By Colleen St. John
In earlier posts I wrote about building out the structure of the internal client facing teams at an early stage startup. For my CS Leaders out there building out teams from the beginning, now that you have your team hired and you’re starting to onboard and manage customers - what is the next step for growth?
If you consume any content related to Customer Success, you’ll see again and again the need for data to help drive decisions. I know based on my own experience and through speaking with many CS Leaders at startups that relevant customer data is not always available in the early days of a new company in a way that is easy to view and utilize. So what is a CS Leader to do when they hear again and again that managing customer information and data is critical to success?
I’d suggest starting simple. Outline the critical elements that you and your cross-functional partners may need to know about the business as it relates to customers. You can choose any tools that work best for you, or a simple shared spreadsheet always works. I recommend following a template that will make it easy for you to transfer this data over to a CRM or CS Tool down the line. Be aware of long pages of notes related to customers living in various documents in various locations. This will create a huge headache when the Sales and Customer Success teams have the time and resources to implement a software that will allow you to scale because customer data will live in many different locations. Another common mistake is waiting to track customer information until the CRM or CS Tool is ready. These systems often take time to implement and a CS Leader will still need to give input and guidance related to what customer information is relevant. You don’t want to miss out on critical customer information while you’re waiting for the tools to be built.
Spreadsheets may not appear to be the most elegant solution. However, in the beginning, you just need a strong sense of what is happening with your clients at your fingertips so it can be easily shared with other leaders. Identifying key points, such as contract start date, contract end date, kickoff date, desired launch date, actual launch date, licenses purchased, and whitespace opportunity will immediately help to inform you about two key elements of your business: Time to Value and opportunity for growth.
Time to Value (TTV) allows a CS Leader to understand the amount of time that it takes your client to derive value from your software or service. TTV is often measured between the first meeting with CS to the time of product launch, but the definition may vary between industries. Gathering data from the beginning will continue to allow you to make informed decisions based on what could be impacting a customer’s TTV metric. This could be any number of things such as a clumsy Sales to CS handoff, product concerns or issues, lack of responsiveness, or leadership issues on the customer side. Once you start to hone in on what acceptable TTV looks like, you can begin to establish goals related to this metric.
Identifying opportunities for growth will not only give the CS and Sales teams an understanding of future potential, it may also help a CS Leader to determine customer bands or segments. In the beginning, it might be manageable to implement and support every customer the same, but likely as you grow, you may need to segment customers, build a recommended customer journey for each segment, and staff each segment accordingly. Your future self will thank you if you start thinking about the potential from the beginning so that you have a north star to continue to work towards.
The early days of a startup require a ton of information gathering, so I’d also recommend thinking about utilizing surveys to understand the sentiment of your customers - would they recommend you to a friend? The NPS score might not be the most meaningful metric in the beginning but possibly still a good question to ask to truly understand how your early customers feel about your services and software.
As challenging as it can be in the beginning to gather and manage data without the right systems in place, it’s still good to start building a strong foundation for data about your customers. As time goes on, the systems, the tools, and the metrics will grow, and you will truly be a CS Leader who uses data to drive decisions.
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.
Colleen St. John - As Director of Client Services, Colleen leads the implementation, support, and customer success teams at Littera Education. Colleen is an experienced customer success and professional services leader. She relies on her extensive corporate background in customer success and project management as well as her academic Masters in education, to design effective strategies for clients to follow from initial rollout to long-term adoption and expansion. A licensed teacher, Colleen holds an MA in Education Administration from Notre Dame de Namur University and a BA in Liberal Studies from San Diego State University. Originally from California, Colleen now lives in New Jersey with her husband and three children.