By Russell Bourne
Readers, how’s your 2022 planning coming along? If you missed it, last month we posted a guide on how to use the final 6 months of 2021 to get everything set for 2022 before it starts.
Let’s now take a look at how you can make sure your processes remain best-in-class. Specifically, let’s examine processes that are external-facing; in other words, Customer Journey steps.
Subtracting Processes
Your current processes were probably born out of a past goal - maybe from 2021 planning, or maybe from something that was relevant years ago and hasn’t been re-evaluated since. The best leaders set goals by understanding the high-level goals for the company, and breaking those down into department or individual goals or in support of the high-level goals.
For example, in the past your company may have wanted to reduce churn (company goal); they believed churn was a result of customers not understanding ROI, so you created an initiative to deliver a certain number of EBRs across the customer base (team and individual goal) where your CSMs could be sure they communicated ROI data to your customers’ executives. Maybe your CSMs even have a variable compensation component based on how many EBRs they hosted or scheduled!
Why would you want to potentially get rid of a valuable process such as that? An analysis might reveal one of several reasons:
You knocked the EBR goal out of the park - but your churn rate didn’t improve. This is an indication your churn rate wasn’t tied to your customers’ perception of ROI after all. And it’s great news! You’ve eliminated one factor, and you can move onto testing another. Bear in mind, it’s possible your churn rate improved among Enterprise accounts but not in the Mid-Market. In that case, you might choose to eliminate EBRs for the Mid-Market segment only. Run your analysis separately for each segment.
You fell short of the EBR goal - but your churn rate didn’t suffer. This is the flip side of reason #1 and it tells the same story. The EBR goal didn’t support the churn goal.
Your churn reasons shifted and ROI perception is no longer high enough on the list to justify spending time on. It’s important to be nimble and eliminate the EBR goal so you’re not investing time on it going forward.
Adding Processes
Now that you’ve removed a few journey steps related to initiatives you no longer need, how do you go about replacing them with something productive? Again, you want to look at your high-level goals and figure out if any of them would be supported by processes you don’t currently use. Chances are, you have high-level goals related to retention and expansion.
Retention
Let’s pick up where the last example left off: churn reasons, also known as non-renewal reasons.
Remember when your churn analysis told you ROI perception wasn’t a big factor anymore? Let’s say it also told you customers are cancelling due to your lack of support for a new version of a ubiquitous platform. In that case, you should probably create a 2022 initiative around knowing which version each customer has, when they plan to upgrade, communicating urgency to Product with the right data, communicating the roadmap to customers, and maybe even some beta testing. These communications are your new Customer Journey steps until the problem is solved.
Expansion
You might also look at your expansion-related activities. Specifically, this is a time to pull aside your CSMs with the best expansion numbers and see what they’re doing “off the grid”.
One CS leader told me the story of a Marketing leader who was convinced the best way to generate expansion leads was to use a Marketing platform to blast all customers with an ad for a certain cross-sell product, and then have each CSM personally follow up with an email. Each Marketing email created a Task in Salesforce for each customer, and the CSMs were expected to mark a Task complete when they sent each customer the follow-up email. The Marketing leader’s goal was to show the linkage between CSM activity and expansion results. Marketing got the green light to go live with the initiative.
Most CSMs went with the plan, and as you can imagine, spent a lot of time on administrative work and emailing customers who weren’t a good fit for the product. One CSM in particular simply didn’t send the follow-up emails; instead, they dedicated a few hours to (falsely!) marking the Tasks as complete, and proceeded to intelligently reach out to certain customers that were more likely to purchase the extra product based on certain criteria.
Unsurprisingly, the CSM in question was the leading expansion salesperson that quarter. They ultimately shared what they’d done with their CS leader, including sharing the criteria they used in order to decide which customers would be most likely to buy. Those criteria, and the CSM’s actions based on them, would be used as process and Journey steps going forward among the entire team.
Ultimately, when re-evaluating your processes for yourself as a leader and your CSMs as individuals, remember it’s key to be flexible around your company’s current business goals, and the changing conditions in your market.
The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that helps leaders build and develop top performing customer success teams. We offer short-term consulting engagements that can kick-start your planning efforts, as well as coaching for leaders who need some weekly advice. Check out TheSuccessLeague.io for details.
Russell Bourne - Russell is a Customer Success Leader, Coach, Writer, and Consultant. In a Customer Success career spanning well over a decade, his human-first approaches to leadership and program management have consistently delivered overachievement on expansion sales and revenue goals, alongside much friendship and laughter. Russell serves on the Board of Gain Grow Retain as co-lead for Content Creation. He is passionate about equipping individual contributors and business leaders alike to lean on their Success practices to grow their careers and help their companies thrive. He holds a BA from UCLA, and in his free time plays guitar semi-professionally.