Three Customer Success Strategies We Don't Talk About Enough

The discipline of customer success management is a natural outgrowth of the customer-oriented revolution that has swept business over the last couple of decades, as information technology has made customer centricity increasingly possible. In the consumer space, we have CRM systems, one-to-one marketing programs, and the customer experience management discipline, all designed to make customers more loyal and valuable to a business by carefully meeting individual customer needs.

In the B2B space, customer success management serves the same purpose. Ensuring your customer’s own business success has become a virtual requirement to run a SaaS business or a subscription-based operation, but the discipline can be applied to any company that sells to business customers.

There are many tactics and nuances in this task, and there is also a robust customer-success discussion group on LinkedIn with nearly 20,000 members, the Customer Success Forum. I was recently asked what my own suggestion would be for the top three strategies a customer success professional should pursue.

And while I’m not sure I would classify what follows as the “top” strategies, because that would depend on where you are in the evolution of your own customer success initiative, nevertheless here are three important strategies that every customer success manager should be aware of: 

Strategy 1: Don’t try to squeeze the customer success function into the customer service arm of your business.

If you’re just starting out on the customer success journey, this is an extremely important idea to keep in mind, because customer success is proactive, while customer service is reactive.

Providing good, professional customer service should of course always be a key operating objective for your company, and good service is a prerequisite for creating a satisfied and successful customer. But the talents and skills required to provide customer service and remove friction from the customer experience are quite different from those required to sell more product to customers, which is fundamentally what customer success management is all about. The objective of a customer success function is not just to preserve, but to increase the value of the business customers you are serving, by making them more successful with your product.

Therefore, rather than the problem-solving and execution skills required for eliminating friction in the CX, a customer success manager must combine marketing imagination with deeper insights into the nature of a customer’s business, in order to coach the customer in how to achieve even more profit.

Strategy 2: Don’t confuse customer satisfaction with customer success. They are completely different.

Guy Nirpaz, CEO of Totango, pointed this important strategy out to me during a meeting in his office a few weeks ago. Guy said one of the key differences between selling in B2B as opposed to B2C is that, in the B2B world, success always trumps satisfaction. To illustrate the point more persuasively, he drew a matrix, as shown below, with the level of customer satisfaction along the vertical axis and the level of customer success on the horizontal axis. And then he said we all would prefer to be in the upper right quadrant, with high customer satisfaction as well as high business success. And none of us would want to be in the lower left, with low satisfaction and low success. 

But which quadrant would be preferred if the upper right were not possible? Would a company be happier with high customer satisfaction but low business success? Or with low customer satisfaction but high business success?

If you have to think for even a second about the right answer to this, then you’ve never worked in any business I’ve worked in. The objective in every case will be high business success. Success always trumps satisfaction in the B2B space.

And the fact that success is more important than satisfaction to a business customer lays the groundwork for Strategy 3:

Strategy 3: A certain level of tension and stress in the customer relationship is good.

A long time ago I worked for the highly creative ad agency Chiat/Day (now part of TBWA). Our account managers had a kind of mantra about whether the creative ideas being presented were good enough or not. We used to say “No idea is really creative enough unless you see the blood drain from the client’s face.” And our willingness at Chiat/Day to push clients to the absolute limit is what made our clients’ advertising so successful – from Apple Computer’s launch of the Macintosh with the famous “1984” commercial to Taco Bell’s Chihuahua spokesman.

One of the most difficult but potentially rewarding tasks a customer success manager has is to challenge the client with new thinking, and to bring them new ideas that might upset the existing way of doing things to make it possible for the customer to achieve more success.

Often a business customer will be so focused on the way they’ve always done business that they’ll have difficulty imagining new opportunities. So the expertise that a customer success manager brings to the table with respect to the product’s capabilities is a valuable body of knowledge. 

Innovation and change are fundamentally subversive activities in any existing organization, and challenging the status quo will often lead to some dissatisfaction, if not outright annoyance, on your client’s part. But posing an unwelcome challenge to the status quo is sometimes the best way to improve your client’s success.

So your job, if you’re a customer success manager, isn’t to make friends with your client, and not even necessarily to “satisfy” them. Your primary jog is to push your client, challenge them, and get them to think, in order to make them more successful.

Stress comes with the job when it’s well done. You should welcome it. 

Photo: CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP/Getty Images