiently, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. A great example here is if you have an integration the client is interested in, but the instructions for getting it are novel-sized and you send them in the body of an email. Yuck. Instead, try having a couple different options available – a video demonstrating how to do it and a slide deck. The deck should not just be the email but spread in steps across multiple slides. Incorporate gifs and images to make it as detailed and easy to follow as possible. Last but certainly not least, offer up yourself and other resources! If the customer wants you to hold their hand through the process, leverage your Zoom credentials and do exactly that. There’s no excuse for not doing everything you can to communicate effectively and easily.
On the whole, there really isn’t a lot of difference in the raw skills and approach between creating change internally or externally. The people you’ll be interacting with are different, but ultimately what you’ll be doing will have plenty of overlap. Make time to meet and understand the nature of your client’s business and everyone your service and product will be touching. Meet with all those stakeholders and learn about their day-to-day, their hurdles, and what they care about. From there, effectively fit your offering in a way that only helps them do their jobs. Communicate well and be ready to jump whatever hurdles the client has, and you should be able to help your customers form new habits around the adoption of your product.
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
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.