Category: Customer Success
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Why A Customer Account Roadmap Is Beneficial & How To Create One
The word roadmap usually conjures up thoughts of a product roadmap for people in a technology product company. For customer success managers though, the intent of a customer account roadmap, while similar, is bit more surgical than a product roadmap when it comes to defining success and leading customers to it. Think of the customer […]
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If It Doesn’t Have Customer Value First, FAHGETTABOUDIT!
No matter what role you play—product management, product marketing, sales, customer onboarding, or account management—if your starting point isn’t quantifiable customer value, fuhgeddaboudit! Nothing else matters. Period. End of story. I know firsthand how easy it is to get caught up in your own goals—corporate goals, sales targets, marketing KPIs, retention quotas. Before you know […]
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How to Facilitate a Strategic Account Planning Meeting With Customers
In its simplest form, strategic account planning is your ability to help customers define success in measurable terms, then lay out a roadmap that leads them to their definition of success. If you’re a customer success manager, there’s nothing worse than feeling like you’re in constant reaction mode with a never-ending to-do list, hence the […]
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How Customer Success Can Grow User Adoption on New Releases
If you’re looking to grow user adoption on your products, a few more tools in your arsenal beyond traditional release announcements and in-product reminders will help your cause. Put yourself in the shoes of your users. They’re short-handed, carrying heavier workloads, and they’re overwhelmed with the amount of information coming at them from every direction, […]
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Onboarding Customers – How To Use Job Tasks For Superior Results
When you’re onboarding customers, the end game is to improve the job performance of your users in ways that have measurable value to their organization. If that goal sounds familiar, there’s a good reason. It’s the exact same goal product managers aim for when they’re building new features and products. Onboarding Customers With a New […]
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How to Set Customer Success Managers Up To Play Offense
In most B2B organizations, it’s more the exception than the rule that customer success managers inherit accounts where they’re in a position to play offense because the customer is thrilled with your products. Let’s dream for just a minute. It Starts With Product Management Product management consistently does discovery at a level that makes them […]
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Integrating Business Processes vs. Products
Let’s start this discussion of integrating business processes vs. products with the spotlight on pre-sales, sales, and customer on-boarding since they bear the brunt of the ripple effect. Here’s the scenario. You’re in the throes of the sales cycle and it’s product demo time. In addition to functionality, you’re highlighting the fact that all your […]
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Bridging the Gap – Strategic vs Tactical Customer Discovery
Market and customer discovery is the single most foundational skill for success in product management and product marketing. There are two things to consider when it comes to being more strategic in your discovery. One of them is obvious and the other is rarely if ever discussed. Let’s start with the obvious one, understanding what’s […]
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Customer Success – How To Build Relationships With Customer Executives
As the customer success manager (CSM) role evolves into more of a strategic customer leadership role versus a tactical reactionary role, it’s critical to build relationships with customer executives, and in most cases, it’s not as difficult as you think. Kudos if you’re already there. Relationships with customer executives aren’t only critical to customer success […]
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10 Things That Would Happen if All Customer-Facing Disciplines Were Aligned to a Common View of the Customer
Here are 10 things that would happen if product management, product marketing, sales and customer success all had a common view of your target customers. Is there more to it than this? Sure, broader market research, competitive landscape, emerging technologies, etc., but this how you build your organization’s core strength for the long haul. Do […]