On B2B Customer Success - Part I

Moving Beyond NPS and implementing a comprehensive approach to Customer Success

The divide between Sales and Customer Success is as well-known as the one between Sales and Marketing.

In the Bold & Sharp Sales & Marketing Index, customer experience is assessed in the "Alignment" subsection of the "Excel" category within the Growth Engine cluster. This indicates that Customer Success is a crucial part of the activities and processes organizations must "Excel" in to create and retain value.

It emphasizes the importance of understanding that customer experience begins with the first sales touchpoint. It then continues seamlessly through smooth collaboration between the Sales and Customer Success departments and eventually translate into metrics that go far beyond NPS.

Let's review the components required to shift from customer basic health measurement to a total customer success experience.

1.? Customer experience is real :

This requires meeting the following criteria.

It all starts with sales :

A simple way to create customer experience is to first align your sales process with how your buyers purchase, not how you sell or wish to sell. Value must be part of every milestone.

Great customer experience requires insight sharing from the first customer touch point to closing. Insights can be based on storytelling and knowledge in selling to specific verticals or stakeholders. They can also be surprising, provocative or challenging and introduce frame breaking ideas on customer pain, buying process or purchase criteria.

You may have? no insight available, either created or maintained, to support your sales team in making themselves different. In that case, you must ensure you have reps skilled enough to instinctively teach customer for differentiation and tailor their perspective to various business situations..

Customer value is measured and delivered?:

Let's acknowledge that if your sales experience is great but you fail to keep your promises, customer experience is just terrible. And so will be your NPS. On the other hand, if you receive a fair score from customer surveys and yet still experience churn, you're not any better off.

Delivering value is a two-way conversation that doesn’t end with closing deals. It starts precisely on implementation day one and requires ongoing engagement until value is measured and corrective actions are taken when needed.

Customer satisfaction relying solely on NPS is not enough. Value must be monitored by engaging with the right people (Power), and supported by irrefutable evidence, such as executive engagement or a willingness to expand.?

2.? Keep it smooth across the board :

?In the Bold & Sharp Sales & Marketing Index, customer success is also part of the "Removing frictions and fostering collaboration" cluster. What are the implications ?

Aging sales and customer success :

Aligned and almost integrated. The Customer success team must be involved in sales basic activities. They attend forecast sessions that matter, at least current quarter opening and closing sessions. Major business opportunities are shared, and customer success managers are welcome to chime in. They are actively involved in opportunity war rooms, not just as informed observers, but as active participants driving actions.

The Customer success team must be also involved in strategic activities such as business planning and account reviews. The first step is to ensure that customer success managers' territories align with the sales team's territory patches. While we recognize that resource constraints may arise, skills, seniority, and accounts complexity should ideally guide account allocation. A solid revenue team cannot be built if various resources with varying competencies are involved in a sales executive's territory or account reviews.

Seek out strong partnerships: pairs of individuals who work as One Team and can challenge each other on expansion or retention discussions. Align systems to support and drive the right behaviors. CSMs should be incentivized to monitor project health, ensure organizational alignment, assess customer commitment, access key decision-makers, and check that value is being delivered. Bonuses, if any, should be granted for irrefutable contributions to revenue generation.

Responsibilities and tasks are clearly defined :

Theoretically, job descriptions are a good starting point to define the mission, roles, and responsibilities between sales and customer success organizations. There should be no overlap. This is where theory meets the reality of human nature, egos, and eventually, silos.

Unless you are a startup and your sales reps are incentivized to focus solely on new business, regardless of what happens after closing a deal, let’s make it clear: the bigger you sell the more sales should ultimately be responsible and accountable for revenue and customer health. This includes internal -cross-functional- and external - with customers -communication. So, think about them as orchestrators, and hire them accordingly.

If silos and egos are still hurting your business, convene both organizations to redefine roles and responsibilities by account tiers. Remain flexible. Specifically for strategic accounts, ensure that the account plan clarifies the "what" and the "who”. This is where decisions should be jointly made to go beyond the call of duty. Other business imperatives also influence specific decisions on sales and customer success respective roles. This is particularly true for strategic upselling or cross-selling opportunities where the objective is to sell big, not to stick to a job description or to a RACI matrix.

Customers or sales roadmap to success ?

Actions and priorities should be focused on delivering maximum retention through value realization and acknowledgment.

CSMs may own the post-sales customer journey if the sales team is primarily focused on fast growth and new business. However, the more mature the? organization, the more sales own the entire revenue journey. CSMs’ goals and priorities become a subpart of the sales strategy, namely on Tier 1 accounts, and should be validated as such by the sales organization.

Therefore, account scoring, targeting and planning should be driven by the sales team. CSMs attention and efforts on the Value delivered, the creation of a shared Vision of the solution, and engagement with Power should be a continuation of the sales efforts by other means. It may generate frictions and require them to raise their game: so, what are you waiting for to train them to value selling and negotiation fundamentals?

3.? Customers become advocates:??????

Customer action tells the true story :

Churn may be your leading indicator and may be marginal. Outstanding customer success organizations go far beyond this.

Customer success is not just about retention numbers. It’s about creating a sense of belonging among customers so that they are proud to share they belong to the community you have built. Customer satisfaction should therefore be measured against additional metrics and actions.

Metrics:

• Customer gross lifetime value: this is calculated as the Average Order Amount × Average Purchases per Year × Average Retention Time in Years.
• Customer net lifetime ?value: This is CLV minus the costs of acquisition, retention, and those associated with future growth.

Actions:

• Leads passed on by customers: these are true indicators of customer sentiment and their sense of belonging.
• Customer testimonials : customers testify through press releases,? business cases or evangelize for you on social medias.

The combination of these metrics and actions define your overall health and what customer success should truly represent. This is what we call Customer Lifetime Value in Real Life. We will explore the details of customer success and customer health measurement in our next article.

Customers have a seat at your table :

Since we now agree that customer health goes far beyond NPS, we can take it one step further. Business metrics matter but this is no longer the point here. The goal is to measure the extent to which your customers belong to your corporate family and how you reciprocate. The below questions may help you figure out whether Customer Success is truly hardwired in your organization DNA:

• What will become of the good ideas shared in you customer advocacy board? Are you ready to admit you may have been wrong and change your product roadmap or strategy accordingly?
• When customers adopt your new products and share data that help you enhance or adjust your offering, what do they get in return?

The customer success team's job is not to make PowerPoint presentations on product usage or keep customers happy. NPS, namely when granted by low or mid-level stakeholders, does not tell the full story. Customer success requires aligning Sales and Customer Success teams, fostering seamless collaboration, and prioritizing value delivery from the first interaction to post-implementation.

In Part 2 of Customer Success, we will deep dive in customer success measurement and share unconventional ways to monitor it. Stay tuned!

Looking for creative ways to drive your sales and operational performance?

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