By Chad Horenfeldt
We’ve been hearing a lot about how QBRs need an overhaul but it’s time to relook at another crucial meeting in the customer journey - the customer kickoff. Similar to a QBR, this can be a boring and mundane meeting filled with endless slides. Instead of energizing your clients, you can suck the life out of them by pummeling them with tedious details they probably won’t remember. It’s time to shake this up if you want to lay the right foundation with your customers and set yourself up for long-term success.
When prepping for a kickoff meeting, how many of you copy your existing onboarding slides, add your customer’s logo, change out a few items, and then jump on a Zoom? There’s nothing wrong with this approach as long as your objective is aligned with your customer’s business outcomes. Too often, the focus is on getting through all of the slides when the focus should be on understanding the customer’s needs and building trust. This post is all about enhancing your kickoff meeting by establishing a positive rapport with your clients, spurring their involvement, and creating a strong foundation for a sustained relationship.
Have a discussion rather than a one-sided conversation
Similar to the excitement of a first date, the initial moments of a kickoff meeting are filled with eager anticipation. You have butterflies fluttering in your stomach as you await to see what type of client they’re going to turn out to be. Are they going to be engaged? Are they going to be serious? Light-hearted? Are these going to be one of the “good ones” or a “problem child”?
Your clients are probably a little nervous as well. They have a number of priorities on their plate and may be worried that they’re getting even more work shoved on them. They may also be unsure they purchased the right solution and suffer from buyer remorse. While they may be excited as they see your product as a savior for all of their current problems, they most likely have a lot riding on this implementation. They may be counting on your solution to achieve a key goal and they may have specific launch timelines they’ll need to hit. Regardless of your emotional state, it’s vital to shift your focus and put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Think about what they need and how best to keep them engaged while ensuring that you’re setting up the relationship for future success. That’s why it’s important to build rapport right away.
To connect and start to bond with your customers, you should focus on learning more about their company, their goals, and their current situation. Rather than conducting a one-sided conversation where you march through your slides and focus on minute details, you can elevate the meeting by engaging your customers in a strategic discussion. Do away with the dull and generic “kickoff call” and consider changing the meeting name. For example, renowned CS leader and CCO at Client Success, Kristi Faltorusso, calls her kickoff meetings "Partnership kick-offs". I recommend calling it “Strategic planning kickoff”. This sets the tone that you’re upleveling the discussion.
Rebranding the meeting to a strategic discussion also signals to the decision maker that their presence is needed. I’ve seen too many situations in which the decision maker hands off the implementation to a member of their team that has little clue what is expected of them or the reasons behind why they bought the product. The presence of the client stakeholder who initiated the purchase at the meeting is vital so they can effectively communicate their vision and rationale for choosing to work with you.
Engaging and involving your customers in a strategic discussion is the best way to entice them to join. Inform the decision maker of the nature of the discussion so they understand why their presence is mandatory. In addition, let them know that you just need them for the first 20-30 minutes and then they can drop off. Now that we've repositioned the purpose and the structure of the kickoff meeting, let's get into how you’ll execute it.
Establish the CSM as the Strategic Advisor
Once you’ve established the kickoff meeting as a strategic conversation, you can also leverage the CSM to take the lead on confirming the client’s desired business outcomes and cementing their role as the strategic advisor. Irrespective of whether onboarding has been separated from the CSM role, the CSM should actively participate in this meeting to demonstrate their competence in defining and delivering customer value.
Instead of starting the meeting off by taking the client through your onboarding processes and other mind-numbing details, jump right into the meat of the conversation: why they bought your solution and what they expect to achieve from it. CSMs should lead this discovery conversation to narrow down the business outcomes, success criteria, and specific goals the client wants to achieve. By tackling this first, you’ll engage the senior stakeholders and ensure that everyone is aligned around specific goals. Even if their business outcomes aren’t too well defined at this point, it’s a starting point you can work off and rally around. They can always be fine tuned later on. In addition, the CSM will be positioned as a valuable partner in their success and not seen as an extension of the support team.
It’s recommended to first focus on their business. Ensure you understand what their business does, who their customers are, and what their main challenges are. Are there any pressing events or activities that increase the urgency of this implementation? Knowing their time constraints can help you better understand their priorities. Next, lead a business outcome discovery session. For more information on how to lead these discussions, check out this previous post: The Secret to Uncovering Your Customer’s Business Outcomes. Remember that your job isn't to just get them launched successfully. It's to improve their business. You’ll know your conversation is on the right track if you don’t see anyone turn off their cameras and you hear them asking you questions.
Define the roles and responsibilities and set expectations
The first part of this meeting should have your customer’s engines revving and wanting more. You’ve engaged them, taken the time to better understand their business, and defined what is most important to them. Now you can set the right expectations so everyone understands their roles and responsibilities at a high level. This includes their weekly time requirements, the homework they're expected to complete and any other key details that will determine the success of the onboarding project.
It’s important to cover this section with the senior stakeholders present to prevent any ambiguity when it comes to overall role expectations and the expected launch timeline. This avoids the issue of the senior stakeholder downloading the responsibility to someone on their team who then drags their feet and puts the whole project in jeopardy. As you’ve frontloaded this agenda item, the key stakeholders are all present so you can eliminate the possibility of “broken telephone”.
Not only are you ensuring that your clients know what is expected of them, you’re also outlining what your team will be responsible for. This can include reviewing what is included in their statement of work or even a high level review of what they can expect from your team as part of the onboarding process. You’ll also want to outline how CSMs or others from your team will engage with your client on an ongoing basis. For instance, it's important to detail how a CSM will interact with the senior stakeholder at this point to establish clear expectations regarding their involvement and future meeting commitments.
You don't have to delve into the intricate details of every element in the project plan right now - just provide sufficient information for them to grasp the collaborative process, your responsibilities versus theirs, and the upcoming phases, with a special emphasis on engaging with decision makers. You can do that later on once the decision maker leaves. I would also recommend implementing something similar to what Kristi Faltorusso uses called “the customer promise” which outlines what the customer can expect from their CS team. This builds trust and draws a firm line in the sand on how your team operates.
Lastly, call out any potential thorny issues while you have the decision maker on the call. For example, Sales may have promised a tight deadline or the client may be missing something or have a risky element of their onboarding that needs to be discussed. Now is the time to wrestle with these topics so you can determine the best way to address them. If you kick them down the road, they’ll only become a larger challenge. Once you’ve completed this portion of the meeting, the client senior stakeholders can drop off.
Save the boring but important stuff for later in the meeting or for a follow-up
With the most important items out of the way, you can move on to the important but humdrum stuff. This includes going through the onboarding project plan, the projected timeline for each phase, what the client is required to do at each stage, and any other relevant items in the user journey. This gets into the nitty gritty so the client can better understand what each week may look like, and the exact resources required and when they’ll be needed. You should also use this opportunity to discuss how you’ll work together, how best to communicate with each other, and set upcoming meetings. All of this can also be done in a subsequent meeting if that’s easier.
Reinvigorating your kickoff meetings
It's clear that the traditional customer kickoff meeting, much like the QBR, often lacks the engagement and strategic focus required to build strong, lasting customer relationships. To address this issue, throughout this article I’ve recommended ways to transform these meetings into dynamic and productive discussions. Specifically, the recommendations show how you can reshape these meetings into strategic exchanges that actively involve senior stakeholders and position the CSM as the catalyst for exploring business results. This involves focusing more on their business and setting the right expectations and then covering the basic elements so everyone is on the same page. This will improve your understanding of your client’s needs, elevate the perception your clients have of you, and set the relationship on the right path for a long term partnership.
The Success League is a global customer success consulting firm that also offers leadership coaching, as well as accredited CS Leader and CS Professional Certification training programs. Please visit www.thesuccessleague.io for our complete offerings.
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.