Turning the CSM Discipline Into a Competitive Strategy

Strategy is often defined as “planning in a hostile environment.” 

And now that customer success management is coming into its own as the fully thought out, nuanced marketing discipline of CSM, the SaaS (Software as a Service) and other subscription-based companies that pretty much invented CSM face an even bigger challenge: How to employ the discipline strategically. That is, CSM practitioners must figure out how to gain advantage over their competitors, most of whom are also using the CSM discipline.

Once every subscription company has access to a genuinely effective CSM capability, complete with tracking and usage data, high-touch and low-touch automation tools, pre-configured campaigns, and so forth, the competitive advantage will go to those companies that:

1. Are the most expert at CSM practice, with the fewest errors, omissions, or other frictions; and
2. Are able to visualize and achieve the next level of CSM more quickly and effectively.

These are two different strategies, but they must both be pursued by any CSM practitioner wanting to remain competitive.

The first strategy is an absolutely critical competitive requirement for the current success of any subscription-based firm. No company can afford not to invest wisely in practicing the discipline effectively, which means hiring smart, professional people and making the most productive use of the tools and data available.

With any newly established business practice, such as Customer Success Management, we should always expect to see a rapidly growing body of knowledge, as more and more experience is gained by everyone. And this, in fact, is exactly what we’re seeing today around the CSM discipline, with a variety of blog sites, newsletters, and discussion groups (including The Customer Success Forum on LinkedIn) all contributing to a robust examination of the advantages, costs and various experience records of current CSM practititioners.

But this also means that the actual pace of learning, among CSM competitors, will vary considerably. So a smart CEO will ensure that all company CSM staff are constantly encouraged to learn more, practice more, and develop their skills even further, rather than resting on their accomplishments or simply defending their existing practices. CSM staff ought to be attending conferences and participating in online discussion forums, in order to learn what works and what doesn’t work, in different business categories, for different types of customers, and with different sorts of competitive environments or special circumstances.

Don’t be bashful, in other words, about allocating a substantial part of your time, literally every day, to sifting through this expanding body of knowledge in order to glean the most important and interesting learnings from others.

And an important yet often overlooked aspect of this kind of rapid learning is to study CSM failures and missteps.

Innovative progress inevitably happens by trial and error; if you don’t welcome errors then don’t expect progress.

CSM staff need to be straightforward about studying mistakes made, particularly their own. Every mistake presents an opportunity to improve, if you are prepared to learn from it. Because experiments and tests are the hallmarks of true, constant innovation, you need a business culture that welcomes what Apple calls “wise failures.” And for all its enormous successes, remember that Apple has also failed quite often. (Anyone remember the Lisa computer, for instance? Or the eWorld online community?)

Of the two competitive strategies I identified above, the first is the most immediately important. If you aren’t already pretty much of an expert at CSM practice, then don’t bother with the second competitive strategy, getting to the “next level” in the CSM discipline.

However, it isn’t difficult to imagine what the next level of CSM might look like from where we sit today, and in my next post I’ll discuss what this level might involve.