Scaling Success in CS Teams

In the ever-competing world of SaaS, the goals and objectives for sales and customer success teams have evolved. For decades sales teams have been the heroes in charge of driving revenue while customer success or account management has been seen as the lesser equal providing a supporting role aimed at managing and delivering against the contract.

?What we see now is the chief goal of the sales team is to pull in new contracts. Filling the Success hopper with accounts to grow and expand. CS teams are now, not only the critical element to growth they are under threat to provide what is needed. There are some key observations I would like to focus on. The success of the model relies heavily on;

1. ? ? Competence of Customer Success team. The competence of the customer success team and their ability to build success plans that can grow the value of the product and contract. All successful customer success teams are focused on the data to help drive this. And whilst learning always forms an element of the success plan, my observation is that it is rarely more than an on-boarding programme or a bullet point. The impact very often means incompetent customers relying heavily on customer success managers to provide basic information or even worse customers not utilising functionality that could be helping them

2. ? ? Scaling Customer Success. Customer Success talent is not only in short supply the salaries for customer success are sky rocketing. How realistic is it that CS teams can continue to grow at current rates and what is the impact if they can’t? Understanding how the role needs to be supported and the relationship it has with other functions such as, sales, product, support is key to enabling customer success managers not becoming overwhelmed with tactical requests

?3. Better learning for growth. If account growth is going to be maximised learning has to form a far more strategic part of the success plan. When it is, the opportunity exists to drive continuous improvement within the customer and develop the skills and knowledge to ensure they are optimising the products. Done well you are not only enabling your customers to want to do more with your product but through certifications you are building greater attachment and brand loyalty. In many organisations the objectives for developing competence within customers sits with an L&D team and does not form part of the KPI's for customer success. By aligning this gives the opportunity for the L&D plan to be integrated into the success plan.

?4. Integrating learning into the process. Learning technology has now reached a point where learning can be integrated into the activities within products to ensure knowledge sharing and learning is initiated at the point of need. Learning experiences are now able to support not one linear approach to learning but build a plethora of interactions both digital, virtual and physical to ensure learning stretches way beyond onboarding and is continuous. There is an opportunity by enhancing the way in which learning and skills are supported the whole customer experience can be elevated. How we feel about a vendor and how proactive they are outside of chasing for a PO often determines how relationships develop and therefore LTV.

5. Enabling customers to retain CS teams. The war on talent is predicted to get even tougher in 2022. It is critical that we are creating environments that support and care about the needs of employees so that they can be successful, enjoy what they are doing and develop. A critical part of this is not using CS managers in a tactical way as the default service support agent that is reacting to red flags but one that can lead clients using data insights to grow value and opportunity. And in doing so in is natural that customers will be more encouraged to invest into a relationship that is demonstrating its value. And indeed the more the more the more the customer invests the more opportunities there are to engage more deeply in strategy and growth around the products.

6. Enabled sales teams. Building success relies heavily on the sales process aligning seamlessly with 1) Customer expectations and 2) Service and and customer success teams. A critical component of this is often the knowledge within the sales team to ensure what is being proposed is deliverable and deliverable within the time frames needed. The better the understanding sales have of the products will determine how efficiently this can be managed. By developing a learning strategy across each of the teams it is easy to ensure not only a common understanding and language.

7. Agility to grow CS Team. With so much pressure to grow customer success teams, having a skills based approach internally provides a better opportunity to build adaptive learning pathways for those in sales roles or sales support roles to gravitate into customer success manager roles. Having clarity at an individual level on how they can evolve is key. This not only provides a healthy pool of prospective talent is breaks down silo's allows the business to create a broader community of knowledge that is learning from each other and respectful of the roles they play.

?This is a Win Win so why isn’t it happening at scale and what are the changes needed to address?

?Download our white paper here to learn more about how learning strategies can enable customer success teams to build greater attachment and happier customers

Customer Success: Ultimate Guide to Lifelong Clients Through Learning (riseup.ai)