Latviv Platform Content

Build a Relationship
Using soft skill considerations, personal charisma, and a keen customer service mindset, make lasting friendships with customers. People see through false pretenses so make sure every interaction is genuine and well thought through.

Understand Business Context
Look for the larger project goals in aggregate, customer and third-party resources allocated for the project, integrations with customers and third-party solutions, level of funding, and visibility. This will help in understanding the dependencies, and

risks facing the project.

Understand Real Problems
Dig deeper to find out why the customer is investing in your product and other related initiatives. If it is not clear how the project and products under consideration will help resolve customer pain points, ask sooner than later. If a customer’s reasoning is flawed, call it out ahead of time, so that realistic expectations can be set, and approaches fine-tuned before the project is undertaken.

You may have noticed that McDonald’s installed self-order stations at its locations. What could be the real problems that these stations are trying to address? Is it to minimize the long queues, reduce labor cost for taking customer orders, reduce errors in manually collecting customer orders using service representatives, all the above, or something else?

Visualize, Deliver, & Validate Value
Before taking on the project, question the need and applicability of your product or service. Will it provide value to customer’s initiatives? Only when you have a convincing response, bid for the project. After winning the project, follow through to the point value is delivered through your solutions, validated, and acknowledged by all those involved with the project.

Manage Project Plan
Document desired project outcomes, activities, tasks, and milestones to achieve them. Provide continuous visibility and track through completion until value is realized.

Deliver Exceptional Memories
All the previous steps, if executed well, should result in superior customer experience and realization of customer end goals. When customer personnel get rewarded such as with promotions and or higher compensation, due to your efforts, initiatives, intellect, and wisdom, customer delight and gratitude will help you achieve your ongoing revenue goals outlined earlier in this book.

QBR Frequency
Choose the frequency of quarterly business reviews (QBR) meetings based on the nature of the business, customer-specific situation, and your availability. Assess your customer lists and group them by in-implementation and post-deployment lists. Give time for adoption after implementations before you schedule adoption meetings for in-implementation accounts. For the latter, plan to touch base every quarter, although the frequency could be higher or lower depending on the situation. Too frequent calls with just deployed customers may make these calls ineffective. Availability of resources in the customer success group, full- vs. part-time resource status in the customer success function and customer availability will also play a role in allotting time for these meetings.

Requesting Data From Customers
Request clients to collect adoption metrics, captured in other third-party systems (as suggested in the previous section) such as customer relationship management, enterprise risk management, HR, or risk management solutions, ahead of these meetings. This data is a goldmine for your sales and marketing teams who are always eager to get their hands on it. Play your cards well.

Don’t persist annoyingly if there is no response. Be polite. If you push too much, you may not get much. Typically, the customers that are most successful in deploying this solution, are more forthcoming in giving you this information. Send out adoption assessment questionnaires and usage metric templates. When you incur time in collecting data when none exists, you may get “nothing to say” from customer contacts. On receiving such push backs, don’t press further or they will stop taking your calls, damaging the relationships.

Making Do With What You Have
Use the combination of real or extrapolated quantitative and qualitative data to create a perspective, a hypothesized value talk track, on the adoption prior to the quarterly business review meeting. Go with what you have and then validate with the customer. The key is to make the customer’s time worthwhile. Add insights, industry perspectives, data, and analysis from other customers’ usage. Share product road map, which is often of interest to customers to see the type of investments the vendor is making in research, development, and resource augmentation.

Making Customer Contacts’ Time Worthwhile
Make customers feel that they learned something from the interaction. Keep augmenting your bag of information with new industry perspectives, new tools and product extensions. Ask your fellow customer success, sales, implementation, and support teams to do the same.

Action Items Follow Through
After the meeting, follow through on action items. Failure to show progress from previous calls will render upcoming ones ineffective and worst case loathed.

Changed Landscape
The cost of development, selling, implementing, and supporting newer technology solutions has dropped significantly, boosting competition in this space. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and other data centers worldwide have made it easier for vendors to install their software applications on the cloud (i.e. third-party hosting provider infrastructure), avoiding the need to run software on vendor’s or customer’s hardware. Without the need to buy and maintain expensive hardware, data center infrastructure, heating, and cooling systems, this barrier to entry for new competitors no longer exists. Likewise, customers who originally installed software in their own data centers for privacy, security, bandwidth, and other reasons, don’t need

to use their own data center or resources for any vendor solution, given improved security and privacy risk landscape in the new environment. Accordingly, the migration effort to switch from one vendor to another is much less for the customer, compared to the days in the early 2000s where customers were very protective of their data and installed every software on their own data centers.

Increased Competition
Increased competition has resulted in continuous solicitations from vendors that are hungry to uproot existing competitive solutions. Influential customer sponsors, when they move from one employer to another, tend to bring along their favorite vendor solution, putting the existing vendor at a disadvantage. In this environment, the role of the customer success manager

(CSM) has become very important. The onus to provide quality, consistency, speed, and performance is now entirely on the vendor, under the leadership of the CSM.

The supreme goal of a CSM is to make their customer successful in whatever initiative the customer has set out to do with the CSM’s product or solution. It could be for customer’s revenue boost, cost reduction, risk mitigation, or a combination of other similar prospective gains.

CSMs are responsible for ensuring that existing customer accounts are not compromised by any potential threat, irrespective of whether it is:

a) external—competition, regulatory

b) customer-related—resource attrition, financial hardship, technology compatibility

c) CSMs employer-related—product gaps, resource limitations, or general inefficiencies

The customer success manager, therefore, must be continuously apprised of developments at the customer, in addition to ensuring their software is meeting and exceeding the demands of the customer’s end users. Any sloppiness can affect the vendor’s (CSM employer) revenue and bottom-line numbers for the year.

History Behind Customer Success Manager(CSM) Role
Formerly, CSMs were called account managers and focused on annual maintenance contract renewals. In the early 2000s and before, enterprise software was sold as perpetual software licenses, where 100 percent of the software license was collected in the first year. Ongoing software support, research, and development were offered under annual maintenance contracts to customers for roughly 20 percent of the license cost.

At that time, account managers’ key responsibility, from a business development standpoint, was to primarily realize annual maintenance revenue. In such a setup, in most cases, the responsibility was on the customer to make the software successful, given that 100 percent of the software costs were already paid in the first year and given that the software was installed in customers’ data centers. There were limited refund clauses, in case the software didn’t turn out to be as successful as promised by the vendor.

In today’s cloud-based licensing business environment, roughly a third of the software license is collected in the first year. Further, many customers insist that the license period begins after the software is implemented. The software vendor must not only satisfactorily set up and roll out the implementation at a discounted price, but also ensure that it provides meaningful

benefits throughout the life of the implementation. Given this increased responsibility, the vendor contact responsible for customer contact needs to be more mature, skilled, knowledgeable, and generally a senior person from the vendor’s organization.

Economics Of Software as a Service (SaaS) Deployments
The cloud-based vendor solutions are popularly sold lately under the annual software as a service (SaaS) pricing model. The name implies that the software solution is sold as a service to be used for a defined period (as opposed to unlimited timeframe software usage rights sold under the perpetual license models in the 2000s). Pricing is still per licensed user in both cases, unless the vendor offers bulk or enterprise license. The key differentiating point between SaaS and the perpetual license is the length of usage per license.

From a profit and loss standpoint, software vendors selling SaaS solutions, make little to no money in the first year, given the very low margin or under-cost implementation fees. Additionally, projects may require rework in the first year on vendors’ dime, further negatively affecting the breakeven analysis. Vendors make money in the second and third years of the deployments, where support, hosting, and processing costs are minimal, and healthy license fees provide profitable returns.

Customer Retention
CSMs are expected to maintain or increase customer retention rates through their efforts. Simply put, when a customer drops usage and declines to renew an annual license contract, the renewal rate is affected negatively. The higher the renewals, the better for the company, as margins from the second and third years of usage are high. After a few years of a vendor’s existence, product quality, nature of the industry, and vendor’s research and development investments, determine the percentage of customers that renew year over year. CSMs are incented to exceed this typical percentage, also referred to as a threshold, and penalized if unmet.

Key strategic customers should be identified, paid special attention to, and retained at any cost. Such customers help with product definition, sales referrals, marketing promotions, and/or provide substantial revenue.

Innovation through constant research and innovation plays an important role in retaining customers, among other factors discussed in this book. Constant provision of newer features with major releases demonstrates continuous investment by the vendor. Customers find this a bonus over and above what they evaluated during the contracting phase. These investments make the license renewal conversations much easier for customer success professionals.

On a related note, CSMs are incented to pursue multiyear license arrangements to contractually obligate the customer into using the software for more than a year. This reduces reoccurring revenue risk and lowers renewal efforts from both a customer’s and vendor’s end.

The customer, on the other hand, is very aware of this business model and will agree to multiyear contracts, only if they see value in a vendor’s solutions. They will continue to invest in your solution only if they can or are making more money through the vendor’s solutions. Strategies and steps outlined in the rest of this book will help you reach these desired contractual arrangements.

Incremental License Revenue
The key difference, between hardware and software businesses, is the manufacturing or development cost of an additional widget or license. While there is a substantial cost to manufacture an additional hardware widget, the cost to offer an added software license on top of existing software installation is minimal to zero. Software business investors get particularly

excited when additional licenses are sold since the added license revenue almost entirely (subtracting for sales commissions) affects the company’s bottom line. CSMs should constantly be on the lookout to sell additional licenses with minimal extra implementation or installation costs.

With that said, good work cannot be taken for granted. Companies cannot rest on their laurels. They need to continuously deliver additional value over and above previously set expectations. Vendors can do this cost-effectively in multiple ways.

Company resources should look for additional uses or applications of the same capabilities. Similar to how a Swiss knife could be used as a knife, scissor, can opener, or screwdriver, a company’s product could be used by multiple user profiles for varied tasks. Through ongoing research and conversations with customers, innovative uses can be explored and shared across the customer base. Each of these use cases should be well thought through and supported by working software solutions before they can be shared with customers.

Upsell And Cross-Sell
Upsell and cross-sell are almost always used together in sales conversations. Essentially, they respectively refer to selling higher-end products and selling other related products to an existing customer. Large software vendors offer a portfolio of software products providing ample options to map vendor’s capabilities to customer’s multiple needs.

CSMs are urged to form long-lasting customer relationships so that their customer contacts can share with CSMs emerging opportunities in the customer’s environment. CSMs of large software organizations need to have skills and personalities similar to those of senior partners and managing directors of large consulting companies.

Senior partners at the big four consulting companies walk the halls on customer premises, meeting and greeting new customer contacts on a regular basis. This skill is key to identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Once an opportunity is identified, supporting technical staff can map appropriate solutions to customers’ emerging needs.

Customer Satisfaction Ratings: Net Promoter Score (NPS) Or Equivalents
Management terms from the Harvard Business Review and other publications have influenced the corporate world’s thinking for a long time. Customer satisfaction scores, net promoter scores, and other variations have evolved or morphed into one form or other. As caretaker of customer success departments, Latviv team’s focus has always been on the objective behind these scores:

What actions can I take with this information?
Can I prioritize my customer accounts meaningfully so that I can focus my energies on the ones that are most at risk?
For the ones that are at risk, is it worth the effort to retain these customers?
Are they the right customers given my company’s capabilities and the current or expected revenue from the customer?
Are the scores a true reflection of my company’s capabilities?
What is the likelihood that the formula used to calculate the score is accurate and comprehensive enough to provide me the desired information?
Am I getting blindsided by using this score?
Finally, is it worth the effort to analyze everything quantitatively, when a combination of discrete qualitative groupings combined with descriptive information can do a better job?

Latviv’s general recommendation is to build customer prioritization models specific to your situation. Templates included in the appendices include several scores, filtering, sorting, and grouping categories as examples. You could provide weights to each category and compute aggregate scores if management prefers; however, be aware of the risks as previously outlined.

Companies with very large numbers of customers may find it worthwhile to segment their customers using these scores and to distribute the accounts by seniority to customer success staff. Likewise, companies with limited management bandwidth could establish thresholds and escalate attention to senior executives when overall scores deviate from expected norms.

A detailed analysis of net promoter or customer satisfaction scores is outside the scope of this book. However, there are many good resources, including free online content that you can find via an Internet search.

Key Performance Indicators (KPI)
Indicators are a potent tool for large organizations to track and manage the health of the company. They are used to prioritize attention, allocate, and compensate resources. Indicators typically fall under two groupings: leading vs. lagging and performance vs. risk indicators. For instance, the increase in the number of users is a performance metric, whereas an increase in the number of support cases is a risk metric. Performance metrics reveal improving trends when scores are higher, whereas risk metrics show improving trends when scores go lower.

Indicators are designed to have thresholds, to auto-notify indicator watchers when values go above or below designated thresholds. Customer success software platforms automate this capability, making it easier for company management to watch for trends and be notified when both desired and undesired outcomes occur.

An indicator metric in isolation may not be a good reflection of its intent. An increase in the number of support cases could reflect the deteriorating quality of software if the number of customers and users are the same. Whereas the same increase in the context of a simultaneous increase in customers and users may not necessarily be a deteriorating condition. A skilled business analyst will be better able to interpret indicator metrics in the larger scheme of events.

Leading indicators forewarn the occurrence of an event before it occurs, and therefore have a predictive element in their definition. For example, a reduced number of weekly user logins over a multi-month period could indicate that the customer is not seeing the value in the product implementation and may sooner or later decide not to renew the software license agreement. Lagging indicators, on the other hand, reflect a deteriorating situation explicitly. Dropping revenue numbers of an organization is a lagging indicator and simply conveys the fact that the business is not doing well. Management teams are therefore more interested in leading indicators because they allow them to act before it is too late.

A few of the many indicators that are applicable to customer success departments are:

A) Number of user logins

B) Number of support tickets

C) Periodic usage of product features

D) System response times

E) Number of survey responses

F) Number of positive survey responses

G) Number of contract renewals

H) Number of multi-year renewals

I) Number of open upsell opportunities

J) Number of open cross-sell opportunities

K) Number of realized upsell and likewise cross-sell deals

L) Revenue increase

M) Cost reduction

N) Time to implement product

O) Time to onboard users

P) Escalations to management across customers

Red Flags
In addition to the quantitative factors represented by customer satisfaction, NPS, and indicator metrics, qualitative information is equally important, if not more so, to ensure the continued success of the customer in the context of a company’s products and continued revenue stream. Customer success professionals are advised to watch for negative indicators, or red flags, such as attrition of customer resources involved with the project, ongoing budget allocation pertaining to the vendor’s product, customer’s financial health, reputation, or other significant risks applicable to the customer’s industry. Each one of these risks can have a potent impact on the health of the project. Customer-facing resources such as customer support, implementation, and sales teams should always be on the lookout for such developments in every interaction with the customer. Vendors should provide appropriate forums to disseminate this information across all customer-facing resources.

Knowledge Repository
Big four consulting companies historically took the lead in establishing knowledge repositories for internal use first and then to share information and training selectively with external parties. The knowledge repository concept has caught on and is pursued by most large vendors now. It allows sharing among colleagues of best practices and lessons learned by senior vendor personnel. Customers appreciate this emerging, constantly updated stream of information, and expect their vendor contacts to share relevant information timely and contextually.

Vendors should disseminate this information with care. As lessons are learned, relevant vendor resources should publish this information on knowledge-sharing forums, discuss with peers to agree on a consistent external communication update, then train all relevant staff to use this formalized information for communicating with clients. Establishing and driving a consistent message outside the organization is important for minimizing confusion among both internal and external audiences.

Knowledge repositories are also a good place to host technical and business development training materials. Questions and topics such as “how are the vendor’s products useful for customers’ needs,” “how is the vendor product configured and implemented,” “what messaging should I use to engage with prospects,” should be answerable with the training content in these repositories. New recruits will find this business and technical knowledge useful in interacting with customers.

Customer Success Technology Solution
A technology platform underpins a significant part of the efficiency and effectiveness playbook, drawing from American football terminology. It helps automate, driving a consistent experience and success approach among all CSM professionals at a given vendor. Key performance and risk indicators, customer satisfaction scores, product goals, action items, assigned customer and vendor resource details, notifications, collaterals, feedback tools, and surveys, dashboards, reporting, analysis, and integration with third-party systems, collectively become a monumental undertaking that can only be managed through a technology platform for large vendors. Sharing guidance and collaboration become much easier with such a solution.

Providing information as and when needed also helps engage the customer. Given the challenges inherent with cloud-based solutions outlined in previous chapters, out of sight, out of mind is a significant risk and shouldn’t be taken lightly. Customers should constantly be apprised of the value provided by a vendor’s solutions. A technology-based solution cost-effectively provides continuous visibility and always keeps the vendor’s brand at the forefront.

Customers should be encouraged to bookmark the link to the platform to access implementation notes, training materials, corporate documentation such as product vision and roadmap, company updates, business development presentations, and product brochures. Even if other solutions exist that house this documentation, it is okay to provide redundancy. Duplication will not hurt if the information is kept updated. From my standpoint, a customer success technology platform is the ideal location for customers to access such vendor information.

This technology solution can also be used to insert meaningful updates to the customer’s daily communication platforms such as email, corporate chat, and mobile interfaces. In addition, to project-specific updates, daily or periodic tips and tricks techniques can be pursued to stay uppermost in the customer’s mind.

Level 1—Initial (Undocumented, Reactive, And Ad Hoc)
The customer success setup is not well-defined or organized. Dedicated customer success resources are not allocated to customers. Company resources from other departments such as implementation, product management, sales support, or marketing are requested to manage customer relationships when the situation has already aggravated. There is no reference documentation on the process, customer accounts, and historic interactions with customers.

Minimal success is dependent on a few skilled and passionate company employees who keep customer relationships afloat with part-time responsibilities. New employees find it difficult to onboard themselves and require extensive shadowing with senior colleagues.

Level 2—Repeatable
Skilled customer success resources take the initiative to document a few key success stories and supporting process documentation such as typical implementation steps, customer success metrics, root causes, and remediation efforts. Key company personnel interacting with customers are tasked with the consistent execution of these processes. However, adequate monitoring of process execution is not undertaken due to limited management bandwidth.

Level 3—Defined
Experienced resources define and document all processes relevant to interacting with customers. Expected outcomes and success metrics as defined in this book are documented. Metrics are expected to be collected, analyzed, and shared for instance, among other customer success process expectations as previously outlined. All relevant customer interaction resources are required to follow these set processes. However, with not enough customer success examples to build on and validate, the processes are not fully tested and validated for enough future customer implementation possibilities. Inexperienced resources need to reach out to senior colleagues for impromptu guidance in unanticipated situations.

Level 4—Managed (Capable)
Consistently collected process metrics validate the effective achievement of desired outcomes across a wide range of customer profiles and implementation setups. A company has invested in audit and quality management resources to test defined and documented processes across a wide variety of conditions. Processes are found to be competent and have variability by design to adapt dynamically in environment variations without compromising quality.

To achieve this level, companies must have implemented their solution successfully at numerous customer accounts under varying customer circumstances. For example, the product is implemented at customers representing numerous industries—such as retail, finance, and manufacturing—for a range of users. The data set representing these implementations could also vary from small to extremely large databases. The number of metrics and their relationships with each other for consideration could likewise vary from a handful to a sizeable number. A few examples of these metrics could include the number of users, their login frequency, impact to customer’s revenue or cost figures, leading and lagging indicators that collectively or individually predict customer success.

Level 5—Optimizing (Efficient)
With the previous maturity levels under the company’s belt, companies focus on constantly evaluating and executing process improvement opportunities without adversely affecting desired outcomes. The goal is to constantly enhance the customer delight factor with cost-effective investments in people, processes, and systems factors. Better team alignment, more skilled resources, dedicated personnel, clearer, and visually appealing documentation, and better technology systems are just a few of the many opportunities that companies can invest in to continuously optimize their customer success capabilities.

Responsibilities
While the sales executive is on point to convert the lead into an account, the CSM is responsible for ensuring that the customer achieves their goals after the contract is signed and should accordingly work on the foundational elements outlined in Part I, Customer Success Concepts, in this sales phase. These include documentation of outcomes, success metrics, and capturing customer details. While every vendor will have varying management hierarchies, I suggest that the assigned CSM is on point for all post-sales phases activities while staying in the loop during the sales phase. Customer experience and success responsibilities in the sales phase should be jointly handled by sales and marketing teams.

Typical Sales Process
While limited smooth talker sales personnel can get away with selling unneeded products, most enterprise investments are need-based. Typically, customer end-users express a need for a solution to their management, who then appoints a champion to represent the end user’s interests. The champion collaborates with the influencer to analyze detailed requirements, options available in the market, pricing, time frames, expected value, and return on investment. The influencer prepares and makes a business case for a solution to sponsor. The latter reviews the budget for this year and next, makes funding arrangements, and identifies a project manager to coordinate the rest of the purchasing process. The latter invites vendors to bid for work, and coordinates in shortlisting and final selection in collaboration with all customer end roles (refer to the full list in the “People” section of Latviv book Chapter 2). Diligence persona looks at relevant vendor financial, technical, usability, staffing, security, privacy, administrative, and all other relevant capabilities before sales contracts are finalized.

Quality Of Collaterals And Talk Tracks
The term “talk tracks” refers to the verbiage used by sales teams to make the sale. This includes information such as “why is the vendor’s product better than others,” “capabilities of the product,” and “vendor’s strengths on top of its product-based capabilities.” Standardized sales and marketing talk tracks and collaterals are typically created by product marketers in collaboration with sales, product, and engineering leadership of vendor organizations. Prospect-specific content is prepared by sales engineers or sales staff under the leadership of the sales leader assigned to the account.

During sales phase, very limited time is available from customers. Sensing time constraints, novice vendors tend to convey a lot of information in less time. On the contrary, talk and show less, to the point and with quality words and visuals. Follow a customer’s lead, let them talk more, and respond when requested. Listen to their requirements carefully. Customers are interested in all relevant vendor details, and if they are interested, they will reach out.

There is an information sharing balance that needs to be pursued in this phase. Share enough to keep them interested and motivated until the contract is signed. During sales conversations, it is better to not expose everything. Have them ask for more. Keep them engaged as they make a business case internally, get funds, and complete the vendor evaluation process. Leave open the possibility of sharing data gradually by providing a pretext to reach out and ask for status. Additionally, always be mindful of not revealing competitive information that could be used against you and in favor of competition during sales conversations. While vendors do require signed non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), it is not much of deterrence in practice.

Whatever you say should be well thought through. Presentations, notes, contracts, and proposals should be of top-notch quality. Both aesthetics and content of the shared materials should be appealing and compelling. Engage a designer to ensure that the materials are pleasing to the eye and intellectually excite customers’ minds at the same time. As a rule, your information will be reviewed with interest if it is pleasing to the eye first. Readers tend to glance and skim through sales and marketing literature before they deep dive further for detailed information. If the visuals are not attractive, you will lose the opportunity to get the first favorable impression.

Make it easy for the customer to grasp the message. People always have too much to read. Start with a summary, get to the point, and then lead the reader through detail. Good readers scan every document, front and back, looking for the key point. Once they locate it, they zero in. If they cannot find the summary fast, they will reject, move on, or deprioritize your project. For reference literature, refer to publicly available marketing materials from large information technology software and services companies.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Talk less and with quality
Ensure collaterals are pleasing to the eye and appeal to customers’ minds at the same time

Help Prospects Make A Business Case For Your Solution
Give your prospects the time and resources to make your solution’s business case to their executives. Proactively think and provide materials that will make it easier for the prospect contact to consume and use for their own presentations to senior executives. Use the business case argument to have them create a budget for your product if not obtained already. Tapping into money left over from some other product’s budget is another possibility. All this potential effort from prospects is conditional on potential buyers’ and sponsors’ belief in your product’s value proposition.

Structure pricing so that it is simple to understand, is flexible, with tiered options, and is in line with customer budget. Simplicity minimizes conflicts and misunderstandings during contract negotiations, implementation, and renewals. Always propose the least resistance approach and ensure pricing consistency across all customers. This will also drive consistency across your sales and marketing collaterals, making the lives of all your customer-facing resources easier. Product pricing decisions are handled by senior vendor leadership. The previous recommendations are more for them than for the CSM. CSM group leadership should have an influence on pricing models and take appropriate feedback from the ground CSM staff interacting with customers on a regular basis. As a quick primer, pricing is influenced by product cost, company overhead, competitive pressures, and price sensitivity of customers.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Offer simple to understand and flexible pricing terms
Check for budget, make a business case to create a budget, and stay within budget

Choose Your Customers
Sales, marketing, and CSM staff should have a clear understanding of their own products, business models, and targeted customer profile. While this consideration is more applicable for vendor’s senior management, related inefficiencies and inconsistences can have significant revenue and cost impact and setup the CSM for failure in the next four phases – implement, rollout, adopt and review.

For instance, never use a direct sales force to sell to low budget/low volume accounts. Numerous startups fall into this trap, thinking that it is easier to get small customers before selling to large ones. When they do manage at times to get into the large accounts, the effort required to service the small existing accounts remains substantial and drains company resources. The key is to refine the business model and identify your sweet spot fast. If you are starting a new business model fail fast, refine, test, and scale.

If the low budget/low volume accounts are not your sweet spot, politely decline to pursue this segment, deprioritize existing, and move on. Likewise, if you serve a mass-market customer base with a very low touch service and support model, decline to serve large accounts that require dedicated service and support teams.

One of the CEOs I worked with famously said “certain prospects are better off with my competitors.” He is right. Get a sense of the demands placed by your prospects during negotiations and weigh those demands against the potential to grow revenue.

Many times, products that don’t make sense are sold to customers to make up for sales targets. High-level customer executives could get influenced to sign deals, leveraging corporate relationships, or common investors. But, after the sale, it becomes an uphill battle to implement the solution and to adopt it, if people on the ground don’t appreciate and find value in the solution.

Despite the limited alignment of vendor’s product with prospects’ needs, vendor sales executives persistently knock on prospects’ doors, work the phone lines, emails, and other desperate measures, not realizing that they can push the needle only so far. Building on the square peg in a round hole analogy, if something is not meant to be, it is not meant to be. Executive influence can only go so far. Efforts from both vendor and customer sides may not be worth it in these situations. For senior vendor executives, it can be difficult to bite this bullet and accept this reality. I recommend that they do, sooner than later.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Low paying and high maintenance customers are not worth their name if you are not able to leverage those relationships for selling into new accounts
While it is worthwhile to engage them early on in your business lifecycle to test product concept, cost considerations should deprioritize effort to maintain their implementations

Don’t Burn Bridges
Mid-size to large consulting companies offer numerous service offerings and look for repeat business from customers. They assign senior staff to accounts for periodic follow-ups. Winning and losing request for proposals (RFPs) to other consulting vendors doesn’t mean an end to these relationships, since other opportunities are sometimes in the pipeline at the same customer. Do not close the door because you may have other possibilities now or in the future.

Additionally, customer service is in a consulting company’s DNA. For context, senior-most staff—popularly called company partner, managing director, executive director, or equivalent—treasure their assigned accounts. Each senior assigned resource is responsible for nurturing their accounts, selling the full portfolio of services offered by the consulting organization. As the account owner, their focus is customer satisfaction. Depending on the scale and extent of the damage to the account, any misstep by anyone under the senior resource serving the account could result in the cause for termination of both the senior person and the person causing the misstep.

On the other hand, smaller software companies and startups are typically into one-trick pony software sales. When their solution loses out to competitors’ solutions, such companies think that the relationship is lost. One sales manager I know came out hard on the prospect contact after he lost the RFP. The prospect contact, who was formerly part of the salesperson’s Rolodex shared the futility of this outburst with me after the incident.

Software vendors, with such limited offerings, participate in few RFPs and attempt to stay in the account through the stickiness of their software implementation. I covered in Part I, Customer Success Concepts, how no software implementation is permanent at any company for a given domain area. There is always room for competitors to get into the account after losing the RFP during a formal evaluation process. Most large customers engage more than one vendor and maintain more than one implementation as a backup solution. Given the churn, company closures, and merge and acquisition activity in the software industry, there is always a possibility that another bid will open in the future and the rejected vendor is invited again. Customers realize that innovation is constantly happening so a deprioritized vendor may become a force to reckon with in the future.

Software companies, big and small, need to take a lesson from consulting companies’ mindset and treasure each prospect relationship even if it doesn’t turn into a business transaction in the first few rounds of conversations.

KEY TAKEAWAY

Maintain contact with prospects that didn’t select your software in the first round

Alliances Between Software And Services Partners
Out of sight/out of mind is a human psychological trait that causes failed deployments after the implementation team is out of the picture. To address this, large software vendors explore mutually beneficial partnership arrangements with consulting companies that are present on-site for long durations.

Internal audit projects, or ongoing IT hardware/network support projects, for example, tend to be multi-year relationships. Alliance with such consulting partners can make the onsite partner your local champion, vouching for your interest during their periodic interaction with customer contacts. In return, software vendors offer service opportunities related to their software implementations to their partners and invest in training partners’ services personnel.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Build alliances with services organizations that are engaged in long-duration projects with the customer
With proper incentives, they will vouch for your interests in your absence

Exploring Upsell And Cross-Sell Opportunities
Coming back to the circular nature of the five phases, once a product or solution is successfully implemented for a customer, CSMs in collaboration with sales executives or themselves, based on vendor’s incentive model, should begin to look for upselling and cross-sell opportunities. While this topic is covered in the section titled “Bottom-line Value and Compensation Model of Customer Success Program” in Chapter 1, I touch on behavioral nuances here during such conversations.

After deployment, software companies pursue periodic business or adoption reviews, also called quarterly business reviews (QBRs), with the customer. Vendors don’t have to stick with quarterly schedules and can vary the frequency based on the situation. This topic is addressed at length in Chapter 9 titled “Adopt.” Such meetings are ideal for bringing up other potential and meaningful opportunities if the previous product or service deployment is a success.

Customers, while open to hearing about other opportunities, don’t appreciate aggressive selling during such adoption or business review sessions. A subtle, consultative approach works best in such situations. Whether you are selling, implementing, or following up on adoptions, always go with some different nuance or nugget of information to your customer. You will create an image of a resourceful contact among your customer base and will always feel welcome whenever you reach out to them. Don’t expose the full bag of information in one meeting. Gradually trickle through this information so that you stay engaged and have a reason to go to the customer exploring business development opportunities every now and then.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

People like to buy from and work with people they like or are impressed by
Offer meaningful business value and your customer contacts will not hesitate to invest further in your relationship with them

Outcome Management
Clearly defined and realistic goals are key to the success of any project. All parties involved need to document desired outcomes based on the resources, time constraints, skills, and capabilities of the people, process, and systems under consideration, tying back to the customer success framework from Part I of Latviv’s book. Simplicity in the documentation, talk track, negotiations, requirements, and project planning will provide clarity to everyone involved.

Negotiating Milestones
Parties involved need to negotiate what is possible given constraints, and then build project plans keeping this desired end in mind. Once the execution framework is in place, project managers from all parties need to continuously monitor and course-correct knowing fully well that certain objectives may need adjustment as more visibility is attained during project execution. This flexibility is important and should be expected from project sponsors. Reasonable and mature executives understand this expectation and are willing to reorient project requirements if alternatives are thought through and understandable justifications are conveyed to executives.

Document Management
Continuously updated documentation with audit trails will set up projects for success. In the worst case, if projects fail under the worst unanticipated conditions, or when circumstances are beyond the involved team’s control, this audit trail will save ground-level resources and supervising executives from tough postmortem analysis of failed projects.

Learning Lessons
Success and failures are part of a mixed bag. Failures can be avoided, but when people attempt to chart uncharted territories, unexpected circumstances do occur. In this situation, it is important to stand up again, learn, course correct, and keep going. Success is built on failures, brick by brick and in the case of customer success function, one customer at a time. The entire organization should support customer success function during adversities. Lessons learned from both successful and unsuccessful deployments will pave the way for the next successful one.

Implementation Processes
Most vendors have a good handle on their respective implementation processes. Accordingly, the high-level activities highlighted for this phase in the image below are designed to simply provide an overview of a typical implementation model, while focusing primarily on overcoming challenges experienced during execution.

Typical Implementation Activities:

Outcomes need to be supported by detailed requirements and business analysis. Information collected during the sales phase should be transferred to the vendor resources involved in the implementation phase. Customer influencers, champions, sponsors, and project coordinators, except for the due diligence team, are required to stay engaged with the implementation

phases and beyond to establish this continuity. This customer group is explicitly called out in most vendors’ implementation frameworks and is provided vendor-specific names for reference, such as the Tiger team. The actual name doesn’t matter. Latviv will use this name to reference this customer group. The Tiger team establishes a reporting hierarchy among themselves to collaborate with the vendor resources and to communicate within the group. It works with the vendor to transfer requirement details, clarifications as and when requested by the vendor. The vendor’s sales team accordingly transfers the information they collected during the sales phase. Best practices communicated in Part I of Latviv’s book, such as the use of a customer management solution, documentation, and visibility of customer expectations, should be adhered to to make the process seamless and to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks.

A vendor’s implementation manager and customer project coordinator collaborate to distill requirements into actionable tasks and communicate the resulting project plan to all stakeholders involved. Vendor’s senior management and customer sponsor review plans, monitor progress and provide guidance to respective sides. Escalations between customers and vendors are handled by this senior staff. For training-related activities, vendors first train representatives of the Tiger team to validate solutions, its value and prepared training materials. Tiger team representatives are typically on point to train the rest of the end-user community. I recommend that the vendor stays involved in training as many users as it can while maintaining professional services costs.

Implementation Activity Execution
With adequate planning, execution becomes much simpler and straightforward. Resources are requested to execute as agreed and report back to the project manager who then communicates status to all relevant stakeholders. In the execution subphase, industry, product, and domain knowledge rise in prominence. Training materials cover product or industry-specific information in addition to customer-specific configurations in the information technology solution.

Implementation Training
Enterprise implementations require the involvement of a significant user base at customer sites. If the solution is not trivial and requires preparation and delivery of extensive training materials, training all users becomes a significant undertaking. A tree approach where a few champion trainers are trained first, who then train a few more potential trainers each is one option. However, this is subject to the learning and training capabilities of the trained trainers. An alternative solution would be for vendor’s trainers to train as many users directly.

Training could be delivered through web meeting sessions, video conferencing, or via in-person classroom-style sessions. For the latter, trainers fly into multiple user locations where users could be grouped into locally accessible training locations. If in-person sessions are preferred, this approach turns out to be cost-effective and efficient for all stakeholders involved.

Continuous Customer Engagement
It is generally a good idea to get every opportunity to speak with customer contact, especially after a key milestone. Interim updates can be shared by email with respect for everyone’s time. Continually make and show incremental progress while managing customer’s time and level of interest. Accordingly, schedule meetings that aggregate enough talking points to convey to customers.

Continuous engagement is important across all customer touchpoint phases. The next phases, rollout, and adoption, especially require regular follow-ups. It is important to regularly measure testing and production usage, get continuous feedback, and course-correct to truly realize the goals of the implementation.

Reach out to your customers informally and occasionally, if you have a good relationship with them. At the very least, schedule periodic touchpoint meetings, formal adoption sessions, in advance for the full year.

KEY TAKEAWAY

Touch base with your customer, often, but not more than what the customer finds valuable in these meetings

Implementation Team Setup
Most vendors know how to staff their projects from their own end. They also prepare and publish a good list of participation roles from the customer side too. For reference, depending on the scale of the project, vendor side participation may include a vice president, consulting partner, architect, project manager, or technology resources both onsite and offsite. Customer side participation may include a corresponding project manager, champion end-users, project sponsor, a team of supporting domain experts, infrastructure security resources and more.

While it may sound obvious, Latviv recommends that projects be staffed well, even under cost constraints. Project governance or team setup gaps on either side—vendor or customer—can make or break projects. High priority projects should receive appropriate attention from key company leaders from both vendor and customer end. In addition to project staffing, access to data and supporting systems should be authorized and supported by the right individuals from both organizations.

Customer organizations have competing priorities and fight political battles internally to access the meager resources required to complete existing projects. Nice to have solutions typically get scant or minimal attention. “Nice to have” is a term used for non-crucial solutions or features. Such solutions, even if agreed and contracted with effective sales tactics, are always pushed to the end and are hard to get off the ground.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Project governance is important
Nice-to-have projects will always receive scant attention
The vendor will need to leverage superior customer success skills to rise in priority

Customer Motivation
Handling customer interactions can be a very frustrating experience. Lack of timely response, misunderstandings, and a slow pace can enervate the most enthusiastic and experienced customer success managers. Partial attentiveness, by customer contacts, to vendor requests, failed configurations undertaken by inexperienced customer staff, reassignment of project staff and project sponsor exit can result in rework and or project delays.

If the customer is motivated and is collaborating proactively, the rest of this section may not apply. If not, then there are ways to remediate this situation.

Customer contacts typically have numerous tasks on their plate, each seemingly more important than the other. Daily prioritization is always a struggle. It becomes the responsibility of customer success lead to raise his or her project’s priority in the customer’s mindset. Most naïve resources or newcomers to this role resort to excessive emailing, calls, or requests for onsite visits, which tend to have an opposite effect and end up annoying the customer.

A more effective strategy is to gradually raise awareness through a persistent sharing of newer information and a show-and-tell approach. If you ask the customer to gather all the information and then expect to start configuration, the likelihood of getting started soon automatically goes down. Alternately, minimize requests sent to the customer, go with what you have, make assumptions, note them, enable configurations to change them later, demonstrate a prototype or proof of concept, and then validate assumptions with the customer. As the customer contacts see and interact with the emerging solution, you will trigger their imagination, excitement, and passionate collaboration with the solution.

Your customer points of contact need to continuously make a business case internally to collect critical information from their colleagues. They will likely struggle to get that information, since the talk tracks you provided may not be as clear to them as to you. Follow up your verbal tracks in writing, so that they can refer to it and forward it as appropriate. Try to anticipate and reduce resistance they might face internally.

Large customer organizations have a command structure with multiple layers of communication. The manager reports to the director, who reports to the vice president and so on. Every decision may require multiple approvals and could take longer. Customer service managers need to accordingly tailor their talk tracks, plan to work with, explain, and get buy-in from multiple customer executive levels.

Be patient with newer customer recruits and if applicable consulting partner resources. If it takes extra effort to train them, make that extra effort. While you live and breathe your software solution every day, they do not. Don’t get frustrated and worse, show that frustration in front of the customer resource. If the skill set required of the customer or partner resource is not adequate, mention that privately to the project sponsor.

Lastly, while the vendor is motivated in anticipation of the financial windfall, the customer is looking for value from the implementation and resulting recognition from driving that value within their organization. Make the customer resources heroes in the eyes of their peers within their organization. Strive to help them receive awards and recognition for their work on the project.

All these methods will help you get the required attention from the customer and help tide through project management challenges within the customer organization. You will end up making friends who will remain your strong supporters, not only while they are with the customer but also at their future employers.

Superior customer success skills become super important in such situations. Your sales and project management skills outlined earlier in this chapter will enable you to get the required resources from both the vendor and customer end and be successful in your projects.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

The vendor is expected to do more always
Minimize asks of the customer—they are always stretched thin

Handling Customer Objections
Customers raise objections when they interact with vendors throughout all customer touchpoint phases. The key objections relevant to customer success in the implementation phase are outlined here.

Starting with the first interaction with the customer contacts, it is important for the vendor to get their ducks in the row prior to the first call with the vendor. First impressions are important, and your responses will determine your involvement in the project or even the continued health of the project. Always be alert in front of customers. Savvy customer contacts may start with a few curveballs to test the vendor resources assigned to their project, via essentially interview-style questioning. Customer questions could be very subtle, and vendor resources may not realize that they are being interviewed.

Vendors should inventory potential objections and document management approved responses. For instance, regarding a question, “how long will it take to deploy the solution?”, most vendors should and typically respond with “we are staffed to complete the project in as less as XX weeks if the customer is ready with all of the information required to complete the project.” Experienced customers already understand that most projects take much longer than this baseline since the time-lapse to collect the information and iterate through the system setup is naturally a time-consuming activity.

There should be a central voice that coordinates all responses from the vendor side. Implementation talk tracks should be discussed and agreed by vendor side executives prior to the customer calls.

If there are gaps between the expectations set during sales process and vendor’s true capabilities, this information should be relayed by vendor management to the customer success and implementation managers ahead of time. Latviv doesn’t recommend vendors pursue aggressive business practices, by promoting features that don’t exist (also called “vaporware”) since they invariably lead to customer heartburn, vendor resource attritions, and project delays. In such events, customers force their vendors to eat up significant implementation costs or build the features at vendor’s cost or compensate the customer through other means.

It is likely that expectations can be reset with alternate and acceptable solutions. Latviv covers selling and influencing capabilities in the next “Selling Never Stops” best practice item. These capabilities will enable you to get the appropriate buy-in, attention and resources for alternate solutions, helping you address these potential objections.

The following are just a few of the numerous objections, questions, and concerns that could come your way during your meetings with the customer.

• “How long will it take to roll out the solution to my end users?”

• “We were led to believe that our involvement on the project will be very less, but here we are asked to assign many full-time equivalent (FTE) resources on the project!”

• “Asks from you (the vendor) are unreasonable!”

• “Per sales discussions, the requested information, designs, prep work should have been handled by the vendor.”

“The software interface and capabilities shared today are markedly different from the ones shown during the sales process!”

• “The end-user training involvement is very high whereas we were told that the user-friendly nature of the system will not need user training!”

• “Quality of vendor resources is questionable.” “They don’t seem to be prepared for meetings and struggle through their talk tracks!”

• “There are multiple requests coming in from varied vendor resources with no streamlined central point!”

• Lastly, “our priorities have changed, or the project is delayed.”

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Prepare potential objection lists with documented management approved responses Be alert and prepared to convey a strong positive first impression during implementation kickoff meetings

Selling Never Stops
Contract ratification doesn’t automatically smooth the ride for the vendor. Numerous hurdles still need to be addressed before the next contract renewal. Customers intentionally reduce the renewal time (from a multi-year vendor renewal proposal to an annual renewal cycle grant for instance) to test the vendor and its software solution.

It is incumbent on the vendor resources involved, under the leadership of the CSM to pave the way from this point on and in the next two phases – rollout and adopt – to strive for multi-year renewal grants. Sales account representative who got the deal to this stage will look for upsell and cross-sell opportunities and are dependent on the CSM and other vendor resources to turn the account into a successful reference and continued buyer of the vendor’s solutions. The CSMs are and should be part-sales professionals to continue the selling process. They need to be polite, patient, persistent, diplomatic, and 100% wedded to the success of the project.

On the customer’s end, contacts involved in the sales process may not be the same as earmarked for implementation and deployment. Due to attrition and reorganizations, customer personnel could be reassigned, bringing in new faces and voices that may not have the full perspective, incentives, or the motivation of the original group. Further, customer contacts typically have top, competing, ten to fifty tasks at a given time, and their priorities may change constantly for your project.

It is easy to get frustrated with the slow pace. Against these odds, CSMs need to stay on top, work with the client’s pace, and balance their time with other customer projects. If the project makes sense and is compelling, it will bubble up in priority sooner than later. Most vendors assign several customers per CSM based on this expected pace of response and execution

speed. In this setup, keep yourself motivated with projects that excite you and have customers’ commitment and time. There is usually an interesting customer project in your assigned customer list that will keep you, as CSM or implementation manager, excited and engaged in your roles.

Your influencing capabilities become critical to moving your tasks to the top of the queue. By default, a show-and-tell approach works the best. The sooner you can help realize proof of concepts, show progress, implement faster with minimal help from the customer the better. Just talk will not help and will likely push your tasks and projects to the bottom of the customer contacts’ to-do list.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Don’t assume the project will continue after contract ratification

Customer success and implementation manager need to be part sales professionals to drive the project forward

Appreciation Of Sales Process
Young customer success and implementation managers may not appreciate the effort and opportunity provided by the salesperson to lead the implementation process. It is important for vendor implementation resources to understand that a lot of stakeholders’ time, numerous touchpoints, and investments were required to provide them this opportunity. Latviv recommends exposing customer success and implementation managers to at least one complete sales cycle and the related progress from one stage to another: from sales lead, to opportunity, to the demonstration, to RFP response, to contract negotiation, and to closure. This will help them appreciate the sales person’s role more, and their employer’s business better. With a strong understanding of the proposed value presented during the sales process, they will be much more able to realize that value for their customers.

KEY TAKEAWAY

With a strong understanding of the proposed value presented during the sales process, customer success and implementation managers will be much more able to realize that value for their customers

Customer Guide
As a buyer and potential adopter of technology, the customer contacts look for guidance from vendors during implementation conversations. During the sales phase, they have sat through a few product demonstrations and would have formulated opinions about your product, but don’t have clear visibility of the implementation roadmap. Vendor resources taking the lead during implementation conversations should be prepared adequately to take the customer guide role. Vendor resources need to be trained – both in theory and practice – and be completely conversant with the implemented solution’s quirks, nuts, and bolts, before they take on the guide role during implementation.

Before you teach others, make sure you understand exactly what you are teaching. Numerous implementations have failed when insufficiently trained vendor resources are given customer-facing roles. Before taking on customer-facing roles, such individuals should implement the solution themselves, either in a sandbox with as realistic real-life data as possible, or better still, have implemented, deployed, and realized success at another customer. The more individual success stories you can experience yourself, the better. It will help you establish and leverage credibility in all your future implementations.

KEY TAKEAWAY

Before you teach others, make sure you understand exactly what you are teaching

Customer Engagement Protocols And Learnings
Vendors may need to spend significant time at customer sites or telecommuting. It is therefore prudent to touch on a few important considerations in this bonding phase. While a certain interaction approach may be acceptable at one customer, that same approach may not be appreciated at others. The size of the customer organization typically influences accepted practice.

At the onset of the engagement, convey to your customer that you are conscious of customer end protocols and would like to be advised of them as and when relevant. Protocols are tied to an organization’s culture. Employees observe, ask, learn, and follow protocols customarily at their respective organizations, after being with the same organization for many months, years, or decades. Vendor personnel’s interaction time with customer organizations is much limited in comparison and they may need to be apprised of relevant protocols explicitly. These protocols could be seemingly insignificant such as requiring page numbers, font size, and type in every customer-facing documentation or presentation. Others could be chain of communication and meeting set up-related protocols. For example, the decision to cancel a meeting involving multiple customer resources may require explicit and strict approval from customer contact, even if another key customer stakeholder has agreed to cancel the meeting.

For customer meetings, be aware and follow the elements outlined in the namesake Chapter 12 of Latviv’s book. Likewise, the elements outlined in Chapter 14 titled “Professional Growth Suggestions” will also help you put your best foot forward.

In addition, always focus on executing your work successfully with minimal distractions. Participate in as few meetings as possible but do stay informed about other areas of the project and company operations.

Always be in continuous learning mode. Observe new technologies, processes, policies, and procedures, and share them with your colleagues in your own organization. This will increase visibility for you and help your vendor organization serve your customers better.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Take your customer contact’s guidance to understand and follow customer end interaction protocols

Always be in continuous learning mode

Avoid distractions and stay focused on your assigned tasks Stay informed about other areas of the project and operations

Customer Touchpoint Frequency
Right after a software solution is sold, there is natural eagerness and pressure from all stakeholders to implement and deploy the solution. Most contracts are written to realize implementations faster. The vendor is naturally engaged actively and incented to realize this end goal sooner than later.

For project coordinators, Latviv suggests putting an indefinitely reoccurring weekly status meeting on the calendar to review project progress on a weekly basis. The presence of this meeting on the calendar will keep all stakeholders on point until the implementation is complete. It is okay to repurpose the meeting for execution-related conversations. Of course, after the project’s success is realized, the reoccurring meeting can be deleted.

Billing
Nobody likes surprises. Billing procedures should be clearly defined such that all bills are tied to approved statements of work. CSMs should bill for approved and incurred professional hours only with adequate documentation. They need to set and meet expectations for billable hours. If CSMs expect to go over a certain budget, they need to make sure the customer is aware ahead of time. Results count, not level of effort. CSMs should measure and present a bottom-line impact when sending billing statements. Help the customer make a business case not only during project approval but also at the time of billing. The customer contact’s manager will always ask at the time of approving the invoice “did we get what we expected.” Keep them prepared with appropriate talk tracks to make their job easier and to help represent you well with internal stakeholders.

Project Management
Borrowing from Wikipedia’s definition, “Project management is the practice of initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing the work of a team to achieve specific goals and meet specific success criteria at the specified time.” In this best practice, Latviv emphasizes the importance of this activity and calls the salient points that have stood out for us during our past experiences, but doesn’t attempt to cover this topic holistically. While technical details of project management can be procured from other sources, this “white hair” wisdom outlined here may not be as clearly and succinctly stated in other sources.

The key responsibility of any customer-facing individual or a resource providing a service is to set and to meet expectations. These are typically the time duration, effort, and resources in terms of hours and cost. Vendor project managers collect this information from each resource tied to the project, aggregate all tasks, and streamline them into a project plan. A project plan along with supporting collateral is a means to document the project goals, milestones, activities leading to these milestones,

and ownership with buffers for potential slippage. It is a means to outline best-, worst-case scenarios, and mitigation measures so that everyone is aware of and can plan for their individual next steps down the line.

It is the responsibility of the vendor CSM, or others under the leadership of the CSM, to anticipate all possible issues that could occur on the project, i.e. before they occur, and plan accordingly. This planning step includes the procurement of tools—technology, infrastructure, and the set-up of a project governance team with escalation touchpoints both at customer and vendor levels. Risks that cannot be mitigated need to be called out so that everyone can accept them as they are or not take

on the project. In a nutshell, the customer success lead, collectively with the implementation manager, is expected to have a vision far out in the future and help the customer contact visualize that vision at the beginning of the project.

After setting these expectations, respectively assigned vendor resources are expected to realize conveyed expectations gradually and surely. A key aspect of delivery management is boosting credibility with small wins. Customer contacts get nervous when milestone dates are not met. This goes back to the setting of expectation responsibility. Be less ambitious in the beginning phases. Promise less and do more. Interestingly, this is all in your hands. These small tricks can make or break your projects.

After this initial but key establishing-credibility phase, stay on schedule for all active projects. Projects tend to get off schedule when complacency gets in. Always have indefinite, reoccurring, meetings till the implementation is complete, the solution is deployed, and successfully realized.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Set and meet expectations

Anticipate, plan and socialize risks with stakeholders

Build credibility with small wins

Stay on schedule with indefinite, reoccurring touchpoint meetings

Simplicity In Implementations
The goal of every implementation should be the seamless deployment of the solution across the user community. End users don’t have the time to learn new technologies, interfaces, and processes. They have their own job to worry about, and most new optional asks of them typically fall on deaf ears. If something is designed to improve their lives and is simple to adopt, they will be all ears.

The solution should accordingly be usable, maintainable, and administrable. Don’t over complicate implementations. Personality types that have the intrinsic need to be challenged tend to over-analyze requirements and end up complicating the solution. Watch for this behavior in yourself or your customer side counterparts.

It is much easier to scale with these principles.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Don’t over complicate implementations

Watch for personality types on your team that like to over-analyze requirements

An intuitive implementation that make end-users’ lives easier and fruitful will achieve the most success

Design Review
All requirements and designs should be routed through a committee of experts, product managers, or solution architects to make sure that the design is blessed across the organization. Keep your ego aside if you think you are the expert and don’t need others’ buy-in. Make project success the full organization’s responsibility. Toe the official company line and strive for utmost transparency so that everyone as a group can watch for project risks and plan mitigation measures collectively.

Approach to the contrary will likely be at your own risk. If the project fails, you will be on the hook. As an investigation measure, your peers will request copies of all emails, notes, and documentation, putting you in a defensive position. Typically, after two or three failed projects, most CSMs and relevant vendor resources are asked to move on. So, don’t push your luck.

Product Limitations—Avoid Saying “No” To Requested Features
No enterprise software product is perfect. They are designed to work with numerous customers, and therefore, are set up with baseline functionalities. Configurations, and in seldom cases, customizations are required to align functionality with customer requirements. Configuring the most appropriate solution is the collective responsibility of customer success and implementation managers.

Sometimes, customer contacts get adventurous and attempt to configure the vendor’s application on their own, without adequate training, for their requirements. When they encounter difficulties, they inquire about functionality that may or may not be necessary for the implementation. When this requested functionality doesn’t exist, customer success and implementation managers may find themselves in a spot. That brings up the question, “when to and when not to say ‘no,’ when vendors don’t have the requested functionality.”

The word “no” clearly has a negative connotation and pushes a potential buyer or adopter of your product away from you. Keeping the prospect or recently signed customer engaged during such tricky conversations is an important responsibility of these two roles. A categorical “no” is better when a “yes” answer will cause the customer to be intentionally misled and will be a blatant lie. But when the question or functionality is irrelevant to the implementation, you can avoid saying “no” while staying honest to your customer.

You can and should avoid saying “no” when a better alternative exists or can be made available at short notice. Remember you are the solution expert. Prepare your word tracks accordingly. For instance, you can start with “we have been implementing this solution for XX years” or “numerous customers have asked for this functionality, however they have soon realized that the alternative approach is much more intuitive in the context of your requirements.”

KEY TAKEAWAY

Don’t mislead your customers, however, when a better solution exists or can be made available, you can avoid answering a customer’s question with a black and white “no” answer

Product Enhancement Ideas
Customer interactions trigger and are a significant source of worthwhile product enhancement ideas. Latviv touches on the product management topic here, since new feature ideas typically originate during implementation planning sessions, and it is valuable for both customer experience and customer success needs.

If you play a product manager role in addition to your customer success responsibilities, don’t ask customers how a feature should be designed. Designing is a product manager’s job, and moreover you don’t want the feature to be specific to just one customer. Ask for feedback on alpha or beta version instead, if the customer proactively offers to help with this request.

For consulting projects, where the solution is specific to just one customer, this recommendation may not apply.

In a product manager’s role, stay creative, and always look for newer ideas, efficiencies, and processing techniques. Go beyond theoretical, irrespective of the company or technology you are representing. Constantly experiment, configure, implement, and program in a sandbox or at an actual client implementation. It is much easier to narrate experiences gathered from experimentation, or actual customer implementations and thereby demonstrate credibility in front of your customers.

Your products should be deployable and should add business value to your customers.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Listen to your customers, if they offer feedback and ideas

Product design and user experience is your responsibility if you play a product manager’s role. Don’t let customers box you into something specific for that customer

Be creative, think out of the box, and build to scale

Basic Segmentation
Considerations

Central characteristics that make customers distinct from one another – for e.g. geography, demography, product
Customer success report statistics and update columns used for regular company-wide reporting
Updates and stats about customers routinely reported within and outside by CSM teams for weekly syncs v. quarterly meetings v. executive rundowns?
Hint: How does your company currently think about your different types of customers?
Hint: Makeup of your overall base?
Hint: Segments for high-level reporting on churn rates and reasons for churn?

Example Segments

Active Customers
Accounts by Status (Full Customer v. Trial)
Customers by Size (Enterprise v. SMB)
Customers by Product/Edition (Gold v.Silver, Product A v. Product B, Freemium)
Customers by Contract Type/Length (Annual v. Monthly, those with an Opt-Out)
Customers by Industry, by Region
Customers by Tenure (Y1 v. Tenured)
Contacts by Role (Decision Maker, Executive Sponsor, Primary Contact)
Churned Customers
Churned Customers Last X Days
Churned Customers by Churn Reason (Competitor v. Out of Business)
Decision Makers from Churned Customers (for Loss Analysis)

By CS Processes And Customer Life Cycle
Considerations:

Portions of the customer lifecycle owned by the CS team own
Onboarding, adoption, renewal, expansion – all of the above
Responsibility for the trial or freemium conversion
Expectations by each process /phase
Timeline, customer accomplishments, customer engagements
Definition of “successful” completion of each process/phase
Internal reporting requirements / requests
Bottlenecks and challenges by processes
Commonly encountered issues or sticking points
Risks where customers most likely to be “forgotten” or left to their own devices
Most time-intensive CSM activities

Example/Potential Segments

New Customers: by last X Days, by Size
Product/Edition, Contract Type, Industry, Region
Customers by CSM Sentiment
Customer by Product Fit
Actively Onboarding Customers
Customers Behind or Stuck in Onboarding
Customers w/out Engagement for X Days, by Type of Engagement (Email v. Call)
Primary Contacts without minimum product adoption by X Tenure
Users with power adoption before X Tenure
Customers Renewing in the Next X Days, by Size, Product/Edition, etc.
Customers with Upsell Potential (Product A to Product B, Addition of Feature C, Increase Limits)
Customers at Risk for Downgrade or Churn (low license utilization, minimum usage

By Behavior And Lack Of Engagement
Considerations

Sign patterns when customers struggle
Inconsistent signs during the customer’s lifecycle
Common challenges customers face with adopting product
Features more difficult to adopt than others
Stickiest, most impactful features
Factors that influence customers success with product
Feature adoption that CSMs can and cannot influence
Unusual time lag in adopting the product
Pre renewal desired type and frequency of usage and engagement
Allowable time lapse with no customer response or communication
Customer persona – POCs, Decision Makers, Executive Sponsors, etc. – involvement with the project
Characteristics of unhealthy implementations

Example/Potential Segments

Customers/Users active 2 or fewer days out of the last 30 days
Customers with License Utilization <20%
Customers whose License Utilization has decreased >40% in the last month
Customers with fewer than 30 minutes in the app in the last 7 days
Customers with fewer than 2 active users in the last 14 days
Customers/users who have never used sticky Feature A
Customers whose use of Feature A has decreased >20% in the last month
Customers getting poor results from their use of Feature A (ex: low open rates for their sent emails)
Customers who haven’t used Feature A or Feature B within their first 3 months
Exec Sponsors who never log in
Primary Contacts with infrequent usage
Customers without regular QBR meetings and/or who routinely cancel meetings
Customers with a negative Account NPS
Decision Makers who are NPS Detractors
Customers with zero engagement with Support, or only engagement to report major bugs
Customers with <2 meetings with their CSM in the last quarter

By Potential Value And Customer Needs
Considerations

Value and benefit(s) customers get from using your product and services?
Is every customer looking for the same benefits?
How do the goals and needs of your customers vary?
Prioritization during time and resource constraints
Hypothetically, if you had two customers whose behaviors were exactly the same but you only had time to serve one of them 1:1, are there any factors that you would look at to help you pick who to focus on?
Example segments: ARR, growth potential, fit for your product, industry/region your company is trying to corner, etc.
The growth path for smaller customers – new features, higher editions, conversion from pilot to the full revenue customer status
Assessment of customer’s revenue potential
Strategic account references
How valuable/necessary are reference accounts to your company?
How does a customer become an advocate and what types of references are most valuable (a type of customer, industry, size)?
Do you have or are you looking to define strategic customers, who can help your company dominate or break into a new industry, region, space? Or perhaps well-known brands for marketing purposes?

Example/Potential Segments

Customers by intended use cases (self-reported or CSM determined)
Customers without the features/edition necessary to achieve their intended use cases
Customers who purchased for Benefit A that have not achieved it by X tenure
Customers who purchased for Benefit A that achieved it before X tenure
Customers who are not meeting industry-specific benchmarks with their use of Feature B
Customers by Revenue (MRR or ARR in bands/tiers)
Customers with high growth potential, by customer health
Customers with low growth potential, by customer health
Decision Makers from customers with high growth potential
Primary Contacts from reference accounts
Primary Contacts who have given references that resulted in new business
Primary Contacts and Decision Makers from potential new reference accounts
Strategic Customers – Manually Tagged
Strategic Customers – By Target Industry,
Company Size, etc.

By Cross Element Categories
Example segments:
Trial customers with >15 active days in their 30-day trial
Gold edition customers who are behind in onboarding
Customers paying >$20k (high value) who are overdue for a QBR
Customers who should be fit for your top edition but whose usage has decreased >40% last month
Customers who consistently use Feature A but report a high volume of bugs with the feature
Primary Contacts in Y2 with consistent usage but who don’t engage with their CSM and/or Support regularly
Decision Makers from annual customers with a renewal in the next 90 days, where CSM sentiment is green and usage is a good match for a higher edition
Strategic customer (in the industry your company is targeting) who is behind on onboarding and not yet using on a daily basis
Customers with increasing usage but who have not met with the CSM recently and are not using a new feature
Silver Edition customers who routinely meet with their CSM but have not started using Feature A despite being past that point in the onboarding process
Primary Contacts from Pilot Customers within 30 days of pilot expiration, who have been using more user licenses than originally scoped
Gold Edition customers within 6 months of their renewal who are not using the two features that distinguish Gold and Silver editions
Y1 customer who – despite being a poor product fit – consistently uses in unique and creative ways and has a good relationship with their CSM
Primary Contacts who use the product daily and who are a potential upsell to a higher edition but whose decision-maker(s) never logs in
Y2 customers who are the ideal size and are consistently using the product but the primary contacts and decision-makers are NPS detractors

Adoptability Of Solution
Workplace software or a workplace hardware product is not unlike any end-consumer product in terms of user acceptance. People accept products such as clothing, furniture, electronics, or appliances only if they appreciate the combination of aesthetics, value, utility, and ease of use of the product. We all know that as end consumers we cannot be forced to buy or use

the product. The same principles apply in the workplace. Senior management cannot enforce usage, if a software solution, office hardware (such as copiers or laptops), or furniture doesn’t offer utility, ease of use, or aesthetics to end-users of the product.

When workplace solutions or products are rolled out, vendors tend to collect commitments from management or product champions that the customer will commit to using the product. These commitments have typically limited value and teeth if the product is not inherently appealing to end-users. While it is important to adequately make end-users aware of a product’s

capabilities and to appropriately train them, the product itself should be designed to be “adoptable” by end-users.

Product Stickiness And Marketing
Vendors are advised to look for “stickiness” in their product implementations so that the product cannot be uprooted easily in the future. This stickiness can be instituted at customer locations via integrations with customer’s other systems, the scale of adoption, and acceptance by many users. Rollout activity will accordingly involve testing seamless integration, confirming

ease of use and scalability of the solution.

Marketing is an important skill when engaging with a large user community. Convincing each user directly to engage with the solution is not realistic. CSMs should leverage recorded verbal and written mass communication pieces to continually emphasize the importance, and benefits of the solution, in collaboration with the customer’s core team comprised of project managers, influencers, and champions. All communications should be vetted thoroughly with relevant stakeholders, tested with a smaller audience before distribution to the larger audience.

Continuous and relevant communications are important in the post rollout phases as well to maintain awareness of the vendor’s products. Out of sight/out of mind is a critical risk, that vendors should always watch for and remediate.

Success Breeds Success
Maintain relationships with product champions who have been engaged throughout the implementation process. Serve their needs and address their feedback promptly. Celebrate their success with the product in all possible forums. Make them the hero in their respective groups and organizations. Work with them to document case studies, record videos, and

prepare presentations. Help promote this collateral on customer’s knowledge- sharing applications.

Look for winning techniques that help them be more productive, effective, efficient, and successful at their jobs. Ensure they have access to up-to-date training materials to share with their colleagues and peers. Help them spread the word and get you more license revenue.

Success breeds success. Strive for frictionless adoption. Suggest and remove hurdles in People, Process, and System areas as highlighted in Latviv book Chapter 2.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Strive for frictionless rollout by fine-tuning all three aspects of implementations—people, process, and systems

Celebrate end-user wins

Help the customer spread the word and help you gain traction across their larger user community

Change Management
Changing any aspect of an employee’s workplace is a significant undertaking. Making the person change their daily schedule or activity is akin to changing someone’s habit. It takes effort to socialize the need, educate, initiate, and monitor usage patterns until a new habit is created in the workplace. Any visualized change needs to be well thought through before it is considered for application in the workplace.

Project coordinators need to watch for both overt and covert pushback. They need to prepare responses ahead of time for all potential objections from end-users. Both tangible and intangible benefits should be identified ahead of time, in addition to potential incentives that are meaningful to end-users.

A change management plan should be clearly documented and shared with all relevant stakeholders. The people, process, and systems framework could be used to identify dependencies across these three interconnected elements. Each potential issue or risk should be explored, discussed, and documented. Mitigating solutions should accordingly be identified in addition to executing scenario analysis to identify all possible outcomes. Senior management should be presented with a holistic risk framework so that they take on the overall change management risk with eyes wide open. Typically, management, at this stage, accepts the risk as is, accepts reduced risk after investing in mitigating solutions, transfers the risk to a third-party, or avoids the risk by not taking on change management at this stage. In simple terms, using the timesheet application example at an industrial organization, management could decide to move forward with the software’s deployment across all of its employees, could deploy to only a subset employee base, could transfer software-based timesheet responsibility to another third-party or could decide to stay with the current procedures.

If the stakeholders decide to move forward with the change management initiative, periodic progress is monitored, shared with affected stakeholders, and reported to senior management. At appropriate project milestones, management continuously tracks risk landscape and makes a call to proceed, risk adjust, or abort based on the information received on project coordinators.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Any visualized change needs to be well thought through before it is considered for application in the workplace

Project coordinators need to prepare responses ahead of time for all potential objections from end-users and watch for both overt and covert pushback

Adoption
The adoption phase starts when product implementation and exceptional onboarding takes place. This is where Customer Success

takes over from sales and/or marketing to make the time-to-value short and sweet. It’s where a company must deliver on all the promises

made during the sales process. It’s critical that customers transition into the adoption phase quickly and smoothly so that they are unlikely to

churn. By this point, the customer’s pain points should be understood and there is time to develop a plan to achieve their goals. Each customer has a particular Required Outcome they need from the product and they are each expecting an Appropriate Experience to accompany it. In this phase, initial success milestones should be set to ensure customers are receiving optimal value in a timely manner, increasing the likelihood of complete product adoption.

Adoption Tip: Welcome Email
Send out a welcome email with implementation instructions and helpful tips for getting started as soon as someone becomes a customer. Provide documentation and other materials they will need as they learn to use the product.

Adoption Tip: Kickoff And Onboarding
Schedule kickoff and onboarding calls, introduce the Customer Success team, and send links to support resources.

Adoption Tip: Usage Tracking
Keep a close eye on usage during this stage to confirm user champions are logging in regularly and accessing the features that are most important to their needs.

Retention
The easiest revenue comes from keeping the customers who are already invested, which is why smart companies are becoming laser-focused on customer success to prevent churn. Any company that is really good at making their customers successful finds that retention comes more naturally and puts them on a fast track for growth.

Retention Tip: Customer Health Monitoring
Define churn indicators and measure customer health in weekly reviews to help stay on top of any users who may be at risk for churn in order to chart a correction course as early as possible.

Retention Tip: Customer Objective Attainment
Gather intelligence on how users are behaving within the product to make sure they are reaching their goals, hitting success milestones, and getting the most out of their experience.

Retention Tip: Frequent Check-ins
Trigger more frequent check-ins if a customer is struggling, losing momentum, or missing a key feature to help get them back on track.

Expansion
Expansion is a key indicator that customers have been satisfied with their experience, so much so that they are willing to invest more money into the company. This is where cross-selling and upselling further their experience with your product or services and help them solve other problems they may not have considered previously.

It’s important to point out that expansion isn’t always an option, especially for nascent products that may not have additional features to add-on just yet, but undoubtedly these opportunities will arise as a product grows, as customers request specific changes, etc.

Expansion Tip: Proactive And Logical
Strive to be proactive and logical in account expansion efforts rather than forcing an upsell or cross-sell only at renewal periods or to hit a quota. By staying involved with customers throughout their lifecycle, suggestions for upgrades can come more naturally as needed.

Expansion Tip: Periodic Webinars
Consider hosting a monthly product webinar to showcase new product features to customers, so they are up to speed on new offerings.

Engagement Tip: Case Studies And New Use Cases
Share case studies and new use cases with customers so they have an idea of how other companies are using the product and can begin thinking about how those successes can work for them.

Advocacy
When making a decision on where to spend their money, customers are increasingly likely to take the advice of their peers into account.

For most companies, that means there is power in the ability to create successful customers and to get these customers talking. Customer advocacy covers a variety of ways customers can be directly involved in the growth of the company. Each of these strategies help to refill the top of the hourglass with new leads that are often more qualified and less costly to acquire with higher lifetime values and higher retention rates, which means higher ROI and faster revenue growth. Advocates also help the marketing department. Successful customers are more likely to provide case studies, testimonials, referrals, engage with, and share content. Customer advocacy is a key indicator that customers are willing to stake their reputations on referring people in their network.

Expansion Tip: Periodic Self Assessment
Questions to ask yourself to stay on top of expansion opportunities:

What is your early detection system for at-risk customers?
How will you segment your users?
How do you make high-tech/high-touch decisions?
Plot key engagement points in your expansion plan Did we meet our expansion revenue goals?
If not, what are two strategies we can implement to help us hit our expansion goals next month? If so, how can we continue improving and what’s our new goal?
Do we need to create new educational content or documentation to break down barriers to communicate with users?

Advocacy Tip: Self Assessment
Questions for self-assessment:
Did we meet our NPS rating and response rate goals?
How many detractors or passives did we move up to promoter status?
Were we able to generate more reviews or other forms of advocacy from our customers?
If not, what are two strategies we can implement to help us hit our advocacy goals next month? If so, how can we continue improving and what’s our new goal?
Do we need to address any issues in the previous stages to ensure an increase in customer advocacy?
As you evaluate, consider using your segments to discover if your advocacy practices should change depending on the characteristics of the account or user.

Advocacy Tip: NPS Surveys
Implement monthly or quarterly NPS surveys to take note of trends and identify top promoters. Consider making those surveys actionable—for example, if a customer identifies as a promoter, prompt them to share their experience on social media.

Adoption Tip: Reviews And Testimonials
Encourage product reviews and gather testimonials to support word-of-mouth marketing efforts and sales needs.

Adoption Tip: Customer Advisory Board
Create a customer advisory board (CAB) that meets quarterly so key customers are not only financially invested, but emotionally invested in the product and the team. This gives them a stronger voice, provides them with a community of fellow users, and makes them a significant part of company growth.

Send Thoughtful Handwritten Notes
Start here: Identify 5 of your best customers—those whom you have a strong personal relationship with and those who are active and gracious in working with your company, doing speaking en­gagements, or providing referrals. This week, send them a handwrit­ten card thanking them for their loyalty. Next—this is the hard part— identify 5 of your most difficult customers. Those that take every ounce of your energy, those that seem to reach out at the most in­opportune times, or those that have had a major struggle with your product. Send them a note as well, and be sincere in your approach.

Have Even Your Executives Get Personal
Start here: Create the role of an executive sponsor for your top customer accounts and have that senior member participate active­ly in their assigned customer’s dealings with your company. Have them visit onsite with the customer at least once a quarter and meet the team that uses your solution, have them sit in on the quarterly business review and important calls, and even have them shadow riskier moments such as implementations, customer support, or es­calation calls.

Interact Via Social Media
Start here: Assuming you don’t have control of your company’s so­cial media accounts, you can take some of this into your own hands with your personal accounts. Twitter is a great place to start as it’s less personal and doesn’t feel intrusive. Who are those people in your customer accounts that you should follow on Twitter? Follow them yourself and also send the list to your marketing department for your social team to engage with on the company account. Fol­low their activity and begin to understand what they enjoy outside of work. Find something such as their favorite restaurant, candy bar, or a golf course? Look for an appropriate opportunity to surprise them with something they’ll love. They’ll appreciate the gesture, and even more, so they’ll appreciate that it isn’t just more work schwag.

Invest In Customer’s Networks
Start here: Select a handful of trusted customers (that’s a big key here) where you have strong relationships and you respect how they treat others and handle business. Go through your own Linke­dIn account and your personal “friend” contacts and make a list of 5 individuals you think your customer would benefit from speaking to and send them the list. Create a little bio about each person and why you think the introduction would be valuable for both the cus­tomer and the contact. When you hear back from your customer, they’ll be thrilled at the opportunity to meet new people and, chanc­es are, they’ll be more than happy to return the favor in the future.

Sweat Even The Small Stuff
Start here: Next time a customer comes to you with a concern, no matter how small it is, do everything you can to fix it or call on someone who can. Do you have a backlog of customer wishes or needs that you just haven’t had time to fulfill? Express your desire to work on these “small wins” to your manager and ask for assistance in taking care of some of these details or by requesting a few hours that week to work remotely to focus on your customer needs. It’ll go a long way in showing that you care—because you’re willing to roll up your sleeves.

Internal Advocate
Be your customer’s internal advocate

Understand Your Users
You have to know their:

• personality, likes, and dislikes (refer fields on persona form)
• companies
• attention span: what they definitely won’t understand and
• level of difficulty: what may seem hard for them

Show Value
Every step of onboarding should demonstrably bring users to the purpose they had when signed up. So don’t let any challenges get in their way to receiving the value.

For new customer side audience members or to simply reemphasize and educate, express your value proposition in simple and clear terms. The faster users find and understand your product’s core value, the more likely they are to eventually become an enthusiastic, profitable customer. To get your customers to reach success more rapidly, think about the feature that best represents your value proposition. Next, figure out the best and most efficient way to introduce and teach your users about these features.

Keep In Touch

1. Start with email introduction as the first step of your onboarding, because emails are checked more often.
2. Send reminders after the first email to motivate them to go back to the product and finish set up.
3. Use help tips inside the product to lead users along the way
4. Send educational emails about new launches and share pieces of advice on how to use your product

Caveats:

1. please don’t shower users with emails
2. let them continue their work for some time without you
3. sending emails once a week is enough

Setup meaningful automation:

Automated welcome email. Create an email that triggers when a new user signs up.

Follow-up email. Schedule a follow-up email to invite your new customer to log in to the software.

Greeting message. Build a greeting message for the initial login.

Engage contextually, not periodically

Instead of checking in with customers periodically to see how they’re doing and answer questions, the best companies check in intentionally and strategically. They understand that the customer journey has different phases (such as onboarding, adoption, and expansion) and that within each phase, customers have different priorities and expectations—and engage accordingly.

For example, during onboarding, the product must be configured correctly, delivered on time, and meet customer needs. Moving towards adoption, the customer should be using the product, achieving business value, and becoming delighted. During expansion, customers are looking at what’s next—how they can derive even greater value. Customer-centric companies identify customer expectations across this spectrum and take their engagement cues from where the customer is on the journey. Rather than being premature or too late, these organizations give the customer exactly what they need when they need it. And, they understand that customer expectations change over time.

How do companies gather this information? By doing their homework. They ask customers about their expectations for each stage in the customer lifecycle and then make those expectations their priorities. In addition, they ensure that engineering, sales, marketing, and all other departments across their own organization understand and align with customers’ priorities.

Create Customer-Centered Goals
Let users accept the product at their own pace with gradual self-acknowledgment of their own success with it. If they clearly and naturally understand the purpose behind your product, they will push the usage forward without requiring nudges from you.

Aim To Impress
Users need to enjoy working with your product and you, to recommend continued renewals:

• Strive to leave a pleasant impression after every user interaction with your product or you
• Look for productivity gains, seamless interaction, and flawless operation of your system

Track On-Boarding Statistics, Detect Bottlenecks

1. Collect feedback from users
2. Check key metrics regularly and course-correct immediately when needed

• Metric 1: Customer engagement
• Metric 2: Customer satisfaction
• Metric 3: Product adoption

Track correlation between business goals and training

• Improved Product Onboarding & Adoption
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
• Improved Customer Retention Expansion & Renewal Rate
• Lower Support Costs
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Believe In Simplicity
End users are busy. Easy solutions get adopted faster.

Show Don’t Tell

Celebrate Adoption And User Success
Trigger a celebratory notification to go off once a client hits a milestone. Add a quiz feature to your academy and give certificates to learners who successfully finish all of the courses in your academy.

Setup Customer Self Service

• Setup knowledge base FAQ and videos on product use.
• Create training content, quizzes, learning modules
• Build an academy and update it frequently.
• Сollect full statistics about your content. It should show the breakdown of all the courses and lessons people go through.

Setup Online Community

Evaluate & Adjust

• What worked for us? What didn’t work for us?
• What worked for our customers? What didn’t work for our customers?
• What are the two aspects we want to improve upon in the next quarter?
• Do we need to create new content or documentation to break barriers?

Setup Credentialing Certificates Of Completion

• Badges
• Formal Certifications – Non-Proctored
• Formal Certifications – Proctored

Training
Educate your customers’ users at or below cost.

Make a business case to drive investment in training

• Product Onboarding & Adoption / Decrease Time to Value
• Customer Retention
• Customer Health
• Reducing Support Tickets
• Scaling Internal Teams (Customer Success, Customer Support)
• Monetization of Customer Education / Revenue Generation
• Demand & Lead Generation (Industry Awareness)

Welcome Emails
Many SaaS companies welcome their users with a simple welcome email. Welcome emails should have a warm tone and offer any additional guidance if neces­sary. To take your welcome emails to the next level, you can even include colors, images, gifs, or even videos to make the effect more visually appealing.

Key Takeaways

1. Make Them Visually Appealing

2. Drive Your Value Proposition

3. Add Hyperlinks and Buttons

4. Let Users Know How to Get Support

Bonus: Welcome Users Through Video

These tips can apply not just to welcome emails, but also to all onboarding emails!

Here are some tips to make emails not seem au­tomated:

Send emails from a personal or corporate email address, instead of a third-party email marketing service

Personalize the sender’s fields (this increases open rate by about 3%)

Personalize your email copy using the user’s information “Welcome John!” versus “Welcome!” can increase your open rates by 20%

Say cheese! Include an avatar or ‘profile pic­ture’ for the account

Make sure your emails end up in the Primary folder (Not spam or promotions)

Send Emails From the CEO/Founder
Another tip to take your onboarding process to the next level is to send emails, or at least the welcome email, from the CEO or Founder himself. Users feel special and important when the CEO welcomes them personally, even if it’s just the marketing team behind it! You’ll be perceived less like a faceless, corporate entity, and instead make your company seem accessible to everyone. Sending welcome emails from the founder of the CEO also establishes a conversational relationship from day one, and builds trust with the users.

Product Tour
Product tours are a great way to orient new users and help them decipher the fastest way to get to their first instance of value garnered. Tours walk users through the product and point out key steps that may have otherwise been missed.

Here are some pointers for a great product tour.

1. Make It Interactive

This is a great way to engage users; gamification works perfectly here.

2. Keep it simple and short; if not, it’ll feel like a hassle to read.

Show them how to use the features that drive your value proposition

Advanced features can be left for the resources page on the website

3. Make It Optional

Allow users to control the pace of the tour with ‘Next’ buttons because…Some people are faster learners than others!

Some might already know how to use your product.

4. Keep Text Short and to the Point

Ensure your text is 140 characters or less – like Twitter. Or, I guess with the new update, old Twitter!

5. Set Expectations Early

Which do you think is easier? – Starting a journey with no idea of the destination or time required, or starting a journey and knowing exactly what to expect and how long it’ll take?

6. Provide Navigation Control

Include a progress bar

Allow users to control the pace of the tour

Have the option to ‘Skip This Tour’

Have a pronounced back button

Introduce Resources To Users
Most, if not all, SaaS companies have com­prehensive resources pages on their websites, but in most SaaS onboarding processes, the resource library is rarely introduced to new users.

These resource pages usually include FAQs, tutorial videos, case studies, and more that can help users maximize their productivity while using their product.

Taper Off – Contact Slowly
Just like teaching someone how to ride a bike, you want to slowly taper off your onboarding pro­cess. You don’t want to end it too abruptly when users aren’t ready to be on their own, but you also don’t want to be sending them onboarding emails forever.

Tip!: You can space out the frequency of your emails e.g. 1 email every 3 days to 1 every 7, to 1 every 2 weeks, etc.

Show Users How Much You Value Them
Throughout your entire onboarding process, you must ensure that your users feel like they are valued. If I have to pick a tip that trumps all other tips, it would be this one.

Everyone likes to feel valued! A valued user is a happy user. A happy user is not only more like­ly to come back, but they’re also more likely to spread the word about your company/product. This can greatly help with your brand reputa­tion as a customer-centric company. Also, if a customer feels unappreciated, they are more likely to take their business to another compa­ny that makes them feel valued.

Lifecycle Drip Campaigns
Drip campaigns are another way to use email as a marketing tool for your training program. Rather than being triggered by an action (course registration, completion, etc.), drip campaign emails are deployed after a specified timeline (i.e. one week after someone registers for a course).

Upon reaching the designated time, students will receive an email with a reminder from your team. The reminder might encourage them to enroll in part two of an onboarding series or remind them to begin a course for which they have previously registered. Drip campaigns are a great way to reinforce key behaviors – you can encourage a student to partake in a certain action or activity and link to learning resources to help them do that. You can also highlight courses that are relevant to their specific point in the customer’s journey.

If you have customers and/or prospects that have not responded to any of your recent outreach efforts, drip campaigns can also be used to nurture these groups. In other words, if you notice someone hasn’t taken training in a certain amount of time, use email to reach out and reconnect. Consider sending them an email with a link to some of your new or highly relevant content to draw them back in.

Note: <Link to Customer Success Book> The customer success book covers a lot more detail than outlined here on best practices. Few takeaways:

• Walkthrough usage, health, utilization and performance metrics derived from vendor and customer’s third party systems
• Discuss impact of these metrics on productivity gains, time savings, revenue boosts or mitigated risks
• Share your (vendor’s) product roadmap, vision and growth plans
• Share product implementation ideas and successes at customer peers
• Share best practices and suggest configuration, process or team (governance) changes to drive better utilization of sold product
• Prepare list of action items for vendor and customer
• Follow through and drive completion of action items
• Collect feedback from participants

• Strive to keep meetings short and to the point
• Share agenda ahead of time with summary of prior calls
• Check progress on action items socialized earlier
• Send request for action item updates ahead of meeting
• Take abundant notes and attempt to record all conversations
• Setup auto record option on web meetings