Fundamentals of Real Customer Success

Customer success drives revenue by keeping customers longer and expanding their purchases. It boosts company valuation through metrics like customer lifetime value, net revenue retention, and customer acquisition cost efficiency.

Discover why customer success matters to customers by delivering on promises and guiding them toward their goals and desired outcomes, addressing misconceptions and clarifying the value you provide.

customer success creates a win-win for customers and the company, delivering value while protecting your energy and matching deliverables to customer needs.

Clarify what customer success is not: magic, a software fix, or a SaaS-only renaming of account management. Focus on driving customer outcomes and setting them up for success from start.

Understand that customer success means customers achieve their desired outcome through interactions with your company across the entire life cycle, from prospecting and marketing to onboarding, adoption, expansion, and support.

Define the customer's desired outcome by identifying the required outcome and the appropriate experience, delivering what they need in the way they want it, through the customer's lens.

Identify appropriate experience by aligning physical, sensory, interaction, and style elements with each customer segment; tailor experiences from an api self-service to a graphical interface and 24/7 phone support.

Discover the customer's desired outcome through the desired outcome discovery process, detective-style observation, and probing questions about goals, market changes, and adjacent products, then listen in conversations rather than surveys.

Learn how customer success management moves customers toward their ever evolving desired outcomes by orchestrating segmentation, interventions, measurement, and renewal while bridging gaps between use and outcomes.

Operationalize the journey by turning milestones and gaps into an engagement model. Balance human interaction and technology with modalities like one-to-one visits, web meetings, broadcasts, and self-service across three segments.

Explore the essential characteristics of a great CSM, including empathy, structured yet flexible workflows, and the ability to evolve with customers and industry changes.

Develop confidence and communication by managing your schedule, preparing for meetings, understanding customers and success gaps, and applying a six-part communication model: message, goal, sender, receiver, method, action.

Define your customer success goals first, then select tools that fit your operational needs. Use tools for customer information, status, playbooks, knowledge base, training, and workflows, along with effective communication.

Evangelize the concept of customer success across the company and circulate customer intel to sales, marketing, and product. Share customers and use cases to close deals and guide product improvements.

Define success potential as the minimum required for customers to get value, and use a six-component checklist to filter bad fits before signing.

Discover the six inputs of success potential: technical, functional, resource, competence, experience, and cultural fit, and how to ensure customers are a realistic, value-driven match.

Start with what you know—technical fit, functional fit, and resource fit—to gauge success potential and adapt as product evolves; stretch customers may become a fit, but success is not guaranteed.

Explore how churn reveals underlying issues in customer success, distinguishing logo churn from revenue churn and emphasizing root-cause solutions over simply stopping churn.

Eliminate churn by addressing five easy steps: bad fit, broken product, inappropriate experience, unclear success, and lack of a customer success process.

Customer success acts as a growth engine by shifting from scarcity to abundance and embracing renewal and expansion as integral parts of the customer journey.

CSMs should sell to existing customers, but focus on helping them succeed rather than traditional sales. Present the right offering at the right time to build trust and support renewal.

Learn how to build customer advocacy as a consistent process, timing requests for reviews or references, and leveraging social proof to strengthen brand affinity and map the customer ascension path.

Explore customer facing kpis that reveal whether customers take actions to gain value and whether their relationship expands or contracts, using net revenue retention to gauge recurring revenue growth.

Identify your internal key performance indicators by clarifying how you and the team are measured, including individual contributors and team level. Align with leadership and report to board or investors.

Measure customer's success vector using milestones, ascension velocity, and accountabilities; track adoption, meaningful product activity, upsells, advocacy, usability issues, and support response to move from negative to neutral or positive.