By Russell Bourne
I’ve spent the better part of 2023 writing and posting extensively about customer journeys, so I’d like to take the time to write about their partner in crime: playbooks. I often hear frazzled Customer Success leaders say things like “we need a playbook for that”, in reference to frequently-occurring, reactive fire drill activities that interrupt the flow of their CSMs’ day. We still haven’t come to a unified language in our CS world, but to my ears, that’s not exactly what a playbook is.
So to start, let’s review the difference between the two:
A Customer Journey is the collection of customer-facing touchpoints a company delivers to its customers - by segment. If you’re from the hospitality industry, you’ll recognize this as “front of house”, or if you’re from theatre, a customer journey is what happens in front of the curtain. Most importantly here, customer journeys should always be thought of from the customer’s point of view.
A Playbook is an internally-facing guide outlining what your company has to do behind the scenes in order to deliver the customer journey. Sticking with our hospitality and theatre analogies, playbooks are “back of house” or “behind the curtain” activities. Behind each customer journey touchpoint is a play, and the collection of all the plays is the playbook.
I’ll run through a couple common examples most SaaS companies have.
The Kickoff Call
Most SaaS companies see the customer kickoff call as a crucial, manually-delivered touchpoint in their high-touch journey. It’s so important, many deliver it manually for customers on a medium-touch journey too. From the customer’s point of view, the kickoff call is a meeting where their Sales rep and Pre-Sales Engineer introduce them to their CSM, Professional Services or Implementation engineer, and possibly a Project Manager. The customer feels good about this because they probably know and trust their sales contacts, and they want all the information they gave those folks to be well-communicated to their post-sale team.
There’s a lot that has to happen behind the scenes to make the kickoff call successful. Your play for the kickoff call might need to include any of the following:
Sales must translate buying reasons into an internal document that will be the basis for a joint success plan
PSE must log all technical requirements into an onboarding spreadsheet or tool
Project Management must create a project timeline so the team can set customer expectations on milestones and go-live
All internal teammates must attend a post-kickoff call debrief and agree on next steps, open necessary tickets, and so on
With those steps taken as preparation, your customer-facing kickoff calls can run in a smooth, predictable, scalable way. As you can easily imagine, each component of the play can also have RACI assigned to it so each person knows their responsibilities, with no overlap or gaps.
Expansion Sales Motions
Another common customer-facing touchpoint is outreach by a CSM regarding expansion. Let’s be honest, customers don’t often love this one. If you’re a CSM and you feel your expansion efforts are amateurish sales pitches that go nowhere, a play might be exactly what you need. Possible things you can do behind the curtain that will make this touchpoint less painful and more fruitful:
For upsells (more quantity of a product the customer has), research actual usage, capacity against agreement, value derived
For cross-sells (modules of your product the customer doesn’t have yet), perform discovery to decide which module to target, rather than product-dumping everything you have
Pre-outreach, re-validate your best contact(s) for the outreach
Consider whether expansion touchpoints are 100% proactive, or if they should be triggered by an event (customer exceeding capacity, customer was in the news, customer M&A, etc.).
Again, RACI is an effective tool to use on both the play and touchpoint here. Without clear swim lanes, customers might receive the same sales call from a CSM, an Account Manager, or even their original Sales rep - a poor experience which will make your company look disorganized. If your company has a sales rules of engagement plan that prohibits new-logo hunters from farming the base, the RACI for the expansion sales play is a good place to document that.
The kickoff call and expansion sales touchpoints are good examples of times when you can more or less control when the touchpoint happens. Some journey touchpoints are inherently reactive, but that doesn’t mean you can’t plan for them. Remember the frazzled CS leader from the beginning of this article? They’re looking for a play. And crucially, the play can only exist if the fire-drill situation is a touchpoint on the journey! Journeys and playbooks are intended to manage the majority of what goes on day-to-day, not capture every edge case.
If you’re tempted to create touchpoints and plays for common escalations, think about how common they truly are and whether the frequency warrants documentation. By best practice, your highest-touch journey should have somewhere between 40-60 touchpoints, and you could write plays for the most important 50-80% of those, especially where cross-functional teamwork is involved.
Remember, a customer-centric company will design the customer journeys first and then build the playbook to support the journeys. Involve your teammates in the design of both, and you’re off to the races.
The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers a comprehensive CS Leadership Certification program, containing such classes as Building a Playbook and Journey Mapping. Please visit our website for more on this and our other offerings.
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.