Customer Success is a Team Sport

By Ashley Hall

While we love to call CSMs customer superheroes, it’s imperative to understand that it doesn't mean the CSM has to do everything themselves. It’s an important lesson to learn how and why to partner with other departments as often as you can - success is a team sport after all! 

As a customer success professional, your regular day-to-day can feel like you’re constantly fighting fires and running from one challenge to another. Throw in a challenging and chaotic year like 2020 and each day can feel like a 5-alarm fire. Seemingly no industry will make it through this year unscathed and you very well might be powering through a reduction in staff or a reduction in resources making things just that much more challenging. 

I’ve spent the last several weeks being pretty hard on myself through all of these challenges expecting my performance to be perfect and to always have the right answer. First, I’ve worked on dropping the expectation of perfection. Second, I’ve tried to identify where I should and can ask for more help. 

Yes, while CS might be the hub of the customer wheel, that does not mean you are the only one expected to do the client work. Share in the opportunity and burden to partner with departments across the organization. Here are ways I’ve reached out to other departments for assistance during challenging months. 

Executive Team

Collaborate with your executive team on how they can shoulder some of the current challenges. Are there immediate actions they can take to make your day-to-day easier and connect more with the client base? While I would look to a webinar or fireside chat with leadership as a start, I’ve been able to implement executive sponsorship and participation in EBRs to partner in the recent influx of customer challenges and feedback.

While it is not possible to have an executive relationship mapped to every single one of your customers, I always encourage leadership to be familiar with a select population of the customer base - whether that be based in industry, contract size, or implementation that is up to your organization. Having executives that regularly check in on your clients in addition to your day to day behaviors is not only a great client experience but often yields a layer of feedback and collaboration you might not get from your standard daily interactions. In addition, this quarter we've begun looping in our assigned executive sponsor to join and present a portion of the Executive Business Review. Once that executive is looped into the process they own their discussion points and slides and take over a portion of the meeting, giving the CSM time to listen in on the new viewpoint and hear the client feedback delivered to another set of ears.

Solutions/Professional Services

I am lucky enough to have access to an incredibly talented solutions team. Rather than me having to know every single detail of every piece of functionality we have, we do have a technical team designed to partner with developers and IT teams specifically. If and when there are opportunities to allow my solutions team to run and manage a technical call without me, I take it. This way clients are getting more pointed, focused attention they need and I can connect with another customer on something I am qualified to solve.

We’ve also begun having our solutions team participate in pre-sales conversations well before success is looped in so that they can begin mapping the technical portions of the project leaving the success team’s focus on relationship building and successful non-technical implementation.     

Support

I always do my best to point my client partners to our knowledge base as a first line of solution-seeking. More often than not, what the client is looking to do has been done before. Is there a step-by-step guide ready to be shared? If not, keep a running list of the articles that would make your day-to-day easier and share it with your support team for incorporation to your knowledge base.

When it comes to partnering with support, looking for ways to unlock efficiency is key. Rather than lobbing issues over the fence for them to solve, CS is doing the first line of investigation on a client issue and summarizing the issue into a format designed by support. This small step has strengthened the working relationship between support and CS and has improved our resolution times.  

Product and Engineering 

While a backlog of feature requests is something that all teams will experience from time to time, recently we’ve asked our product team to deliver on some easy wins to surprise and delight our customers. I advise you to narrow in on a top 10 that your product team knows they can execute in a short time and rank them in order of impact. A surprise email from your CSM delivering pertinent product improvements goes a long way to support the CS organization and increase customer sentiment. 

My current role is with a robust, enterprise offering with lots of advanced features. Currently, we are partnering with the product team on in-app guides and pointers to highlight places where clients consistently get stuck. We hope this will ensure clients will get more resources at the right time and the need for support tickets or additional advisement from CS will diminish. 

If there is only one thing you can gain from this post, it’s that I hope you don’t wait to make these improvements! Rather than waiting for your plate to be too full, put these practices and strategies in place today to prevent future feelings of chaos. There’s no way you single-handedly can make all your customers perfectly successful; collaborate cross-functionally and share those challenges and wins across the organization.

The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers a CSM Certification Program which includes classes such as Cross-Functional Leadership and Time Management for CSMs. Visit TheSuccessLeague.io for more information on our training and consulting offerings.

Ashley Hall - Ashley loves to lead account management and success teams; from training newbies to building processes out of chaos. Ashley is one of the founding advisors to The Success League, and serves as a regular instructor for the company's CSM Training Program. She is a Director of Customer Success at Stackla, and brings her work experiences to her articles and classes. Ashley holds a BA from the University of Colorado, lives in San Francisco, and enjoys global travel.

Protecting Your Time: Nearly as Important as Protecting Revenue

By Ashley Hall

A career in success introduces so many positives. From working with amazing brands as your clients to expanding your industry expertise through your client verticals, not to mention limitless career opportunities that seem to widen with every passing quarter. Along with the good, you also get to manage the bad or let’s say, the more challenging. As caring and excellent problem solvers, it’s natural for CSMs to get pulled in many directions from special projects to technical issues, and even sometimes new customer conversations on top of their daily responsibilities. While probably driven to say “yes” to everything to be an asset and team player - the skill of protecting one’s time ultimately will serve the CSM and the colleagues or clients more so than just always getting a “yes” to every request. The following are good reminders of how and why to protect your time both with your colleagues and client requests with the ultimate goal of serving them better.

“I’d love to help, tell me more about….”

By no means am I encouraging you to become a “no” person. I am looking to empower you with tools to continue being a “yes” person armed with qualifying questions and setting reasonable expectations. Starting with “tell me more about” sets you up to ask questions about priority level and completion expectations. Try this the next time a panicked colleague comes to you regarding a client project “I’d love to help. Tell me more about when the client is expecting an answer and what solutions you’ve come up with thus far.” Your willingness to help is clear, however, you’re immediately finding out turnaround expectations and the current status so that your next response is as informed as possible.

Understanding Priority Level of Projects and Challenging What is Asked of You 

Committing to customer issues or projects is a daily occurrence. Be sure to understand how important or what priority this project has while being transparent about your ability to deliver. If it is not a top priority, perhaps a week turn around time works for both you and your customer, ensuring no one is stressed and you can slide the work into place next week. If it is absolutely urgent, be sure to share some context of what you’re rearranging or sacrificing in order to deliver so they have an understanding of where you’re coming from. Don’t forget to tag other team members to collaborate on the issue, that may even help you solve the issue faster than you planned for.

Turn Meetings Into Videos

Using Loom, the free video and screen recording platform, I’ve saved hours upon hours sending my clients videos in responses to their emailed questions and requests for meetings. We all know we live in an abundance of meetings, some of which could be communicated in other formats. Give loom a shot the next time your client requests a meeting and see if you are able to address all of their needs in a 5-10 minute video rather than a 30-minute touch base or lengthy email. Not only does it help protect your calendar but it's an added bonus for your clients that are in further away timezones - they can watch their video when they’re ready and don’t have to schedule calls at mutually inconvenient times. 

Always Use Your Public Facing, Bulk Resources First

Your company’s knowledge base or resource center should be one of your top used resources. Guidance, best practices, and straightforward answers should be searchable in those resources. Not only should those resources be well constructed but moreover advertised and socialized across your customer base very well. While as a CSM you are their trusted advisor and strategic partner, you are not their question and answer bot. Highlighting and always using those resources first with customers will train them to use those resources as their first step rather than contacting you right off the bat.   

Block Your Calendar

Only you know your best hours of productivity or times to meet with others. The first block I always start with is a block for lunch and a block to get outside. From there don’t forget to block time for your to-do list or emails. Some CSMs can get to feeling guilty about calendar blocks, but you really shouldn’t. When you prioritize and get your needs out of the way, that makes you a stronger teammate and strategic partner. 

Protecting your time and productivity will always serve you as a customer success professional. The defense you set up allows you to build a schedule that makes proactive work a priority and, of course, the flexibility to put out fires when you’re called upon. Just remember, not every fire is yours to fight and sometimes that fire can be put out next week instead of this one.

The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers a CSM Certification Program that includes classes such as Time Management for CSMs and Managing Your Portfolio. See TheSuccessLeague.io for more information on our training and consulting offerings.

Ashley Hall - Ashley loves to lead account management and success teams; from training newbies to building processes out of chaos. Ashley is one of the founding advisors to The Success League, and serves as a regular instructor for the company's CSM Training Program. She is a Director of Customer Success at Stackla, and brings her work experiences to her articles and classes. Ashley holds a BA from the University of Colorado, lives in San Francisco, and enjoys global travel.

Onwards & Upwards: Career Options Within Customer Success

By Amin Akbarpour

A question I have gotten an increasing amount of times over the years is “what's next?” as it relates to Customer Success. I get this from both folks wanting to know what's next for myself as well as individuals thinking about plunging into Customer Success for the first time and wanting to have a long-term view of the CS field. Yes, Customer Success may have been the new kid on the block for years but thankfully there are many career paths one can take that makes it more than just a temporary job. The way I see it, there are three main paths: individual contributor, leadership, and pivot. 

Individual Contributor

One potential career path within Customer Success is to go the individual contributor (IC) route. Here you would climb up the market ranks starting with the small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) segment and ultimately ending in strategic. The middle area (between SMB + strategic) could be composed of several rungs and all by different names. I've seen any combination of mid-market, corporate, and enterprise. As you climb up these different market segments, the complexities of each client grow tremendously. It's not just added personnel and teams you're dealing with; it's complexity in problems, more sophisticated systems, longer lead times as more teams are involved in decision making and executing, and a nexus of checks and balances throughout the organization. There's a reason that you'll rarely see a strategic rep take on more than just a couple accounts while a mid-market rep can take on significantly more. It's not the level of care and diligence that necessarily changes; it's the level of effort and work that must be put forth to ensure the same level of success that becomes drastically larger. 

Don't think you have to go all the way up the corporate ladder. Really enjoy supporting mid-market level accounts? You can always find your sweet spot market segment and plant yourself there. I actually recommend this rather than dabbling in every segment just for the sake of experience. When you find the segment that you enjoy working with the most and it is still challenging and satisfying for you, stick with it. 

Leadership

Another avenue would be to go into management as you propel along your Customer Success career. There are a few ways to go about this...

• Team Manager: After demonstrating success as an individual contributor against one of the previously mentioned market segments, you could work towards becoming a manager at that level. Good to note that you rarely will get the opportunity to manage a team for a market segment in which you were not a successful IC. Unlike some industries (pro sports come to mind) where you do not need to demonstrate success at the highest level in order to coach at that level, Customer Success (and I should add most sales roles as well) require not only experience but proven expertise in the segments for which a leader is responsible.

• Executive: If you like the team manager aspect, then you can consider preparing for the track towards executive leadership. There's a growing number of VP of Customer Success roles that can be a great start for going into a cross-functional executive role. One of the benefits of being a Customer Success professional is that the nature of the job allows you to work cross-functionally and thus, you have a great advantage towards understanding other aspects of the company. This lends itself to very well-rounded executives who can relate and manage different functions in a sustainable way. 

One thing I would like to share anecdotally: leadership is not for everyone. I know many people over the years who became one-and-done managers and for one primary reason: they themselves did not enjoy the actual act of managing people. It's a difficult position where having success as an IC does not lend itself to being a good people manager. It can be challenging when your success is no longer 100% contingent on your creativity, smarts, and ability to produce. Instead, you're required to grow and manage a team of people and put them in a position to succeed. It's a very intricate role that requires a unique skill set in order to be successful. For those who do try and like it, then the road is clear and defined. If you’re interested in the leadership route, this blog post on Customer Success Leadership Skills is a great place to review key skills necessary for excelling as a Customer Success Leader. 

Pivot

Last, but certainly not least, you can always use Customer Success as a launching board into a completely different department. I've seen Customer Success professionals pivot into Marketing, Product, Operations, Human Resources, and Sales. As previously mentioned, the nature of the Customer Success role allows you access and insight into other departments. Sometimes you may find that there's something else out there that's calling your name. I now know individuals who are in the leadership ranks in other departments because their diverse skill set in CS positioned them as ideal candidates for other types of roles.

This Customer Success and Education Study we shared last year highlights the growing field of Customer Success and the diverse backgrounds of people attracted to this field. The flexibility and nimbleness that Customer Success allows cannot be stated enough. It's a wonderful foot in the door of any organization. Whether you want to become a successful IC, a manager with aspirations of going into executive leadership, or have questions you want answered about working in a different department – Customer Success is well-positioned to get you where you want to be.

Still not sure how to approach your Customer Success career? The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers a CSM Certification Training Program that teaches the skills that it takes to be a top-performing customer success professional, including classes on Career Development for CSMs as well as Cross-Functional Leadership. Please see TheSuccessLeague.io for more information on our training and consulting offerings.

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 and currently serves as an account manager for Persado. Amin is a University of San Francisco alum who now calls New York City home.

How to Leverage the CS Tools You Already Have

By Amin Akbarpour

The day-to-day of a customer success professional can be taxing. We’re tasked with finding time in the day for client meetings, creating client deliverables, attending internal meetings, and much more. One of the things that is critical to helping us achieve all of this is leveraging the tools and resources we have at our disposal. Far too often I see CS representatives make their lives overly difficult by not proactively using the tools that are literally at their fingertips. Easily the most underutilized item in our tool belt is the CRM or customer relationship management system (think, Salesforce). Here are some tips on how to get the most out of your CRM:

Reporting

Ever have your leadership team ask you for a report on…

• …accounts that require executive help?

• …customers that have existing technical issues?

• …companies where there is large opportunity to grow?

• …key contacts that we need to build a relationship with?

• …LinkedIn profiles of really, just about anyone?

 
You can leverage a CRM tool to track all of this so the moment the request comes in, you can quickly provide either a link (if the tool is widely adopted) or download and send a report. The amount of time and energy customer success representatives spend fulfilling leadership requests is astonishing. I know some have resorted to keeping Excel or Google Sheet files up to date, which is a step in the right direction. However, you cannot maintain one massive workbook that serves as your one-stop-shop as efficiently as a centralized CRM can.

Personal tip – if you’re using a CRM tool that doesn’t currently have the ability to track certain data points (like account health, usage of your offering, or relationships that need nurturing) you are being asked for, work with your sales operations team to customize it. Chances are if you have a need then so do your other comrades in customer success. Most of the major systems in the market allow for enough modification to support all the data points that you’ll need.

Client Interactions

This is my favorite part of leveraging a centralized solution; using it to store every client-facing resource as well as track all client interactions. Why? It serves as a single place to view all interactions (imagine wanting a refresher on the last conversation you had with a client) while also ensuring all materials the client has ever seen are in one centralized place. If you’re not convinced of the benefits, let me pose this in another way. Have you ever…

• …been asked by a colleague to share a recent slide deck?

• …had to provide the history of an account to leadership or a colleague?

• …been wanted to access another colleague’s spreadsheet but were unable to find it?

If you answered yes to any of the above, then you could benefit from the use of a centralized system.

Reminders

Far too often, I see customer success reps get very creative when it comes to monitoring activities and to-do lists. This includes:

• Setting reminders on the calendar

• Using post-it notes (virtual and physical)

• Sending unread emails to themselves

I’ve even seen some CS requests for a project management tool to help with all of this. This is the equivalent of having one reusable water bottle for tap water and another for sparkling – absurd! Did you know you can set both tasks and reminders in the majority of CRM tools? Imagine logging in, and the first thing you see is your to-do list for the day. You can set up reminders so that you’re always on top of what needs to be done. Not only do these reminders help you, but they add transparency so that anyone can open an account and see what needs to be done. Remember the leadership reporting requests? Imagine cutting those down significantly because they can instantly search for an account and see exactly how far along the customer journey they are.

I do want to call out that if you utilize a CS platform (think Gainsight, Strikedeck, ClientSuccess) as opposed to a conventional CRM tool, then there’s even more reason for you to utilize these functions in your day-to-day. These tools are designed to manage tasks and activities, provide places for you to track and report on important data points, and also feed customer success-specific functions like health scoring and playbooks.

Even in a case where you’re unable to get CRM adoption across your team, there are still many positives to using a centralized tool as your personal customer success book of record. Leverage your existing tools to help streamline your daily efforts so that you can free yourself of administrative tasks and focus on what really matters – making the customer successful.

Looking to add to your CSM toolkit? The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers a CSM Certification Training Program that teaches the skills that it takes to be a top-performing customer success professional, including a class on using CRM and CSM Systems effectively. Please see TheSuccessLeague.io for more information on our training and consulting offerings.

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 and currently serves as an account manager for Persado. Amin is a University of San Francisco alum who now calls New York City home.