Setting A Customer Success Vision

My belief after 30 years of serving customers in the technology space is the following:

The power of setting a Customer Success Vision is to establish a vision and an execution plan that strives to ensure ALL customers become loyal fans of a solution that not only improves their ability to do their job better, but has achieved a business impact that is recognized across the customer’s leadership team.

There are three elements to creating a Customer Success (CS) Vision for a SaaS company:

1. Customer Centered Corporate Climate Shift

2. Customer Value GTM Strategy by Target Market

3. Customer Lifecycle Management Model

1. Customer Centered Corporate Climate

The first part of a CS model is the Customer Centered Corporate Climate Shift in which a company makes the strategic decision to put Customer Success in the center of their strategic vision for growth.

Building a Customer Experience Framework embodies building the best product, highest quality services and delivery with a consistent and valuable customer experience for all customers. This framework becomes a company “Way of Life” and the center of the strategic and operational plan for the entire company.

Customer Success is not achieved by creating a team or department of Customer Success Managers. It is achieved with all departments collaborating and contributing to making the customer’s experience the best in each target market.

It starts at the top with the Executive Leadership Team sharing the vision downward to every employee in the company. Evangelism the importance of each employee’s ability to contribute to building and executing the ultimate customer experience from the first touch point a potential customer has with a company all the way through the long-term relationship that will be built in creating a customer for life.

This will help the team members take a different approach to communicating and servicing customers. When a customer engagement goes sideways, instead of trying to prove to management that they did everything right for the customer, the team focuses on working with the customer to understand what the customer’s real perception is of the company, products and services and why. Instead of going through a series of excuses, they focus as a team to come up with an action plan to provide all the options possible to help address the customer’s issues and concerns to ensure they can turn the customer’s perception to one of value and loyalty.

The team could consist of a variety of team members from Product, Sales, Consulting, Support, Engineering, Customer Success, Finance and/or Marketing depending on the customer issues and concerns. The CS team tends to be the coordinator in bringing the right players to the table to ensure the right perception is created for all customers in every stage of the Customer’s Life Cycle for the company as part of the Customer Success vision.

Once the Company has adopted a “Customer Centered” corporate climate as the focus within the Companywide strategy, the next element to develop in the Customer Success vision is the Customer Value GTM Strategy by Market Segment.

2. Customer Value GTM Strategy by Target Market

The second element to building an effective CS strategy is the Customer Value GTM Strategy by Target Market which helps a company focus on a specific plan for landing new customers and expanding all customers for each defined target market or market segment.

There are two parts to the GTM Strategy.

1. Acquiring New Customers

2. Expanding Existing Customers

It is best to design GTM plays for new customer acquisitions and a separate set of plays for how to expand customers in the GTM strategic plan. Each of these sections are broken down by target market as well.

Once the market segments are defined within a GTM strategic plan, I recommend conducting a brainstorming session with the sales, professional services, customer success, customer service, and product management teams to develop a customer roadmap plan for each GTM play that takes a new customer from initial implementation through to fully operationalized across their entire company. This definition will help defined what the initial land program could be and what an expansion program would look like to get to the short- and long-term ROI value.

The team could focus on defining the high value outcomes for each target market that will operationalize the use of the solution to produce ROI long term. In the brainstorming session, the team may come up with several solutions and identify many other innovative approaches to creating value. The key is to start with the top three that have the highest potential for generating soft and hard ROIs for the customer.

Armed with the understanding of what it takes to make a customer successful with the solution, the Customer Success (CS) team can develop programs focused on delivering specific solutions to the common problems in each of the market segments that ensure realization of the high value outcomes. CS can then align with the Sales and Marketing plans for how they present a solution to help make it clear to prospects and customers on how you solve these problems and provide value specifically within each market segment.

Many companies will bundle up programs that provide solutions to specific problems within a market segment as a solid land strategy. Then create follow on programs that follow a best practice roadmap to expand a customer’s utilization of the solution. These expansion programs can lead a customer naturally into a next phase to continue expanding the use of the solution.

A well designed GTM strategic plan is the key to understanding how to develop a Customer Lifecycle Model that includes the right services and programs that deliver the right high value outcomes with well-defined roles, processes, standards, policies and procedures to deliver a consistent, high quality customer experience in a repeatable manner.

3. Customer Lifecycle Management Model

The third element of an effective Customer Success Vision is to build a Customer Lifecycle Management Model (CLM).

Many companies plan to create journey maps for each customer process. However, journey maps can be more effective in defining an operational plan once a Customer Lifecycle Management model has been defined. From the CLM model it is easier for the teams to develop a journey map for each stage of the CLM model by target market.

A typical CLM model contains the stages that a customer would go through in their long-term relationship with the company. An example of a Customer Life Cycle Management model is defined in the diagram below:

A CLM model helps define all the touch points a customer engages with a company from how you attract them initially all the way through their continuous journey as a customer for life.

Many companies create more or fewer stages than what is shown in the diagram above, however, you want to consider including all areas that a customer engages with a company. The diagram above defines the stages which are the most common elements of a CLM for a typical software company.

The best way to build a CLM model is to have a brainstorm session with the top and middle management teams that represent each department within the company. Customer data can be helpful to analyze prior to the brainstorm session(s). These data trends can provide insights and be helpful to share during the meetings to understand the most successful target markets and processes that close deals and enable expansions. Here are some questions the team can start with to get the conversations going and begin to design the CLM stages by target market. These are questions that the team would answer from the customer's perspective.

1. How do I find out about the company and what is offered and what it can do for me?

2. How can I solve some of my top problems or pain points using the solution(s) offered?

3. What communication happens once I share my interest? Does it keep me engaged and exchanging more information about my company and why we are looking at the solution?

4. What process will the salesperson take me through to get the information I need to make a decision (product, price and implementation scope and price)?

5. Do you spend time getting to know me and listening to my challenges today?

6. As a potential customer, I don’t have a lot of time, how does the company help me realize the value of the solution in a timely manner with minimal resources or make it worth allocating resources to implement the solution?

7. How does the company make it easy to do business with the company?

8. How does the company ensure the product will provide the value?

9. How does the company maintain and provide guidance for continuing to get value from the product and/or services to help me improve the key operational areas of my business? Drive revenue streams up and costs down to increase my profitability in the long run.

10. Continue down this line of questions from the Qualify stage through the Expansion stage of the CLM model.

Understanding the market and customer's perspectives are important to evolve the various stages of the CLM. Once you have these stages well defined with goals associated with them, you can begin a journey mapping exercise. These will have natural breaks and hand offs from one organization to another to optimize the customer experience. Feel free to get creative on naming the stages and defining a CLM model that best represents a company, products, services and outcomes you want to be known for as leaders in each target market.

Once you have a CLM model that the leadership team has agreed upon, I recommend presenting this at a company all hands meeting to share with all employees. This will help each employee across all the organizations understand their role and contribution to creating the ultimate customer experience and generate enthusiasm from all employees on how they can help create customer success.

We offer a free 30 minute consulting introduction session to provide guidance on how to become a customer centric SaaS company.

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