Don’t Risk Your Success

Mastering Customer Success Skills

Most skills and knowledge necessary to become a great customer success professional and salesperson for that matter aren’t taught in school. Great training courses, books, and other methods exist that will help elevate your customer success mastery and I recommend taking advantage of them. Yet developing customer success excellence can be a journey into the unknown.

Navigating your customer success unknowns consists of determining what is important and knowing where to find the content that will close your knowledge gap. One way is through books that enhance our ability to perform and succeed at the craft we know and love called customer success. Books that explain and teach “how” to become a successful customer success professional are often more valuable than those that don’t.

Effective customer success implementation requires mastering disciplines and methodologies like Emotional Quotient (EQ), negotiation, leadership, relationship building, critical situation handling, and so on. These skill-based talents must be learned, practiced, and then applied to tactical customer success delivery motions.

Today’s book has a relationship-oriented theme that focuses on many customer success skills. These skills will positively impact your customer success career and life. Another book that has a similar effect and impact is “Crucial Conversations.” However, the book I’m referring to is “Never Split the Difference ” by Chris Voss.

Valuing Customer Success Knowledge

It wasn’t until college, when I began paying for my education that I started to take learning seriously. Having had an apathetic approach to learning up to this point decreased my learning skills that would have served me during my college years. Maybe I was bored or distracted, but that’s another story.

During my first “real” job at Cisco Systems, a high-tech networking company, I made the decision to become a life-long learner. It wasn’t a conscious decision. I basically decided to regularly read and study non-fiction books that would boost my social and EQ skills. I read and studied other areas of self-development too, but these areas contributed the most to my long-term success.

After 30 years of constant and continuous improvement, both personal and professional, I’m reaping the rewards. Like eating and sleeping, we must make daily conscious decisions to execute on this commitment. We can only bring to our work and craft what we already have and what we will acquire. To acquire means learning more from experts who have and are willing to share their experiences and knowledge. Learning from others’ mistakes is faster and more cost effective than learning from our own mistakes. Why re-invent the wheel?

Never Split the Difference

Let’s talk about Never Split the Difference. This book is a must read and insanely helpful to customer success professionals. It creates mastery of EQ, influence, and empathy, which positions us as that trusted advisor, we work so hard to create in our relationships. To summarize, Voss shares real life examples from his experience as an FBI hostage negotiator in the first part of each chapter. In the latter part he teaches lessons, practical skills, and examples he used to work through those tense situations that will help you too.

Each skill taught is not only applicable to hostage situations, but also business and personal experiences. What makes Never Split the Difference different from other books that speak to the same topics is that when those other books’ techniques and strategies were implemented, people died because they didn’t work. The techniques and framework taught in Never Split the Difference, have been proven to work.

Like another great book, Gap Selling by Keenan focuses on problem centric selling and is another must read book for customer success professionals, only the framework is provided. This means we must apply the books’ teachings to our work, or in other words, we must practice it until it becomes who we are. Preparation and practice are important to leveraging value from the skills taught. Mastering these skills is very challenging and where the real value resides. Acquisition of these skills will place you miles ahead in your customer success career.

Often we hear customer success leaders speak of the importance in building a trusted advisor relationship or how important the client relationship is in making customer success as effective as it can be. The question then becomes, “How do we achieve that level of expertise?” Never Split the Difference teaches and solves a lot of that puzzle.

Two of the most important aspects of customer success are (1) the ability to build a great relationship and (2) the ability to sell in a way that maintains a great relationship. When done correctly the sale feels like a natural caring event, not something that creates risk or negatively impacts your partnership relationship. It’s the idea of friends help friends. Gap Selling teaches the selling process and Never Split the Difference teaches the relationship aspect.

Great sales people already have these skills, but most of us don’t and yet thousands of people enter the customer success profession every month. Most starting in customer success don’t have these necessary skills, so they must learn and practice them. The flip side to not having these skills is a poor vendor/client experience and relationship.

Hiring for Customer Success

Determining customer success expertise during an interview can be found through role playing and asking questions that demonstrate if the interviewee has mastered these two skills (problem centric selling and EQ – relationship management).

If the person doesn’t have these skills, they will need to learn them. Human resource and hiring managers will want to add this to their customer success hiring criteria. Questions like “What ARR were or are you responsible for at your last or current role?” tells a customer success professional that the interviewer isn’t an experienced customer success hiring professional and can easily yield an inferior hiring result. Why? Have you ever hired someone at work or in your personal life, like a hair stylist, yard worker, painter, doctor or any other professional only to be disappointed? They may have been experienced, but that didn’t matter, did it?

Avoid asking bad questions, requiring cognitive tests, or project work as part of your customer success hiring process. Doing so sends the wrong message and results in bad hires. It also negatively reflects on your brand and reputation.

Conclusion

What really matters regarding customer success is your ability to sell correctly, deliver client business outcomes, and build optimal client/vendor relationships. Acquiring these three skills in a very comprehensive way will lead to a great experience, company loyalty, renewals, upsells, and cross sells, which most would agree is our purpose. Renewals, upsells, and cross sells will become a natural situation rather than a “last minute strategic everyone on deck” heroic event, that in most cases will fail. It’s what you do between renewals to help your client reach their business outcomes wrapped in a great experience that solidifies your clients’ success and yours.