Branded: Customer SuccessWhat is a brand? We talk about brands on a daily basis reflecting and relating to the products we choose to buy and the services we choose to utilise. With visual and audio advertising maturing and developing pulling on your heart-strings and your desires constantly, we are forever succumbing to the promises of an improved experience. Products and services therefore are easy to associate a brand with - but what about people? What about you? What does your personal brand say about you? Do you even have one? What do you want people to associate with you - what qualities do you want to demonstrate? So what is a brand when it comes to people? For me, a former Director of Recruitment I worked with previously summed it perfectly: "your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room". You are a brand and your name with your colleagues, and with your customers will evoke an emotion and what that emotion is depends on your behaviours. In the world of customer success where so much value is attached to the relationships between individuals your brand goes a long way to being successful. Your personal brand is your commitment to your customer and to your colleagues. It is a statement that reflects your beliefs, your values and your opinions. Your personal brand needs to be relevant to what industry or business you are seeking to penetrate, or the persona you are trying to build of yourself. What could be the ultimate aim?
So if you have an aim, you should be ready to consciously create your plan and build your brand. But, where do you start?
Customer Success, selling, and general business is all about people and relationships so ensure people come to you knowing what you are about; knowing what your brand is. What are you waiting for.....go and get branded!
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The Mistakes Of A Failing CSMAsk any Customer Success Manager if they are good at their job and I am sure you will be given a look of discontent, followed by a response of something along the lines of "of course I am, my customers love me!". While the behaviors and deliverables of a "good" CSM are obvious and often written about across the many blogs and white papers available, the misconceptions and mistakes made by "bad" CSMs are not so readily available. Last week I had a discussion with one of my team around what makes a bad CSM, and while you can answer this in many ways we spoke about some of the common mistakes that CSMs make and so based on that, I will give you my four fatal mistakes you as a CSM cannot afford to make. "Silence is golden" or "No news is good news" - One of the most worrying mistakes a CSM can make is the presumption that if their customers are not talking to them it is due to them having nothing to complain about. Yes, it may be nice to have a customer that causes you little pain and little work but realistically what do you know about them? What are they doing? Are they happy with your product or service, or are they out there looking at your competitors? When it comes to justifying the renewal at the end of the contract term not only do you have insufficient information to base your value realization on but you are open to the customer making the accusation they never hear from you. No news may be good news, but don't leave that to chance - ensure you know why there is that silence and you can only do that by talking. And talking about "talking"..... Email has its place - But in this ever increasing world of email communication and ever decreasing world of real conversation lets restrict the use of email and only use when appropriate. The "check in" email is really devaluing of the role you play with your customer and more critically, is probably annoying your customer. Email does have its place in customer success management, but its use has to be intelligent, and targeted. With all the data available to you as the CSM you can connect with your customer based on any number of strategic, high value topics: analysis of their usage trends, on the tracking to your agreed shared goals, on product developments, or on relevant activities you are delivering, but why not pick up the phone and do this in person. That phone call sets the expectation of the value - the fact you have taken the time to pick up the phone places a value of importance on it and what you have to say. Who needs a QBR? - This one is very close to my heart as my team of Customer Success Managers know too well; quite simply how do you ensure you are tracking progress to your agreed shared goals whilst continuously demonstrating value and an RoI if you don't have QBRs. While I accept there may be accounts who do not warrant "quarterly" business reviews that does not or should not mean that you do nothing. Likewise, if your customer is resistant to accepting the a QBR there is usually two things you need to look at. One, do you have the right person or people attending and two, are you showing relevant and valued, insightful content. Arguably if you align the right content with the right attendees you will have a very productive QBR but under no circumstances should a form of business review on a regular cadence not take place. As I have seen over recent years, if you do not frequently ensure you are delivering and communicating value back to your customer over the duration of your contract you are majorly at risk of that customer not renewing. Scrambling to get this together three months before a renewal is often too late - your customer by then has already decided that your competitor is better than you. I "own" the customer - Using this phrase not only will cause angst amongst your colleagues but your conduct often then follows suit with unhealthy, controlling behaviors and traits shown. As a CSM you are only as good as the team around you, and you cannot afford to damage that with your overwhelming desire to be in control. No one owns the customer, end of. You have a responsibility to the customer, to your company and to your colleagues to do the right thing by them not you and in that order; customer first. Now I am sure there are other mistakes or misconceptions out there that you will claim are even bigger and have an even larger impact on being able to be successful as a Customer Success Manager so let's hear them. What for you is the biggest mistake a CSM can make and what is the impact either on you, your customer or your company? The Culture Club: Customer SuccessThere is a lot written about customer success. Customer success the role, customer success the department, customer success the industry, customer success and the numerous best practices but the reality of the matter is that all of these are nothing without a culture of customer success. The culture of customer success starts from the very top of your organisation and penetrates the very depth of your organisation. Or does it? Maybe the culture of customer success is initiated at the very depth of your organisation and infiltrates other departments and roles, until the value and importance of customer success is realized. Realistically though for a lot of companies I believe this is how the culture of customer success has their first seeds sown. Then, and only then when the value is seen, understood, appreciated and realised does it become a top-down approach.
The creation of the culture of customer success is dependent on the positioning of your customer within your organisation. Only when your customer is situated at the very heart of all you do through the entire customer journey can you lay claim to this - a creation of a customer success team does not replace this. Saying you want your customers to be successful isn't enough, saying retention is important isn't enough, saying the Customer Success Manager is the most valuable relationship you have with your customer isn't enough. It requires a complete mindset and philosophy through every role within your company - everyone that touches, influences or impacts the experience of your customer through that customer journey has a part to play. From your sales team in the pre-sales phase, to your technical sales team in the technical implementation phase, to the operations team in processing the order, to the legal team in the contract negotiation phase and ultimately it ends with the CSM, the Customer Success Manager in the delivery phase. While the Customer Success Management organisation bring a lot of skills, experience and value they cannot ultimately be successful unless the entire company is with them and the customer on that journey of being successful. So what should you do to ensure that Customer Success is a company-wide philosophy and mindset, and culture that everyone buys into?
So, we have spoken about the need for a customer success culture, where it starts, who it includes and why. But what is that culture you are seeking? What values underpin your desire for customer success to be organizationally adopted? What are those behaviors you require from your Customer Success Managers? This is something my own company Autodesk are looking at now as we look to relaunch the Customer Success Management organisation with a clearly defined identity, philosophy and value. While you can Google the common ideas that a lot of organisations have as their CSM behaviors and culture, we have set about trying to be truly unique and boundary-pushing when it came to these, and time will tell whether these have the desired effect. Saying this, one behavior that all customer success organisations include and should have, however they choose to word it is "customer-centricity". Earlier I positioned this as putting the customer at the the very heart of everything you do - this is something we at Autodesk encourage our CSMs to do with every activity they are involved in, ensuring they question why they are doing something. Does this benefit the customer? How does it benefit the customer? What is the value to the customer? Asking these types of questions show that you are ingraining that desired culture of customer success within your CSM team. So when do you know you have made it? When do you know that customer success really is at the heart of everything you do. For me there are two clear indications:
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AuthorMatt Myszkowski - experienced Customer Success leader & founder of CustomerSuccessMatters Archives
March 2021
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