This is the fourth in a series of five, so we’re into the home straight. Three previous customer success articles have discussed the purpose of customer success, outlined some of the things which can help you achieve it, and suggested how you might measure the success of customer success, which is not as straightforward as you might think. This fourth blog in the series looks at how and when to engage your CS team.
Engaging customer success
Engagement is complex. Everyone wants a piece of the customer – marketing, sales, product, and more – so the first question is, who owns the customer post-sale? My suggestion is that this should be customer success, but only if you are doing CS properly and only if there is openness to involve other teams when appropriate. I have two guiding principles for what is appropriate: any engagement should add value for the customer, and it should also advance the relationship in terms of value, maturity, or shared vision.
In my experience, the best way to engage with a customer is to build a broad relationship across multiple stakeholders and levels of the business.
Who should you engage? In my experience, the best way to engage with a customer is to build a broad relationship across multiple stakeholders and levels of the business. Your sales team should know the budget holders and business owners. Your engineers or service team should be familiar with the customer’s users and operations team. Your execs should at least have spoken with the executive sponsor. Legal, marketing, support and other relationships may also make sense. These are not all required in every case, but a single point of engagement is what Scots call a “shoogly peg”: sooner or later, it will lose traction, and then you’ll have no relationship left. Invite the CIO to a sporting or cultural event, offer the head of IT a ticket to an industry show, take the first-line support SME for coffee and a sandwich. Do all these things at a time and a place which is convenient to the customer – show them you are in touch with their world and in tune with their priorities.
How and when you engage is very much dependent on your processes and your customer’s processes. Here are some examples:
Sales
As a minimum, introduce the concept of customer success and a maturity model (crawl > walk > run > fly) during the sales process, introduce somebody from CS, and ask what the customer would class as success. Do not do full CS discovery at this stage unless there is a good reason: sales is about closing a deal, not about building a lifelong relationship, and the simpler the process can be, the more likely you are to win the business. If CS is a big sales advantage, a USP compared to a plug-and-play solution, for example, then call it out – but don’t engage more than necessary. Unless the customer process requires in-depth customer success engagement before the sale, it just wastes everyone’s time. CS engagement in earnest should start with onboarding.
Onboarding
Customer success should own and manage this and begin the process of customer understanding and discovery. Onboarding is probably the second most important function of customer success, and usually the most intensive. Other teams might deliver, but customer success owns the success of onboarding. For me, onboarding is not about walking in cold and telling the customer what you think they need to know; it’s about continuing the relationship built up during the sales process, restating your shared goals, handing the customer off to the CS team and other teams but also ensuring that the customer introduces customer success to all their stakeholders, and of course, agreeing on the success plan discussed in previous blogs in this series.
Training
Customer success should lead to drawing up a training plan for the customer to ensure success based on the maturity model. CS should be involved, and they should track the outcomes against the customer's goals. While customer success need not plan or deliver the training themselves, they should present the plan to the customer and be involved at least as a liaison between the customer and any training team. Perhaps your training is custom for every engagement, but more often, a training plan will be assembled from standard components and delivery methods. In either case, it is up to customer success to explain why this plan has been chosen, how it is unique to this customer, and how it matches their needs to ensure success. Tracking delivery and progress towards measurable goals should also be the responsibility of CS, in my view, perhaps with the involvement of sales or professional services managers.
