Spring to Success!

It was a beautiful day in Toronto. I was held up till 10:30 am est on a customer meeting and had to drive downtown to attend this at 11:30 am.

Made it a few mins late, and it was surprising to see a full house on a Thursday at noon.

Networked with a few while waiting to get a seat and in a few minutes, Sarah (Garriock) Maru?i? kick-started with a warm welcome and introduced us to our wonderful speakers, Pam Martin , and Anthony D'Auria .

In just a few minutes, I realized this meetup by Gainsight will help me take home a lot of learnings and contribute to the community with what I learned from my experience.

After a 60 min session and skimming through my notes from the meetup,

my 5 key takeaways and 2 cents on each of them,

• It's very important to have all your CSMs at the same level all the time as the company grows, as there are new product releases, as your customer base grows, and as they are changes to the processes. In my experience, the most effective way to achieve this is by creating,

Playbooks that are both CSM-friendly and scalable.        

By developing playbooks, CS teams can establish clear processes that outline specific actions, next steps, and personnel involved at each stage.

• Time to value or Time to first value are key metrics to measure. While that's great, how does one measure this? How do we realize, recognize and confirm with the customer about this? My answer is, to celebrate.

To celebrate the time to first value it as a moment by meeting 
your customer and communicating about it.        

When we capture it as a type of meeting, it would be easy to measure on what's the average time to value or the first time to value across multiple customers, and segments and then accordingly work on improvising.

• This one is interesting, the best, and highly relevant in today's market. As we all know how every customer we work with is trying to cut down on the no. of tech products/tools/platforms they are using, it becomes very important to position more than one business value outcome, to propose more outcomes to different stakeholder groups (wider and deeper), all of it leading to building more than one champion. How do we build multiple champions at one customer company?

Multi-threaded conversations. Start by connecting with multiple people
within a customer company. The most effective way to reach different
people with same/different needs and build a strong network of advocates.        

• While it's important to meet and discuss things on a regular basis with your champions, it might not effective enough for a CSM to win a renewal or close a new up-sell deal.

It's important for CSMs to connect with the right people at the right time for the right conversations.

Understanding your customer's org chart with definitions on who is the,
Economic Buyer, Champion, Supporter, Detractor, and the 
relationship between each of these stakeholders is the key for CSMs to
have the right people at the right time for the right conversations.        

• Lastly, I keep hearing this and have trained my team members on this topic. "CSMs are shy to ask questions", "CSMs are not fierce enough to ask a few questions about the customer's xyz" etc., And I totally agree with this from my experience and this primarily can be solved using,

A framework. Enable them with a tool to discover about their customer,
with a bunch of different topics. Over a course of time, measure their
discovery and track it. Coach CSMs on how to phrase their questions.
Let CSMs share their stories with each other on how they discovered.        

And secondly, by changing the mindset. I did a post on this a few days ago.

In summary, CSMs with,

1. A scalable and easy to follow, Playbook
2. A way to track their customer meetings
3. A way to ensure their conversations are multi-threaded
4. A way to learn who are the right people who need to be in the right meeting
5. A framework for continuous discovery with confidence

can make them successful and their customers more successful.