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Strategy

Determining the strategy for your customer success team depends on many factors. The most important being:

The efficient and repeatable delivery of desired customer and company outcomes.

As SaaS businesses grow, the demands of the customer success team also evolve. We can help you understand what needs to change when, and by how much, in order for your customer success team to support corporate growth goals.

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Strategy discussions on customer success often start with a few very common questions:

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  • Who should own renewals?

  • Where should add-on sales live?

  • How should the team compensation be structured?

  • Should you charge for services?

  • What services should be provided?

  • Do all customers get the same journey (high / low / tech touch)?

  • How much, if any, of this should change over time?

  • How do partner/channel customers fit?

  • What does good look like at current and future stages of company growth?

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Our design services provide a blueprint to determine the optimal make up of your customer success team structure to support your current and future growth and customer satisfaction goals. 

Customer life-cycle management
 

Consistent customer experiences begin with a well engineered customer-life-cycle (CLC). 

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If you don't define your customer journey, it will get defined for you. Most likely not yielding the desired outcomes (as these need to be thoughtfully engineered into your process). We can help break down each step in the life-cycle, define roles and responsibilities, stage gates and KPI's, and stage motions and plays.

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Our work in this area is comprehensive, having evaluated and designed dozens of CLC processes for SaaS businesses.  That experience allows us to deliver solutions that have a real impact as we work to gain an understanding of how your customers realize and operationalize around the value you deliver. This informs what is specifically required for your business and its customers to thrive.  

Solutions by function

Need assistance in a particular area? See our offerings by department.
 

Sometimes all you need is help getting through some tactical challenges. Below are some of the most common issues we see.

Customer Success Management

  • Compensation planning

  • Team structure

  • Customer segmentation and touch level

  • Engagement model - motions, plays, customer cadence

  • Tools and templates - presentations, reports, ROI calculators, meeting structure by type

  • KPI definition and tracking

  • Renewal and expansion opportunity stages and forecasting

  • Churn analysis

  • Team ratios - Customers/CSM, ARR/CSM by cohort

  • Roles and responsibilities

  • Systems selection / integration - Call recording, CRM, Support, Project Management, Resource planning, emerging technology (AI)

Professional Services

  • Team structure

  • Project management methodologies - Agile / Waterfall

  • Services definitions

  • KPI definition, tracking, and reporting

  • Resource planning, utilization, realization

  • Deployment and engagement model design and process by customer type

  • Managed services design and business planning

  • Tools and templates - presentations, status reports, SoW templates, requirements analysis tools

  • Systems selection - Project management / onboarding, time tracking, status reporting, resource management, project scheduling

  • Consulting - domain specific

Support

  • Service level agreement analysis and development (scope)

  • Team structure

  • Support process design

  • Roles and responsibilities

  • KPI definition, tracking, and reporting

  • Customer self service

  • On-line community / forum design

  • Escalation process and root cause analysis

  • Systems selection - Ticketing, knowledge base, forums

Education and Enablement

  • New employee onboarding

  • New customer course curriculum (guides, tips and tricks, how to's)

  • On-going customer education process - new features / use case support

  • Systems selection - document management, LMS, content generation

  • Customer marketing programs for growth

Organizational development and scale

Solutions to scale your customer success operations and continue to onboard and develop talent efficiently

Provide your customer facing teams with the resources and training they need to win, now and in the future.

 

You've outlined your strategy, developed your customer life-cycle process and defined its stages and motions. Now you need to train your team and help them put what they've learned to use. We help by providing the instruction and coaching to continuously improve team skills and performance.

 

  • Training and Enablement 

    • Your methodologies / process / motions 

    • New Employee onboarding​​

    • Basic / intermediate / advanced customer success skills development​​

 

  • Coaching

    • Team call reviews - critique and feedback to make the most of customer interactions

    • 1:1 employee skills development / assessments and goal setting

    • Management development - coaching for first time leaders / CS function heads​​

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  • Fractional leadership -Interim customer success leadership / Part time oversight and management

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  • Recruiting (role profile definitions- CS, PS, TS, EDU)

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Solutions by topic

Having challenges in a specific area? Contact us for more info on solutions for common SaaS growing pains: 
 

  • Prospect to customer matriculation

  • Onboarding - Avoid delays, remove roadblocks, drive time-to-value​​

  • CSAT - NPS deployment strategies for ongoing feedback

  • Customer success transformation - Analysis and planning for the evolution of a "support" focused CSM to a "commercially" focused mindset

  • Gross / Net ARR concerns

  • Strategies to drive use in consumption based models

  • Client engagement issues

  • Change management and adoption considerations

  • New employee ramp time

Customer success consulting

customer lifecycle management

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