How to be a successful CSM in customer success

I totally resonate with you on the below post Noah Little Additionally, CSMs' work is continuous and relentless. Unlike sales teams that may work in bursts to close deals, CSMs are responsible for customer happiness every day of the year. This constant engagement is akin to tending crops; if done well, it results in renewals and long-term loyalty. If neglected, it leads to customers seeking better service elsewhere.

I first read about this notion in the book #ChiefCustomerOfficer 2.0 in 2015. The book discussed company Power Cores and how, for organisations to fully pivot to a 'Customer-Led' model, Power Cores need to shift from a traditional Sales-led Power Core to a Customer Power Core. The book is pretty clear on ensuring readiness but also how to: 👉 Earn the right to growth (expansion isn't a given it takes work and focus) 👉 Create customer-driven growth architecture (to support the expansion there has to be a carefully created framework to make it easy) 👉Honour and manage customers as assets to your business (the same goes for your people 😁) 👉Recognising Customer Experience Development is as important as Product Development 👉Build the revenue erosion early warning process by understanding the intersection points that impact customer decisions to stay, leave, buy more, and recommend you to others. #CustomerSuccess and the quality of the frameworks on which it is built in your organisation are at the centre of this. Instead, what did the majority of companies do? They either gave the CRO the CCO title and changed nothing or (worse still) created a #CCO role, changed nothing operationally, yelled about how badly this role fails, and went back to traditional sales models. All over, CSMs are still underappreciated and over-burdened. #CSM

When your CSMs are set up to succeed and flourish, they provide your sales and marketing teams with content, relationships, and referrals. If a customer churns with a good relationship with their CSM, they frequently return later and continue to refer others to your business. Prioritize those who manage your relationships with your customers, all of your other departments will be able to flourish because of it.

“Your sales team told us you could do X, Y, Z, why are these features not available to us?” WELL… they never were. 😠 Best way to cause a client to churn? Screw up the onboarding process. I’ve seen too many renewals fall off the wayside because people didn’t have their act together on that first, and arguably most important touch point. There’s a litany of ways to botch the experience, but the worst and most common is when your CS team has to manage unreasonable expectations or false promises offered by the sales team. Maybe the AE hyped up a bunch of features that are still under development, or boasted that your product can be deployed company-wide in a matter of days when that was only the case once, and the “company” consisted of five people. Now, the CS team becomes the bearer of bad news. This is how you lose trust and respect with your clients. And it’s significantly harder to resell them on your product’s value when they feel like they’ve been jipped. Get on the same page, get a roadmap, and be clear and honest with the client about how it will all unfold. Don’t set yourself up to fail. It’s hard to recover.

YES I try to look at my Renewals target the same way a Sales Leader would! I've calculated the difference between my forecast for FY26 and my target. This is my "gap" and I make sure I know it in $ not %, so I know exactly what I have to find. Now I'm going to figure out WHERE I'm going to find it. I look at this in 2 ways: 🟥 Renewing ARR with a red health score ❓ How much sits in Q3/Q4 vs the first half of the year? Because I have a longer time to influence it. ❓What % of this red ARR sits in different segments, geographies or CS tiers? Have I got my CS resource balanced in the right way for next year? ❓Which are my highest ARR red accounts that I think we can turn around? 🟩 Renewing ARR with a green health score ❔ Could I renew this bucket at a higher % than the forecast? ❔ What strategies can I arm the team with to do that? From this I calculate how much closer these things get me to target and make a plan for the year with the team. This whole strategy relies entirely on knowing exactly where you risk is for the whole year and how that translates into a forecast. But how do you know you're going to hit target, if you don't have a plan? Learn more about running a renewals number at our Customer Conference talk on 30th Jan, link and access code in the comments!

Having another moment watching the LI #salesbro culture and the constant "advice" which I generally see as making something REALLY simple into something a lot more complex. You wanna win the sales game? Do 3 things. 1. Know who your highest impact potential customers are and go after them 2. Understand what makes your offer valuable to THEM, not what you think is valuable about it, and keep it SHORT AND SWEET 3. Be authentic and stand out. Inboxes are FLOODED with the same canned sales guy bullshit these days. Talk to them like you would a good friend, be real, and don't be scared into being "overly professional" where you sound just like everyone else. That's it guys. That's all you need to do. It ain't that hard. Don't get sucked into the minutiae. #sales #salesleadership #KISS #simplicitywins #outbound #closing #deals #SaaS

While Sales Ops and RevOps are laser-focused on the same objective, the way it's done under each model is different. Depending on your business, one may be more important than the other. So, lets demystify the difference between RevOps and Sales Ops. https://hubs.la/Q02Q6ZXn0

Six Reasons Sales Stall on the way to Closing What should you do when you notice that your sales pipeline if full of possible deals with a large number of them stalled in mid-cycle? David Brock shares his unique insights on what may be happening. "Sellers and managers don’t dive in to see what’s happening and why. Few things can destroy the validity of our pipeline health metrics more than deals that aren’t moving. The pipeline can’t be healthy if we have the right pipeline coverage, but the majority of deals aren’t moving." Here's what to do next... https://lnkd.in/eTQCqWjd

Knowing what reps to fire versus keep can be tricky. How we define the “line” of performance is often simple so it misses important factors. Check out 👇 to help properly determine sales rep performance https://lnkd.in/gDCmvYeu