Opening Up the Black Box of College Football O-Line Recruiting

My son Adam is about to head off to College, and just finished the college football recruiting process. He’s a 6′ 3.5″, 283-pound offensive lineman, was the team captain, earned first-team all-conference, first-team all-state awards, and helped lead his team to a state championship. Local recruiting reporter Andrew Nemec (Sports Illustrated, ESPN-affiliate 1080 The FAN) called their offensive line “the best group I’ve seen in a decade or so” and credited them as the elite group that fueled the title run. On paper, that resume should open doors. In reality, we learned a lot about the recruiting process.

We went into this process knowing almost nothing other than the typical stuff you hear on the internet. If you’re a parent or player about to go through this, I hope our experience saves you time, money, and frustration.

What We Were Told Going In

The conventional wisdom was pretty straightforward:

  1. Make sure your high school coach is advocating for you.
  2. Get good game film on Twitter/X and reach out to college coaches.
  3. Keep your grades up.
  4. Attend a few camps at schools you’re interested in.

Sounds reasonable. Logical even. Here’s what we learned.

Your High School Coach Is a Reference, Not a Recruiter

I want to start by saying we loved our high school coaching staff. They were incredible with Adam and poured everything into the program. But going in, I had expectations about their role in the recruiting process that, looking back, weren’t fair or realistic.

I thought Adam’s high school coach would be a major driver in getting him looks. The reality? Your coach is a reference check. College coaches will call them to ask about your kid’s character, work ethic, and coachability, and you absolutely want that conversation to go well.

But if you’re counting on your coach to actively get your kid an offer, you’re setting expectations that aren’t part of their job. Most high school coaches have a full-time job, whether that’s teaching at the school or working somewhere else in the community. Coaching isn’t what pays their bills. It’s a passion, and they pour themselves into it, but at the end of the day, their priority is winning high school games with the team they have. Helping with recruiting is them going above and beyond, and it’s frankly not their job.

Advocate for Yourself Because Nobody Else Will

This was one of the bigger lessons we learned. Adam had multiple college coaches reach out on Twitter saying they were visiting his school. Adam assumed his coaching staff and administration would loop him in. This didn’t always happen. He’d find out after the fact that a college coach had come, visited with other teammates, and left, and he wasn’t pulled out of class to meet them.

This happened twice. The first time a D1 FCS school visited, they told Adam they were looking forward to meeting him, yet Adam wasn’t pulled out. We assumed the college coach had just changed their mind, maybe they lost interest, maybe the visit fell through. We chalked it up to the process. The second time, Adam found out when a different college coach actually DM’d him afterward, asking where he was, and why he didn’t visit him. The coach had asked for him, but wires got crossed somewhere. Looking back, we’re confident the first time was a similar miscommunication. That’s a D1 FCS opportunity that slipped through the cracks, not because anyone had bad intentions, but because the process has a lot of moving parts and your kid isn’t anyone else’s top priority. 

The lesson: micromanage this process. If a college coach tells you they’re visiting your school, tell your administration and coaching staff directly. Say the words: “Coach [Name] from [University] is expecting to see me. When should I leave class?” Don’t assume the logistics will take care of themselves—everyone involved has a hundred other things on their plate, and your kid’s recruiting visit may not be top of mind for anyone but you.

Grades: Important, But Let’s Be Honest

Everyone talks about the importance of grades, and yes, they matter. But let’s be realistic about how much.

At the D1 level, there are certain academic schools that will absolutely filter you out with bad grades. But there are also plenty of stellar athletes across D1 who are barely passing. So while grades are talked about constantly in the recruiting process by all sides, in practice they feel like more of an afterthought for most programs at the top level. 

Where grades actually become a strategic advantage is at the D2 level and below. Good grades can unlock academic financial aid that helps cover costs beyond tuition, which leads to maybe the most important thing we learned. Adam is actually getting some great academic assistance because of his grades, and that’s making a real financial difference.

But here’s the other side of it: Adam trains with a D1/Pro-level player who was open about the fact that grades weren’t a significant factor in his recruitment (he laughed at how poor his GPA was). At that level of athleticism, the academic piece becomes less of a gatekeeper. So grades are one of those things where the advice is technically correct, but the reality is more nuanced. If you’re an elite-level athlete, programs will find a way to make it work. If you’re not, good grades become a financial tool more than a recruiting tool.

Full Ride vs. Scholarship: Know the Difference

This was a wake-up call. In D1, when you hear “full ride,” that means everything—tuition, room, board, fees, the whole package.

At every other level, a “scholarship” typically covers tuition only. Room and board and fees? That’s on you. And here’s the thing: room, board, and fees are often the most expensive part of attending college. So when a school offers your kid a “scholarship,” make sure you understand exactly what that covers before you start celebrating.

Twitter/X: Do It, But Manage Your Expectations

Yes, post your film on Twitter. Yes, reach out to coaches. But understand the reality of what’s happening on the other end.

Most coaches at bigger programs have their DMs blocked from people they don’t follow. A lot of schools hire grad assistants to review incoming film. These people are sifting through thousands of submissions and often don’t have a deep understanding of every position. So what are the odds your kid gets skipped even with great film? Extraordinarily high.

One D3 coach told us directly: “If I’m slow to respond, it’s because I have 10,000 DMs from 8th graders asking me to review their film.”

So post your film. Make it available. But don’t make it your primary strategy for generating interest.

That said, once a school became interested in Adam, whether through a camp, a network connection, or a referral, the conversations almost always happened on Twitter/X. It became the primary means of communication between Adam and college coaches. So the platform absolutely matters, just not in the way we originally expected. Outbound contact such as cold DMs to coaches, rarely, if ever, worked. But inbound interest? That all flowed through Twitter/X. Make sure your kid’s profile, film, and contact info are polished and easy to find, because when a coach does come looking, that’s where they’ll go.

Your Inner Circle: Club Coaches and Personal Connections Were Our Secret Weapon

This surprised us. The best advocates Adam had weren’t his high school coaches or Twitter outreach—they were the people who knew him personally and had connections into the college coaching world.

The middle school coach. Adam had a middle school coach who stayed in touch with his college football buddies, many of whom are now coaches at local D3 schools. Through this one connection, Adam got his first offer, along with several others. Those first offers were the domino that changed everything. They got Adam added to the “watch list” at camps, because some of those D3 coaches were working the camps. And being on the watch list is what ultimately led to Western Oregon. Without that middle school coach making those initial calls, the entire trajectory is different.

Club coaches. Adam regularly attended two club programs, and both of them went to bat for him. They leveraged their networks to backchannel with college programs, find out where Adam stood with a school, and actively advocated on his behalf. They did this for other kids too. These coaches also frequently help out at college camps, which means they can make sure your kid actually gets looked at when it matters.

If your kid isn’t involved in a quality club program, seriously consider it. And don’t underestimate the power of staying connected with coaches from every level, even middle school! You never know whose phone call opens the first door.

Camps: More Important Than We Thought (With a Huge Caveat)

We originally thought camps were a nice-to-have. They’re actually critical. But here’s what nobody tells you upfront: there’s a pecking order, and if you’re not on the right side of it, you might as well stay home.

When you register for a camp, the college coaches already have a list of kids they want to evaluate. Those kids get put in one group. Everyone else gets put in another group—usually identified by different colored armbands or some other marker. That second group? Largely ignored.

Learning this the hard way was extremely discouraging. College coaches have limited time and they’re focused on their priority targets. If you’re not on their watch list, it’s very difficult to get meaningful evaluation time.

The takeaway: Before committing to a camp, do everything you can to get on a school’s radar that is attending that camp first. Use your club coaches, your network, anyone who can get you on the preferred list. Otherwise, you may not get the evaluation you’re hoping for.

Potential vs. Performance (i.e. the “stats”) : The Hardest Pill to Swallow

Indiana head coach Curt Cignetti has talked openly about this—his famous mantra is “production over potential.” He built a national championship team around it. But here’s the thing: Cignetti is the exception. Almost everyone else in college football recruits on potential over performance. And potential, at the offensive line position, starts with measurables—especially at the D1 level.

Adam is first-team all-conference. First-team all-state. State champion. Part of an offensive line that a respected recruiting reporter called the best he’d seen in a decade. Zero D1 offers. Meanwhile, kids in the same state who didn’t receive those honors have D1 offers. The key difference? Adam is 6’3.5″ with shorter arms. Those other kids are 6’5″ and above.

Here’s how recruiting actually works: it’s a numbers game, just like hiring in business. HR filters out candidates based on resume keywords. College coaches filter out linemen based on measurables. If you’re not over 6’4″ with a sufficient wingspan, it’s really hard to get a look. Height, arm length, and hand size are the filters before anyone even watches your film.

How did we come by the 6’4” cutoff? We observed it being used in a D1 camp to separate groups for evaluations, as well as several college visits. We could be wrong, but this was our observation.

Regardless, if your kid doesn’t fit the physical profile, understand that the path is going to be harder—regardless of how well they actually play. 

College Visits: Ask the Hard Questions Before You Go

One of the things we learned is that colleges do “courtesy” invites. These are invites extended to high school players that the program has little to no actual interest in recruiting. Think of it as community outreach, as it’s good for the school’s brand, and for establishing good rapport with regional high schools. And just like at camps, you’ll be sorted into groups when you arrive, usually with an armband or similar marker so coaches know who to focus on and who to politely acknowledge. We didn’t know any of this going into these visits.

University of Idaho. Our oldest daughter went to Idaho, so there was a personal connection. We signed up through their prospect visit form, hoping to get a legitimate evaluation. The kickoff session was very well run, but this is where we learned that film screening is handled by recruiting staff, and not by the position coaches. So even though we were there, it was obvious no coaches evaluated Adam. These programs receive thousands of submissions, and the people doing the first pass aren’t always in a position to deeply evaluate the nuances of every position. This is the same dynamic as the Twitter DMs—great film can still get lost in the shuffle.

It became clear pretty quickly that we were in the courtesy group. 

Here’s the kicker. While we were in the stands watching the game, some fans asked Adam where he went to high school. When he told them, they lit up: “Oh man, we have some amazing players from there. Do you guys know [Player A] and [Player B]? Couldn’t believe how ready they were to play college ball.” Former teammates. Playing at Idaho. Thriving.

You know what we didn’t do that I wish we had? Reached out to those guys beforehand. Asked them about life at Idaho. Asked them to put in a word with the offensive line coach. A direct referral from a current player to the position coach could have completely changed how that visit went. Instead, we went through the front door and missed an opportunity to make a real impression. The backdoor was right there and we didn’t use it. Worst case scenario if we had, would be to receive feedback like, “I looked at him, but don’t see it due to x,y or z.”

Washington State. Same lesson, different angle. Adam was invited to visit WSU. It seemed like real interest as they asked us to put together a film of specific drills, which took a few hours to produce. We drove there, spent the night, and showed up the next day only to be placed in the courtesy group. We were hoping to leave with some serious interest or maybe even a PWO offer. Instead, it was a nice tour.

In hindsight, we should have been direct before the visit: “We’re extremely interested in WSU, but traveling there is a real cost for us. Are you inviting us because you have a legitimate interest, or is this an open invite?” Coaches across the board are actually great at being honest about this, but only if you ask. We didn’t.

Great father-son bonding time, but an expensive lesson in asking the right questions upfront.

What to ask when you’re there. When you do visit, ask the tough questions. Don’t be shy as coaches respect directness and they’d rather have an honest conversation than waste anyone’s time. Ask things like: Where am I on your recruiting board? How deep are you at my position? How do you see me fitting into the program and contributing? What should I be focusing on to make myself more ready to play here?

If your goal is ultimately D1 and you’re talking to D2 or D3 programs, ask them about their philosophy on the transfer portal and supporting players who want to move up a level. Every coach we talked to had their own take on it, but they were all very aware of the new landscape and were open about how they support that process. Western Oregon actually bragged about the number of kids from their conference who transferred to D1 programs. That tells you something about the culture and the development. The coaches who are transparent about this are the ones who actually care about your kid’s long-term path, not just filling a roster spot.

Don’t Sleep on D2 and D3 Programs

I want to take a moment on this because it’s important. We were blown away by the quality and camaraderie of the D2 and D3 programs we visited. The coaches genuinely cared about us. They wanted Adam. They were vocal about how he would fit into their program and where he would play. There was a warmth and personal investment that stood out. I will forever be grateful for the time and attention these schools spent with Adam and I.

So many kids go into this process with a “D1 or bust” mentality, and I get it as D1 is the dream. That being said, I’d encourage every family to look favorably at D2 and D3 programs. College is about more than football. These programs often offer a tighter-knit community, more personal attention from coaches, and a college experience where your kid is valued as a whole person, and not just a set of measurables. And with the transfer portal, there are multiple examples where a strong D2 or D3 program can absolutely be a launching pad to D1.

What Actually Works: Leverage Your Network

If I had to boil this entire post down to one sentence, it would be this: your network is your recruiting strategy.

I’ve already covered the middle school coach and club coaches above as they were Adam’s most impactful advocates by far. But there were other network connections that mattered as well.

High school teammates already playing at the college level. A former teammate playing at Central Washington told the offensive line coach he had to look at Adam. I’m pretty sure that’s what put Adam on the radar there. I wish we had leaned into this approach more and earlier in the process.

The common thread across all of it: every meaningful opportunity Adam had was from someone who picked up the phone on his behalf. Not a Twitter DM. Not a form submission. A real person vouching for him to another real person.

Timeline: When Does This Actually Start?

You’ll hear that junior year film is everything, and that you need strong junior accolades to create momentum and land top-tier offers. There’s truth to that, and Adam didn’t have a standout junior film, which made the process harder.

But here’s the counter: one of Adam’s teammates got a full-ride offer to a top-5 D1 program having not played his junior year at all, and didn’t even earn the starting spot until halfway through his senior season. So while junior film helps, it’s not the only path.

Unless you’re an elite D1 prospect who signs early, the real pressure starts in December of senior year. Before that, enjoy the college game day visits in the fall as they’re genuinely fun and a great way to get a feel for different programs. But once December hits, the urgency ramps up. Signing day is coming, rosters are filling, and the window starts closing. Just be ready for that shift.

Where Adam Landed and What it all Comes Back to

Adam is going to Western Oregon. The interest started the summer before his senior year, after he performed well at a regional camp that happened to be hosted there. Here’s the thing, he was only in the preferred group at that camp because a D3 coach had added him as an “interest.” That D3 connection got him into the right group, he performed, and Western Oregon noticed.

No Twitter DM made that happen. No high school coach made that call. It was a network connection that got him in the right group, a camp that gave him the stage, and his performance that closed the deal. Every single lesson we learned the hard way is right there in how it actually played out.

What I thought mattered most going in:

  • Get good grades
  • Have your high school coach advocate for you
  • Post film on Twitter and reach out to coaches

What I found actually moves the needle:

  • Leverage your network: club coaches, old coaches (even from middle school), high school teammates already playing in college. This is the single biggest thing. Adam’s first offers, his camp watch list placement, and ultimately his landing spot at Western Oregon all came through personal connections.
  • Yes, post film on Twitter so it’s there when coaches look—but don’t rely on it as your primary outbound strategy. It’s where the conversations happen once a school is interested, not how you generate the interest.
  • Camps are more important than I expected, but only if you’re on the preferred watch list. If you’re in the courtesy group, you’re unlikely to get the evaluation you’re hoping for.
  • Good grades help you get academic aid at D2/D3 programs, which can make a meaningful difference in the total cost. Think of it as creating a better “all-in” offer.
  • Ask the direct, uncomfortable questions before investing time and money in visits.
  • Understand that measurables almost always matter more than performance, especially at the D1 level, and plan your strategy accordingly.
  • Micromanage the process at your high school. Don’t assume the logistics will be handled for you as miscommunications happen, and opportunities can slip through the cracks.

The recruiting process is a grind. It’s emotional, it’s expensive, and it’s full of lessons you can only learn by going through it. But if you take one thing from this post, let it be this: build your network early, lean on it hard, and make sure your kid is in the right group at the right camp. I hope sharing our experience helps someone else navigate the highs and lows a little better!

Account Escalations. How to Manage and De-Escalate a Customer

The customer calls/emails you out of the blue. And, wow, are they mad! More often than not, it’s your company’s fault. The site is down. Data is deleted. Someone made a mistake impacting their business. A feature isn’t implemented. A dozen small issues have put them over the top. The Support experience is poor. Regardless of the reasons, your customer’s business is impacted, and they are angry!

Many of us have been there, and it is never fun. Having the courage to own getting the customer back on track is challenging, and is frankly one of the harder jobs for a CSM. Thankfully, there are strategies to handling these situations effectively that not only work but more often than not, make you even more valuable and appreciated at the end! Why? Because unlike most of their other experiences, you managed them through the escalation and got them back on track!

To effectively manage a customer escalation I will first walk through the mindset, define the two workflows you must manage, and explain how to handle the first call to reassure the customer, wrapping up with the resolution itself.

The Customer’s Mindset

It’s important to understand the customer’s mindset before your first call. They are angry, Almost always this is because an important expectation was not met, frequently causing them to be embarrassed at their work, resulting in them no longer trusting you as their vendor.

The good news. The fact that they want to talk to you is a good sign. It means that while trust has been broken, they want you to fix the problem so they can stay with you! It’s the ones that are just as angry, but who have NOT escalated that you have lost!

The worst thing you can ever do is to become defensive, deflect, or make excuses! Once you have handled the escalation, the customer will remember how you responded in a time of crisis and will know that you are one of a rare few companies who do this, and will be more loyal afterward as a result!

The Two Workflows

When handling an escalated account, it’s important to always remember that there are two tracks you need to handle:

  • Solving their problem.
  • Communicating status updates as you solve their problem.

I’ve seen multiple times where the customer is still upset even though we resolved the issue because we didn’t communicate effectively!

First Contact

The first meeting is critically important. If they are a key customer, ask your CS executive to join you on the call. Their job is to express empathy, show that the customer is valued by their presence, and allow you to handle the situation.

In the meeting, start by explaining the purpose of the call. Highlight that you understand they are frustrated and ask them to explain their problems. Actively listen and take notes. Once done, first express empathy. State that this is not the experience you are looking to provide. Then re-iterate back to them what you heard. By showing empathy and actively listening (proven by re-stating the problems) you are diffusing their anger and highlighting you understand their situation.

Most of the time you will not be able to solve the problem on the call. The customer will know this as well. You have aligned with the customer on the problems, so let them know you will handle this issue with urgency and will work internally on a plan for the next steps. Let them know when you will be telling them the next steps (tomorrow, end of day Friday, etc.), and wrap up the meeting.

Once the meeting is done, immediately send meeting notes thanking them for their time, summarizing the issues you agreed on in writing, and finally reiterating when you will be following up.

The Project Plan

From the initial meeting, you should understand all of the issues. You now need to prioritize the issues, understand what resources are needed, and get timelines on deliverables. These are all core tasks of project management! Escalations are typically pretty lightweight, so I recommend just using a spreadsheet like:

I track this in my CRM/CSP as well so you have a record of this activity and so other people involved in the account know about the escalation and the status.

Subsequent Meetings / Communication

Once you have created a project plan, you should schedule a meeting to share the update with the customer. It’s best to deliver this update in-person/virtually vs. over email, although email can work as well. In this meeting you should be sharing the issues, what you have done, and what the next steps are on them. If you can’t handle all issues at the same time, make sure you explain that and that you are working through them in priority order, which they’ve confirmed. Let them ask questions, and schedule the next meeting as appropriate. If you believe this is a long-running escalation, I recommend meeting at least weekly, sometimes daily, or 2-3 times a week depending on the speed at which the customer and you can get their issues resolved.. Always send meeting notes (a portion of which should be the project plan).

Final Meeting

Once you believe you have resolved all of the customer’s issues to their satisfaction, make sure to have a final meeting to confirm that you have solved their issues, ask if there are any other issues, and ask for feedback on how we could have handled this situation better (short of it not happening in the first place). Assuming you have done a good job, you should have an appreciative customer. Once that is done, let them know that you are wrapping up, and will be going back to standard business operations and meeting/communication cadences.

From Radio Silence to Renewed Relationships: Tackling Non-Responsive Customers

You are meeting with the customer, having great conversations, and then, all of a sudden, the customer stops responding to you! They have gone dark, become non-responsive, or gone radio-silent. This happens to every CSM at some point in their career, and it can be hard to handle. In this article, I provide a clear methodology to successfully re-engage non-responsive customers.

Why?

The first question to ask yourself is why? Obviously, you won’t know for certain, but you probably have a pretty good guess. Typically, this will fall into one of four categories:

  1. The customer has decided to not renew.
  2. The customer is in the process of deciding whether to renew.
  3. The customer doesn’t value the meetings/conversations, so is now ignoring you.
  4. Something happened to your customer: extended PTO, they were terminated, they quit, etc. Emails get forwarded to managers when someone leaves, so you won’t get a bounced email response.

Understanding the why will help you create proper content when following the escalation steps outlined in the next section.

What to Do?

Now that you you have a hypothesis as to why the customer is non-responsive, I recommend following these steps to re-engage with the customer:

  1. Try to confirm your hypothesis as to why they are non-responsive through analysis:
    • Is the contact still there, or have they moved on? Look them up on LinkedIn.
    • How is usage? Who has logged in last, who has submitted support tickets last, what does product activity look like?
    • Are they moving to something else? An example of checking would be if your software is integrated into the website, you could look at source code on their website to see if your competitors information is used.
  2. Ask for help from fellow employees who may know your contact/customer.
    • Are there individuals on your Services team who may have a relationship?
    • Have they worked with a Partner, and if so, can the partner help you?
    • Can the sales rep who closed the deal be off assistance?
    • Did they have a different CSM who could send an email?
    • Does anyone on your support team have a relationship with someone at the company?
  3. Start contacting individual contributors within the company who could help.
    • Reach out to Power Users you may know of. They are typically helpful, and will help you understand politics that may be happening.
    • Contact anyone who has logged in recently.
    • Contact anyone who has submitted a support ticket recently.
    • Go through your CRM and contact anyone who looks like a legitimate contact and user of the product with a title of manager level and below.
  4. Start escalating upwards within the customer’s company.
    • Contact them to get information on status.
    • Look at LinkedIn for Directors with the appropriate title for your space and contact them.
    • Final step is to go directly to the executive level. Look for VP, SVP, or C-Suite and email them directly.
  5. Leverage your internal Executive contact. Escalate to your Manager for help. Outline the steps you’ve taken before asking for executive help. From here, work with your manager to have an executive at your company contact the points of contact directly. Include pre-written emails when asking the executive for help. Start with your original point of contact and then move up the org chart to their executive.

Contact Follow-up Cadence:

Contacting a person to restore a relationship is rarely a one-time activity. I recommend these follow-up steps for each person you try to contact:

  • Send email #1. Wait 3 business days.
  • Call person, wait 4 hours.
  • Send email #2, saying “Following up on email and phone call.”
  • Send a LinkedIn message alongside email #2.
  • Call person again (at different time of day AM vs. PM)
  • Send final email #3.
  • If deal is six figures, consider on-site.

Message Content/Tone

In your messages, you should focus on addressing the reason you believe they are not responding. Make sure it’s obvious what’s in it for them! If you haven’t provided value, acknowledge it and recommend actions that will help them out. If it’s the renewal, offer a concession (PS strategy, discount, etc.) to proactively re-engage them. If you are at the end of your message cadence, your tone can become more direct (carrot vs. stick). As an example, “If I don’t hear back by September 15th, you will have officially not renewed. We will be shutting down your instance, at which point you will not be able to retrieve your data.”

Final Thoughts

From my experience, I’ve learned the following lessons:

  1. CSMs frequently rely on just 1-2 emails. Use the phone. Use LinkedIn. If appropriate, go to their office!
  2. CSMs frequently don’t look internally for other relationships and are intimidated to blindly go up the org chart. This does work! Frequently, the original contact reaches out to you as a result.
  3. The executive contact point works! Either they will respond to the executive directly, or the contact will respond to your prior email within 24 hours!

How to Define and Measure Customer Value

If you ask any CSM what the primary responsibility of their job is, you will invariably hear, “I am responsible for ensuring my customers get value.” This is a great answer since value drives customer stickiness, renewals, and growth! This all makes sense, but when you go a level deeper and ask, “well, how do you define and measure this value?” you will frequently not get an answer. This is because it can be incredibly hard to determine, which is why many companies struggle and never do this!

Now there are two components of value, and a CSM needs to handle both of them:

  1. Logical: you are helping the company generate money, you are helping the company save money, or your product is an insurance policy.
  2. Emotional: you have a good relationship with the customer, and your product is viewed favorably from an emotional perspective.

This blog will be discussing just the logical component of value. The emotional side could be a series of books in it’s own right!

So What is Customer Value?

Now, when talking about customer value, you should measure it within 2 (maybe three) ways:

  • Generating Revenue: marketing automation software help to generate leads that convert into new business. You show the number of new business revenue generated through your solution.
  • Reducing Cost: A customer support knowledge base is deflecting support tickets. Measuring the number of tickets solved via knowledge base translates into fewer support headcount needed, thereby saving the company money.
  • Insurance Policy: Almost everyone with a Windows computer has anti-virus software. It doesn’t directly generate revenue or reduce cost, but if you do have a virus, your data could be compromised which is a potentially catastrophic issue and well worth the investment in anti-virus software!

Understanding Use Cases

Now that we know how we want to measure value, we need to figure out how to map the product features to value statements. Most products enable multiple use cases, or workflows, to be deployed on top of them. This is an important, and often overlooked, step to defining and reporting on value. Many people try to map to value based on product features, which fails as a feature can be used in different ways, and many times it requires multiple features to be used in combination to implement the actual use case, which actually provides value.

Using support software as an example, you can have multiple use cases (notice I have a value prop in each description):

  • Knowledge Base: Drives self service on frequently asked questions thereby reducing support costs by removing direct support ticket submission, while also improving the customer experience.
  • Online Support Forum: Enables customers to ask questions in a public forum, and to get answers from other users, thereby reducing support costs by removing direct support ticket submission, while also improving the customer experience.
  • Direct Support Channels: Enables support agents to switch across different communication mediums (email, chat, phone) and manage multiple tickets in an optimized manner, enabling them to handle a higher volume, and to resolve tickets faster. This reduces support costs by improving support agent throughput, while also improving the customer experience.

The above are just a few examples of the use cases that a support team will launch when deploying support software. If a customer only deploys one of these use cases, then their value will be lower, and they will be more likely to churn.

Additionally, when looking at the value prop, I mention both reduction of costs and improving the customer experience. If budgets are tight, your CFO will only approve the reduction of cost investment, and not the customer experience improvement, as they will see customer experience as a nice-to-have vs. saving money as a must-have investment.

It can even get more complex. If you look at Marketing Automation Platforms, a big component is sending out email. That’s a product feature. But how do you know whether that email is for customer marketing, lead nurturing, or something else? Being able to understand the purpose in which a feature is being used, especially when the feature is applied to multiple use cases is critical.


As such, it’s important to understand what are the more common use cases your customers are running on your product, and which ones provide the most value.

Wide vs Deep Use Cases

One note under use cases, is that for some solutions it may be important to understand whether a use case will drive wide adoption, or deep value. As an example, for CRM software, which is typically licensed on a per user basis, you can have two use cases:

  • Sales teams manage their deals. They track all activity and status, and record the results. This lets them manage their follow up action items, and provides clear reporting, visibility, and predictability to management. This is a deep use case as it provides deep value for the sales team.
  • Product, Customer Success, Support, and other departments leverage the CRM to see the sales history and what products were sold to a customer. This will drive a lot of additional seats but the value is significantly lower than just the sales team.

The wide use case ultimately generates more revenue through the per-user seat licensing model, but the more significant value and stickiness is through the sales team use case! In an ideal situation, you are implementing a combination of both wide and deep use cases with your customers to maximize both adoption and value.

Use Case to Value Measurement Framework

Once you have documented your use cases it’s time to map back to value. This is frequently the hardest part. How is a use case generating the company money, or saving the company money? What metrics can you use to track this? Regretfully, this work will be use case specific.

A couple examples:

  • Support knowledge base use case: I implemented a solution that followed customers through the web page workflow using Google Analytics, and for those that went to a KB article and never navigated to the, “create a support ticket” pages, we would count that as a deflected case. This was not easy to measure! Another company had a pop-up before people left the KB article asking if this article solved their issue. A very conservative measurement approach, but this worked as well. From there, you can quickly map this out to the average cost per support ticket the company handles today to get a sense of the money the KB is saving the company!
  • Online Support Forum: We had a large company requesting a down-sell because they thought they were overpaying for their support forum software. We asked them what their average cost per ticket was in support, which was $20. We then ran a report showing that end users had answered over 100,000 questions, thereby saving them 2 million dollars! This quickly turned the tables and highlighted what a great value they were getting and ultimately resulted in an upsell. In hindsight we should have been providing this metric from the beginning, and this is one of a few stories that made me realize how important it is to map to financial value early!

Once you have developed a way to map to value, I recommend running it by customers to ensure they understand and believe in your metric. Getting customer sign off to believe a number, especially when it’s measured through inference, is critically important. From there, start sharing the value results back out to your customers in their QBRs!

Competitive Differentiation

Great, you’ve successfully mapped your use cases, and have deployed a measurement framework for value based on these use cases. You are even the first in your space to do this, giving you a significant competitive advantage.

Sadly, you have a lot of competitors and it will only take them a quarter or two before they copy your work (the dirty thieves)! As such, you need a set of unique differentiators to differentiate yourself from your competition. Some common examples of differentiators include innovation, quality of the product, performance/speed of page load times, reporting, the user experience, simplicity to adopt your solution, and/or your post-sales experience. It’s important to have this clearly understood as your contacts are being inundated with emails and calls from your competitors constantly!

You need to do this as if you cannot prove clear value, AND you are not proving true competitive differentiation, then you will likely end up competing for price. No one wants to hear the words, “I like you. Your value is clear. Your competitor is promising a similar result for half the the price. I have to give them a shot.”

Summary

Ensuring you give your customers value is essential, and being able to show a specific, believable, dollar amount, is critical to justify your customers’ ongoing investment. The work I’ve outlined above can be incredibly difficult to achieve, and requires executive sponsorship and deep partnership with the Product, Marketing, and Sales teams in particular. The last thing you want is to complete all this great work for it not to be deeply understood and re-used within these other departments!

Additionally, I recommend starting out with just one use case to value mapping to get started and to expand from there. Trying to do all of this work at once will frequently result in failure as it will take too long to complete. It’s amazing how frequently I’ve hit the ideal solution, only to find out via customer feedback that I have a few more iterations to go to truly get it dialed in for customers!

How to Standardize your Customer Renewal Process

Having an efficient, proactive, scalable, customer renewal process is critical for maximizing revenue, minimizing customer friction, and maximizing efficiency for the organization!

Before looking at the renewal process itself, it’s important to make sure you are set up for success with the contracts themselves!

Customer Contracts

Before managing the renewal, you should first consider how to reduce friction and maximize revenue in the renewal process by evaluating your contracts.

Auto-renewal language

I recommend including auto-renewal language into contracts with a notification period (typically 30 days) set in the contract. There can be exceptions to this!! For example, if you are a company where you plan to have upsells, then I recommend against auto-renewal language as you want to have the upsell conversation with your customer.

Contract Term Length

A lot of start-ups begin with monthly contracts, and then have a large project to migrate customers to annual contracts. Additionally, monthly contracts are a better model for some companies, so make sure to think what works best for your company, business model, and customers. People typically think of B2C companies as being monthly, with B2B being annual, but I always look at those phone contracts we’ve signed up for as a glaring exception for why you should evaluate what’s best for you!

Uplift

Make sure the uplift amount is included in the original contract, so there are no surprises come renewal time. I have seen this get overlooked completely with start-ups, resulting in per customer margins going down over time as a result.


For uplift amounts, I typically see anywhere from 3%-10%, with 5% being the number I use the most frequently. This is an easily explainable number, as it helps to cover employee compensation increases, as well as the new features / improvements they received throughout the year. It’s important that whoever is managing your renewals understands and can easily justify this number if it comes up as a discussion topic for the renewal.

Renewal Process

This process is for enterprise customers, which is a highly manual process. For companies that have more of a scaled model, you will want to standardize and automate out many of these steps!

Please note that the renewal process is also a great time to also be including any upsell. You are already having a commercial conversation, so if the customer wants to expand, and you haven’t successfully upsold them already, this is a low friction time to do it!

I typically start the renewal process 150 days out. Yes, more than a quarter out. This ensures all renewals have kicked off before the quarter starts, and to give runway to fix any accounts that may be at-risk.

150-120 Days prior to Contract Expiration Date

During this period you are getting aligned internally on the customer terms and introducing the renewal to the customer. This is done in the following steps:

  1. Determine the renewal terms, opportunities, and risks:
    • Review the contract for auto-renewal language, uplift amount, cancellation term, or anything else specific to your business and the customer.
    • Understand any upsell opportunities you want to include in the renewal.
    • Understand the customer’s current state: budget constraints or willingness to invest, any important customer impacting issues, customer’s understanding and acceptance of the value you have provided.
  2. Internal deal review and approval process. This should show the value the customer is getting from their product, what the customer has purchased (old terms), what the new terms are, and any business risks. I typically do this by email, where the CSM (or renewals person) sends an email to a distribution alias (deal desk), which includes the approver from the finance team, approver from the business team (typically head of CS or Revenue), and any other interested personnel.
  3. Once approved, the CSM lets the customer know during one of their meetings that the renewal is coming up, asks if they have any questions on the terms, and if there is anything to be aware of during the renewal process. This is the “official” customer introduction to the renewal process and should be flushing out any risk in the account based on the customer’s reaction.

120 to 90 Days prior to Contract Expiration Date

At the beginning of this period, you should send the official email to the customer with the updated terms. If you have an auto-renewal language, the request is to have them reply to the email to confirm their intent to renew. If you do not have auto-renewal language, include a summary of the terms in the email, with the contract attached (or let them know it’s sent via Docusign, or other contract management solution).

A personal goal I have always had for the team is to have 50% of renewals done 90 days out! This helps to highlight your at-risk/problem accounts going into a quarter. Some of your customers will drag their feet as well, or not want to sign until the last minute, but it’s still worth pushing.

Why do we want written confirmation if they are auto-renewing? To prevent any customer surprises! The last thing anyone wants to hear is, “I didn’t know I had to cancel by x date! I’m not paying!” The goal is to minimize the collections process, while also providing an ideal customer experience as much as possible! Put yourself in the customer’s shoes, wouldn’t you be upset if you got invoiced randomly without being notified?

If you are negotiating aspects of the renewal, including upsells, the goal is to have these conversations during this time period as well. That way you are entering the renewal quarter aligned with the customer even if the paperwork isn’t signed yet! If for some reason you are having to go through a difficult procurement process, or getting “put out to bid” again, catching this so far out will give you time to get this work done in a high quality way!

90 to 45 Days prior to Contract Expiration Date

The bulk of the renewal work should have been done by now for customers that will not have issues. You should be getting signatures from customers that do not want to sign a quarter out, or are dragging their feet because your sponsor procrastinates.

I also recommend reminder emails on the contract renewal approximately every 30 days. You should make this work for what’s best for your workflow.

For any accounts that are going sideways, they should all be escalated within the CS (and other) teams for reporting with a get-well plan to get the customer back to health and renewed.

Less than 45 Days prior to Contract Expiration Date

If a customer has not engaged on the renewal conversation, then this needs to be re-escalated to the highest level stating that the get well plan is not working, and additional engagement is required (executive sponsor, head of CS/Revenue, etc).

At this point, the tone of email conversations should be shifting. Previous emails should have been friendly, informative, and helpful. Given the horizon of the contract ending, the tone should now become increasingly direct, with impact. An example would be, something like:

Dear [Customer],

We are only 45 days out from the contract expiration date. If we do not hear back from you at least 30 days prior to this date, you will be auto-renewed and invoiced. I want to get on a call with you to discuss any questions you may have...

If possible, work with your Marketing team to ensure each email has the correct tone.

Signed Renewal Paperwork!

Congratulations, your customer has renewed!

Please put the signed contract, or the written confirmed auto-renewal email into the appropriate repository (CRM, Shared Drive, etc) for storage, and update your CRM and other tools as necessary to record your successfully renewed customer.

Some companies like to know about renewals as well. If so, have an email distribution group and send an internal email notifying them of the successful customer renewal.

Customer Does not Renew

While the goal is to always have a 100% renewal rate, I don’t know of anyone who has successfully accomplished this. As such, when a customer notifies you of their intent to not renew it’s important to kick off a few supplemental processes:

  1. Customer Save Plan: Can this customer be saved? This could be a negotiating tactic, maybe a new sponsor needs to be educated? You have some time to salvage this customer, and a down-sell is almost always better than losing a customer outright.
  2. Customer Transition Plan: How do you off-board the customer? It’s important to give the customer a good experience during this process, so you can re-earn their business later. Notifying them when access will be shut off, ensuring their data is exported ahead of time, and letting them know when their data will be deleted from your systems is important so that the customer is informed, and not surprised. I’ve even sold a services engagement for a data export service for customers when they’ve left.
  3. Customer Exit Survey / Understanding: Having a standardized exit survey to understand why the customer left in their own words is important to learn and improve so that other customers don’t leave for the same reason. This should be a combination of quantitative (customer usage data, support tickets, bugs, etc), and qualitative (CSM feedback, customer feedback, etc). Sometimes the customer is honest with you, and sometimes they themselves don’t understand the reason, so their feedback is just one of many sources of data to seek to understand what’s truly going on. For a scaled model, I have found offering a $50 gift card will get a customer on a call to give you this critical information.
  4. Internal Root Cause Analysis and Remediation: Once you have the above information, hold a cross-functional meeting to share the feedback, align on the results, and put together a remediation plan (if appropriate) to ensure it doesn’t happen moving forward. Depending on your volume of customers, I do this on a quarterly basis for all customers that have not renewed.
  5. Customer win-back: During the customer transition plan, you should ask if they would consider using your service down the road or are willing to share feedback after using the competitor’s solution. Typically customers will agree to this meeting, as at this point they will have hopefully seen that the grass is not in fact greener, and you can re-engage with them.

Tactical Details

Tracking Renewal Status for all Customers

I recommend tracking renewals in either your CS Platform or your CRM. At a minimum, fields should be “renewal risk”, which is a green, yellow, red field, along with a “Get Well Plan” field, which is typically a link to an outside document showing the project plan to save the account. Any account that is not green, should have a corresponding Get Well Plan document referenced. This enables easy reporting for all renewals in the current quarter, and one quarter out. CSMs/Renewals Managers should be putting notes into the platform as well for meetings, next steps, etc.

Contract Management

Make sure you have a cross-functionally aligned repository where you store all customer signed contracts. It can be crazy to see what’s changed for a customer over the years, especially for those customers where you have expanded significantly, so being able to easily find the contracts is critical. I personally recommend storing them in your CRM, alongside all of your other customer data, but have also used a shared drive.

Summary

Once you have implemented your renewal play that works for your company, you should have a solution that is optimized for the following:

  • Customer experience
  • Remove as many “surprises” as possible
  • Maximize revenue via uplift and upsell
  • Cross-functional alignment and awareness
  • Internal efficiency and standardization
  • Reporting and data retrieval

How to Build and Manage Customer Success Key Metrics (KPIs)

I was recently asked, “what are the key metrics for a CS Leader.” My answer:

Net Retention Rate

I mentioned that while this is the key performance metric, it is also a lagging indicator. He proceed to ask me what I meant, and I explained how I joined a company with a major churn problem. We completely overhauled the customer experience, and I expected the renewal rate to increase significantly. It didn’t. It didn’t the next quarter. It didn’t the quarter after that either. One year after all that work was completed the number started to increase. We went from 60% to 73%. Then to 78%. Then 83%. And then 85%. The same is also true working the other way. If you remove an essential service, you likely won’t see the corresponding negative impact for around a year later!

He then proceed to ask if it’s a lagging indicator, what do I look at? This follow up question led to a much deeper exploration of the subject, which I’m addressing in this blog post.

Customer Success Metrics

First, when thinking of Customer Success, I include CSMs, Support, and Professional Services. Second, I break my metrics into my “in-quarter” financial metrics that I need to hit/influence in the quarter, and a dive into the customer health metrics that are my leading indicators to impact revenue and margin.

Financial Metrics

When looking at Financial Metrics, I categorize as follows:

  1. New Customer Business
  2. Existing Customer Business (both renewals and growth)
  3. Operating Margin

Customer Success directly impacts #2 and #3, and influences #1. As such, I track the following financial metrics typically on a quarterly basis (for annual contract companies).

For most of these metrics, I am reviewing all of the deals within a quarter to track the status and ensure everything is tracking according to plan. Once I am 30 days out for the next quarter, I start to review the following quarter as well.

  • Renewal Rate by customer count and by dollars: I’ve seen many companies over-focus on their “big accounts.” That’s why it’s important to look at renewal rate by customer count as well. I had one of the largest tech companies in the world start out as a small 5 figure account end up as a mid 7 figure account. If we bucketed them as a “small” customer based on their ARR, we likely would never have grown them into becoming our largest customer! Not to mention, it’s almost always better to down-sell than to lose a customer. Keeping an eye on customer count will help find some issues you have in your lower revenue install base that you might otherwise miss. Reporting on why customers left, ideally with a customer exit survey process is extremely beneficial. I perform a quarterly retrospective on all lost customers to extract lessons learned and how to prevent moving forward.
  • Down-sells. Understand and work to remove the reasons for down-sells! This number is heavily dependent on use case, target customer profile, how deals are sold originally, and other variables. As an example, look at the recent economic conditions: understanding that down-selling is happening due to your per-user license counts going down due to customers having layoffs vs. another reason is important to show internally!
  • Uplift: Report on the $ amount, % of uplift, and % of customers you successfully had uplift. This is a straightforward way to increase revenue by having a set (in the contract) uplift amount that should be straight forward as part of the renewal process. Tracking these metrics will ensure this program is adhered to. I review uplifts for every customer that is renewing and understand every reason for why an uplift is not included in the renewal as this should be included unless removed as part of a negotiation (multi-year deal, customer is upselling significantly, etc).
  • Upsell: Report on the $ amount, number of customers, and the product. If off of plan, understand why.
  • Cross-sell: Report on the $ amount, number of customers, and the product. If off of plan, understand why.
  • Services Revenue: Understand how services revenue is perceived in the company, and tracking revenue targets, by core deliverable, such as training, onboarding, etc. Depending on the size of the services organization, I track many of the above metrics for services work just like product revenue.

I’ve attached a sample sheet I use to track renewals and upsells. Please note, I export the data from my CRM into this sheet to track on a weekly basis. If you are doing CSQLs, I recommend mapping the upsell sheet to track those to ensure they are followed up on and closed!

In-Quarter-Opportunity-TrackingDownload

I also track the following Margin/Cost metrics. I typically review these on a monthly basis to ensure there are no surprises, as changes in new business and renewal rates can impact staffing and these metrics significantly. These metrics are typically provided by the finance team and via department specific tools. I will dig into each of my team’s tools if I see something I am not expecting.

  • Support Cost: Show as flat cost, % of revenue, and per customer. If you are a growing company, it’s acceptable that Support costs are increasing, but you should be showing how you are becoming more efficient over time by decreasing costs as a percent of revenue and by customer count.
  • Professional Services Cost/Margin: You want to ensure you are understanding revenue, cost, and making sure it’s aligned with larger company goals. Depending on your business, having too much Services revenue can be viewed as a negative by the company! For Services Margin you need to understand the following:
    • Team Utilization is at target (see next bullet).
    • How much work are you giving away vs. billing for.
    • Hourly rate. Anecdotally, I’ve seen most software companies are between $200-$350 per hour, however, some companies I know of go under $90 per hour, so it’s business specific.
  • Team Utilization: Every team should show team utilization, and should be near capacity for optimum margin. I typically have 80% as maximum utilization. If you look over a year, 10% is for PTO & Holidays, and 10% is for internal meetings (training, 1:1’s, etc), which is why it’s 80%.

Driving Retention Rates

Moving into metrics that drive successful customers, I conceptualize it using a pyramid analogy. While everyone cares about growth, there are so many items you have to execute on to earn the right to grow a customer. The metrics you look at are a reflection of these items.

This pyramid also maps to departments. As such, I review the following metrics below on a weekly basis to ensure I am aware of any potential issues that might have occurred the previous week, and to ensure we are improving the metrics based on our quarterly initiatives.

Functional

The bottom layer, Functional is whether the product or service you are providing, fundamentally works. To ensure this is the case, I track the following metrics:

  • Bugs:
    • Number of bugs as a flat number, and as a percentage of overall ticket volume.
    • Time to Resolve on the bugs.
    • Note: You should have alignment about bugs you will fix, and bugs you won’t fix with product and engineering for proper customer communication.
  • Customer Impacting Service Impairments:
    • This includes site outages and any significant functionality impaired. I think of this similar to a construction site where it’s “days since last injury.” This number needs to be 0 for as long as possible.
  • Feature Requests:
    • Number of feature requests as a flat number, and as a percentage.
    • Time to Resolve, and size of backlog to understand how many are getting implemented, and how fast, and whether you are keeping up with customer demand.
    • Not all feature requests should be implemented. CS should have a process to screen and prioritize feature requests for the product team, and a process to politely tell the customer when a feature request won’t be implemented. It’s better to tell a customer you won’t be implementing than to say nothing!
  • Customer Effort Score: I am a believer in this as it can show where there is friction within your customer experience, leading to a lower perception of your solution overall. I typically ask this question both after support ticket resolution (instead of CSAT), and in Customer business review meetings.

Tactical

This is when the product is working, but customers have questions they need answered to use and get value from the product. I track the following support metrics:

  • Support Tickets per Customer: Depending upon your product, 0 could be a good target, or having a few come is a reasonable target. For one company, seeing a decrease in ticket volume gave us a 6 month heads up the customer was leaving. Understanding ticket volume by renewal rates is a good way to understand how you should think of average tickets per customer. Any delta’s on a per customer or across customers should be looked into immediately.
  • Initial Response Times across channels: Understanding how fast your support team responds for each channel (email, chat, phone, social, etc) is important. Look at both average and max. The Max response time shows you the worst experience. If you’re that customer, you don’t care that the average customer was fast when yours is still slow! You should have processes that handle the exceptionally poor experiences within support, while also keeping them rare.
  • Resolution Times: How long does it take to resolve the customers question? Again track average and max so you can understand your target, and the worst experience.
  • Re-Open Rate: Tickets should not need to be re-opened. If that is happening, then it’s good to track and see what’s broken in the process to fix.

Value (and Relationship Quality)

This is the third layer, and where the CSM is primarily accountable. While the concept of value is easily understood, reporting on it can be incredibly challenging depending upon your business!

Additionally, many buyers are not logical, but in fact emotional in their decision making process. CSMs should record in their CRM or CS Tool the quality/strength of the relationship of the key individuals: power user, executive sponsor, contract signer.

Value is an agreed upon metric, ideally across customers, that can show business results. This section should also show “risk” factors that may be impacting value. This can be very simple, or really hard!

As each company is unique, it’s critical to identify the metric that will work for your company. Do not fall into the trap of thinking it’s just “daily users” as that frequently is not going deep enough. You need to report on the value that daily user activity is driving! I know of one company that tracked on this, only to be surprised when one of their top customers fixed an IT configuration that was auto-logging everyone into their product, resulting in a customer who they thought was a “top user” to in reality hardly using the product at all!

Typically value should map to one of three categories: Revenue generated for the customer, cost saved by the customer, or the theoretical risk (measured in $) avoided by having your solution (think of security or insurance software like virus scanning software).

You should have a dashboard that shows customer value, with the contract value as part of the equation to show customers with healthy metrics, and unhealthy metrics. I’ve seen customers with healthy value, but the contract value was so high we were displaced by a competitor who came in at 50% of the cost! The vendor flat out told us, “I love you, but I can’t justify to procurement how much more expensive you are.”

The objective is to ensure there is value for the customer, so that the renewal process becomes easy.

Growth

I recommend an annual formal bottoms up plan on how you will hit your customer growth number. This should map down to the plays you are running, and what you think the success rates will be, and should have the CSMs feedback in this. Example plays:

  • Uplift: contract price increase.
  • Upsell: increased adoption of your product (users, or the activity that triggers additional billing).
  • Cross-sell: what products do you have that your customers haven’t purchased? What need products are you releasing that your customers will get value from?

This plan should then be refreshed the last month of every quarter, with a focus on the next quarter to create your forecast. When you do both the annual plan and quarterly refreshes, listen carefully to the CSMs and their feedback. If any of your growth plays are showing inherit risk of lack of adoption/success, then there is likely something wrong that will be triggering renewal risk as well.

Additionally, I track the following metrics for the “fly-wheel” effect. These will be company specific and done in partnership with marketing:

  • # of reference customers (private reference for a new customer, public reference for our website)
  • Customer Case Studies / Whitepapers produced
  • Strategy guides produced
  • Customer Referrals leading to new business (part of CSQL’s)

Professional Services

Professional Services includes many types of deliverables that are critical for the customer. I think of this team as being the glue between what the product actually delivers and what the customers need to successfully get value from the product. Services typically include onboarding, training, strategy, technical integrations, and even staff augmentation. Having key metrics for each deliverable is critical to understanding and driving positive retention rates.

As an example, I started at one company where the year 1 customer renewal rates where the lowest of any cohort. Digging in, we found that the largest reason was that there was a steep learning curve to our product, and that customers were not getting trained. We overhauled our training program making them easier to consume and more cost effective. We then required training to be included in all new deals. This resulted in a 25% improvement in the year 1 renewal rate! We had metrics that ensured users were trained successfully, and programs that put any new users into our training program.

Another example is around onboarding. Having a quick kick-off call, and optimizing for time to first value for the customer is critical. I personally saw over a 10% improvement in renewal rates when we updated our onboarding process to be instantaneous in kick off call introductions after contract signature and with the onboarding process improving time to first value from over 6 months to around 5 weeks. You may also need to look at how and when your finance team can recognize revenue as part of the onboarding process as well.

NPS

You might not have noticed, but one metric I did not mention was Net Promotor Score (NPS). I believe this is typically a lagging indicator, with the most value coming from the comments, which should already be showing up in other metrics listed above (customer effort if nothing else). I will implement it, as it can influence other executive team member behavior, it’s become somewhat of an industry standard, and I’ve had board members look at me strangely (as in, “Kevin I think you’re stupid for not having it” look). I just personally don’t find it incredible valuable other than being a vanity metric.

Conclusion

There are a lot of metrics to track to understand the performance of the customer success organization. It is critical to take the time to deeply understand each one and how it can positively or negatively impact the customer experience and value, which will ultimately affect your net retention rates.

How to Build a Plan to Staff Customer Success Managers

I frequently get asked, “how do I staff Customer Success?” or, “how do you get alignment for additional CS hires?” or some other type of question that shows there isn’t clear understanding of CSM outcomes, and a resource plan to drive these outcomes.

Things to Know Before Building the Plan

Before creating your plan it’s important to remember a few things:

  • You need to get buy in from the CSMs themselves. They should feel challenged, but feel like it’s possible.
  • Perfect is the enemy of good enough. Your first attempt is a rough estimate at best. If possible, track time so you can iterate and improve on the plan.
  • Related to the above, an easy trap is to map based solely on ARR. Yes, revenue is an influence, but it’s about the customer’s experience. You can have a $20k customer with potential to become $6M, so you’ll want to give them a lot of attention. Conversely, you can have a $1M customer without upside that wants to be left alone except for important updates, so wants less attention. As such, prioritize by the customer’s desired experience first by understanding what you think the effort will be (in partnership with sales team), then the customer’s potential revenue, and finally their current revenue. As part of this, if you have a customer that is low ARR, with no growth potential, wanting a high-touch experience, you have a bad fit between expected experience and revenue, so you need to fix for that.
  • Once done with your plan, map it against reality and ensure it’s going to pass executive review, especially with sales and finance. If a fully loaded CSM is $130k, and they’re only covering $500k of revenue, your plan won’t get approved as it’s way too expensive. You either need to update the experience, figure out how to automate/fix a lot of that effort, or have a larger conversation around the price point not matching the required cost to make a customer successful.
  • Your CFO ultimately will approve your headcount. Make sure your finance partner and CFO deeply understand and agree with your plan so you don’t have the inevitable “new hire justification” conversation for every new hire.
  • Your customer mappings for effort/tier can change! A customer can go from low effort/time to high effort/time for a myriad of reasons: a new leader/champion and a change in expanding usage of your solution are a couple of examples.
  • Each customer in reality will be slightly above or below your estimates. They should balance out across CSMs to be roughly accurate.
  • When thinking about staffing, it becomes really hard for a CSM to have relationships with more than 50 customers. If you have a plan that has a CSM with more than 50 customers, then understand they won’t have a quality relationship that can drive deep understanding of what the customer is trying to do. It will be superficial. This can be okay depending on the circumstance, it depends on your business and the customers’ desired experience!
  • You will invariably hear, “Yeah, but how much revenue is a CSM covering?” or, “How much should they cover?” That’s not the right approach to building a model, but when the model is done I do find myself double checking against $2 million in ARR. If my coverage is below that, I need to understand and explain why (I’ve had CSMs acting as project managers that took me a while to extricate from). If it’s above that, great. You should always be looking for ways to scale CSMs further regardless! Just remember, you are designing for the customer experience first, and the revenue per CSM needs to work with it, or you need to re-think how the customer experience should look.
  • CSMs can handle different types of accounts. I personally find it ideal to blend them instead of having a CSM with the “best” accounts. This spreads risk around should you lose a CSM and allows for better load balancing on the team.
  • Thinking about PTO, and how to handle, can be tough. For the purposes of this plan, I’m assuming that a CSM will let customers know they are on PTO, so the work will not happen when they are gone. If an emergency happens while on PTO, the customer can contact the manager or another CSM (letting the customer know proactively). As such, it’s excluded (other than available hours) from the plan.

Building your CSM Staffing Plan

I typically start with a three tier system that I can bucket customers into: Good, Better, Best. I then list the tasks that a CSM would perform with estimated hours for a CSM to accomplish these tasks. The default tasks I evaluate are:

  • Daily Interaction Management: Any daily firefighting/email response work.
  • Tactical Review: Review outstanding issues, project updates, new updates.
  • Data Analysis and Report Creation: Work spent analyzing customer’s key data, to provide insights and recommendations.
  • Operations Review: Roll-up on where you stand month over month. Key metrics in regards to project updates, any critical/blocking issues that need to be escalated and discussed, adoption metrics.
  • Proactive Customer Management: Following on LinkedIn or other communities, reading news articles, public filings, industry trends. Knowing what matters to the overall company and tie your business review into this information. This includes working on updating the Customer’s Success Plan.
  • Business Review: Review with the champion and the executive sponsor to review key adoption metrics, key accomplishments, noteworthy status updates, get alignment on strategic initiatives and any changes, sharing updates on agreed upon key performance indicators.
  • Renewals Management: Time you spend managing the renewals process
  • Internal Account Reviews: I ask my CSMs to give a “portfolio” update on their accounts with a deep dive on a couple of their key accounts with partnership from other departmental leaders. This creates better success plan, and gives the rest of the leadership/executive key insights into what is truly happening with key customers (part of a Voice of the Customer initiative).

There is overlap in some of these tasks, so come up with definitions that you clearly understand and believe in. Additionally, this list is not exhaustive as there are likely other tasks that you need to consider for your CSMs.

How many hours should each task take? That is unique to your company, and the experience you want to provide your customers. I recommend getting in a room with one or two key CSMs to get consensus on the tasks and estimated hours.

Once done, your staffing plan should look like something like this:

Finally it’s key to be realistic about actual available hours to work, using the the following equation:

  • Total hours in a year: 40*52=2080 hours
  • Subtract PTO/Holidays (typically 10%): -208
  • Subtract non-billable work such as training, and internal meetings (typically 10%): -208
  • Actual available hours: 1664 (80% utilization).

From this, you can understand actual utilization per CSM per account:

Once you have this part complete, you can map your CSM to your accounts and their tiers to get a utilization chart like:

And now you have a predictable, scalable CSM Staffing plan!

Parting Thoughts

Now that your initial plan is complete, some parting thoughts:

  • This is your starting point. I recommend reviewing the plan and improving it at least on an annual basis, if not quarterly.
  • CSMs need to be driving revenue, but they also need to be reducing their cost. You should have efficiency improvements as part of your CS goals to improve the ARR per CSM every year.
  • As part of understanding costs, this model clearly shows how expensive all those customer meetings are! The more you can move to asynchronous communication (self-help, training, etc.) without degrading the customer experience, the better!
  • Understand where CSM costs roll up. I recommend putting it under sales instead of COGS, so that you are not part of the operating margin. Your primary purpose for the company is to drive revenue via renewals, upsells, and cross-sells, so if you are doing this, it makes more sense to be under sales.
  • You can have more than 3 tiers, but I recommend trying to keep to a minimum.

I have attached a sample plan to help you get started!

CSM-Staffing-PlanDownload

Why Invest in Customer Success?

We are 14 years into a world that has “officially” had customer success. As such, I am surprised when Customer Success is questioned, devalued, significantly shrunk, or downright removed. A lot of CS leaders respond with “but we’re about ensuring customers get value!” While true, that doesn’t resonate with executives teams or boards.

I first want to share a couple personal stories about customer success driving financial results.

Story 1: Solving the Churn Problem Takes Longer than Expected

I joined a company right after a significant shake up (new executive team brought in) due to the companies growth having stalled out. The new business number was decent, but the churn was almost 40% annually, resulting in new business doing just enough to keep them flat. I joined at a great time as there was cross functional commitment to fix this problem. We significantly improved the quality of the product, added multiple customer requested features, improved the user experience, added in training, overhauled onboarding, and more.

This work took about 9 months to execute at which point I expected to see the renewal rate improve. It didn’t. From there we continued to iteratively improve the experience. The next quarter we still saw no improvement. Next quarter same thing, no improvement. Only after a full year after implementing improvements did we see the expected results! And they happened quickly…we jumped 13% in one quarter, 5% the next quarter, 4% the quarter, and 3% the quarter after. What did we do in these quarters compared to the first 9 months? Some additional incremental improvements, but nothing major.

What did we learn as a result? Retention is a lagging indicator. What you do today won’t show up for a year or two. This is one of the reasons why customer success is hard–you have to have the conviction that what you are doing is right and that the results will change over time.

Story 2: Yes, CSMs Do Affect Revenue

My first roll out of customer success (before CSM was a term), we implemented a good, better, best model. The good model only had an Escalation Manager, and you only got a named CSM with the better and best model. The renewal rates for these two models was 15% higher for customers in the better and best model, and we grew these accounts on average 10% more than those on the “good” model. This proved that if you do what’s right for the customer, actively listen, and proactively solve their problems, results will follow.

So why do I share these stories? Because Customer Success is the correct approach that actively drives revenue, but it’s a long term play, with long term results.

What Can We Do?

First off, Customer Success should own a financial number. Let’s face it, there’s a pecking order in most companies: you are either building a product or driving revenue, or you aren’t valued as much. If Customer Success isn’t driving revenue via renewals and retention (at a minimum by sourcing opportunities), then it’s harder to justify why Customer Success is there vs. an alternative model. The primary reason I’ve observed for why we don’t own revenue is fear of commercial conversations and responsibility. We need to become comfortable in the commercial arena.

We should also be creating advocates who are referring us into new business. Make sure you are tracking contributions to new business as part of your referral program and highlighting this financial metric as well.

Second, Customer Success needs to be proactive. CSMs talk about value, and while we do that, we also establish relationships where we proactively work to solve the customers’ problems by actively questioning and listening to them. Too often we are reacting and justifying our jobs in executing the plays and templates provided to us vs. critically thinking outside the box and challenging ourselves on what else can we do for them.

Third, recognize that likely every team is being asked to get creative on how to reduce costs. Lean into this conversation, knowing the typical reaction is to fight against it. Everyone can get leaner, somehow, so what can you do to reduce CS costs? Yes, it might come at the expense of something else you deem critical, but share those options to the rest of the executive team. You can cut here, but it means you won’t be able to do x, y, or z project. You can cut here, but it will cause stress and risk in the organization, to the point where it becomes a failure in 6 months, yes you can push more accounts on CSMs, but it drives risk of less proactive work, so medium/longer term churn risk, and 3-6 month reduced upsell/cross sell risk.

Finally, look at the team that is asking for these changes to be made. Is the current economic climate just an excuse to kill Customer Success and revert to pre-SaaS models? I have seen some executives come out boldly and essentially state that they believe that, “Customer Success is a fad and they’re looking forward to reverting back to older models.” I once had a CFO tell me “I’m going to fund your team just enough to not get us fired.” If you are working with individuals who fundamentally don’t believe in Customer Success, and you know you can’t change their mind, I recommend considering if your company is the right fit for you.

Summary

It’s good discipline to always be advocating and highlighting how valuable your team’s contributions are. Customer Success needs to be proactive, constantly advocating for customers and themselves, and leaning in with the rest of the executive team to ensure there are high retention rates, while ensuring we become more efficient over time. The bar is constantly rising, and we must rise with it.

Customer Success individuals are typically humble. Make sure you don’t allow your humbleness to stop your CS team from getting the accolades and respect they deserve.

Renewals, Upsells, Cross-Sells, who should own what?

Having worked for multiple software companies as a customer success leader where I have directly owned different aspects of the commercials, listened to webinars on this topic, read whitepapers, and interviewed multiple CS leaders, I feel like I have an answer on who should own commercials within a software organization, and the answer is, “it depends.”

All models have pros and cons, so I will share my thought process on how I determine the preferred model for B2B Enterprise Software SaaS business (annual contracts), along with the issues to understand that warrant different models. Non-enterprise (sub $20k annually) and monthly subscriptions should have a product-led solution.

Revenue Categories

First, I want to ensure we are on the same page when talking about revenue within an account. I have observed revenue being lost due to these different categories not being well understood!

      • Renewal: This is the standard renewal term where nothing is changing year over year and the contract renews with the same customer audience. The expectation is that this should renew as-is, preferably with an uplift included.

      • Upsell: This is expanding what has already been sold (increasing capacity). More users in a per-user subscription model is a classic example, but it’s just “more” of what you’ve already sold. This work is done with the same customer audience.

      • Cross-Sell: You are selling a new product/module to a customer with the same customer audience.

      • Account Expansion: You are selling anything (new or same product) to a different audience within the company. This is a frequently confused area, so I will provide multiple examples:
          • Disney. You’ve sold to Lucas Films, but you want to expand into Marvel, ABC, Hulu, ESPN, etc…

          • You have a product that fits multiple departments: Say you are selling a product whose end users are both marketing and sales. You’ve successfully sold into marketing, but have had zero success getting adoption in sales, where that is the goal. An example here would be Salesforce, with Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, etc. Different buyers each time.

          • You have products that fit different departments/individuals. You have sold product A to a person responsible for the scope of product A, but need to establish relationships with others to sell products B, C, and D. Could be that person’s boss, that person’s peers, or a different department entirely.
          • You have successfully sold into multiple business units in a company, and now want to go to IT to get the company to agree to an Enterprise License Agreement (ELA).

      Revenue Roles

      Now let’s talk about the different roles that typically have direct ownership (they process the contracts) of these commercial categories:

        • Renewals Reps

        • Customer Success Managers (CSMs)

        • Account Executives

      I break these roles into specific skills (and costs) as follows:

      Knowing each role’s strengths and weaknesses, you can then apply them to your expected customer model based on the skills and effort required.

      Mapping Revenue Categories to Roles for Clear Ownership

      Starting with Renewals, typically the goal should be to make them as frictionless as possible. Having an auto-renewal with default uplift language in contracts helps with this. If you have an environment where the renewal is just processing some paperwork with little negotiations (less than 4 hours of work), I recommend having the CSM own the renewal directly. This is the most cost-effective solution, as you don’t have to hire another team.

      If you are in an environment where the paperwork is heavy, and there are tactical negotiations that happen frequently, I recommend having a separate renewals team. This is beneficial as it frees the CSMs up to continue to be the trusted advisor, and the renewals team will negotiate for slightly better terms than a CSM will on average. 

      If you are in an environment where renewals are complex, products are being reconsidered, and you are more often than not also having upsell/down-sell conversations, I recommend the Account Executive owning renewals. This is the most expensive model, but it’s worth it as you are getting significant revenue expansion during your renewals and you need seasoned owners to navigate alongside your executive sponsors to get budgets approved and negotiations done on time.

      While having a low-friction easy renewal process would seem like the goal for most companies, I know of one company that expects to have a significant upsell each year so they intentionally add friction to the renewal process to ensure the additional revenue is obtained. They do not include auto-renewal language, and they have the account executive own the renewal as there is almost always significant upsell/cross-sell involved as well.

      Upselling can again be owned by any of the three roles. Typically whoever owns the renewal should also own the upsell, as the same rules apply. If renewal paperwork is easy, upsell paperwork typically is also easy, and a CSM can own it. If there are tactical negotiations and a lot of paperwork, a renewals rep can own it, and finally, if it’s extremely complex with strategic negotiations then the account executive should own it. It’s important to highlight that you also need a process that flags upsell opportunities as you are hitting license limitations. If the product does not do this, I recommend the CSM kicks this conversation off with customers as the primary point of contact.

      Cross-selling is a bit different from renewals and upsells as you are identifying a new product to solve a different problem. For this scenario, I typically recommend a paired approach with the CSM and the Account Executive. There can be some “low hanging” fruit cross-sell plays that CSMs can run solo, but typically the Account Executive should be responsible for the cross-sell number, and the CSM should be helping to identify “customer qualified leads.” 

      As an example of shared cross-sell ownership, I had a product come out where we could independently determine whether it would help the customer out. The CSMs worked with engineering to turn the product on for all customers. From there, the CSMs shared the news of the product release in a customer meeting, with the benefits (if there were any) and list pricing for them. If the customer wanted to learn more, we then pulled in the Account Executive to help close this deal.

      Finally, the account executive should fully own account expansion. A CSM can help identify other roles in the company, but this is opportunistic at best. An Account Executive doing this work is typically a senior-level role and is working strategically on how to grow the account through additional relationships and pain points that the company can solve for the customer.

      Once you have figured out the right ownership model you can then start working on having the correct incentive/compensation packages for each role!

      There’s a lot of nuance to what I’ve written above, so if you have questions please ask me on LinkedIn or X!

       

      Manager Job Pragmatically Defined

      I still remember my first time managing people, and how woefully underprepared I was for the job. Now that I am further along on in my career I have seen great people get promoted from individual contributor to manager, provided no (or minimal training), and then struggle as a manager. Having someone that is the best at doing task A (hence the promotion), and assuming that they’ll immediately be amazing at task Z without training  or help is crazy! 

      First, I believe it’s important to ground ourselves in what the job of the manger is at a high level. Pulling from Andy Grove’s High Output Management book, managers should:

      Increase the output of their organization and neighboring organizations they influence.

      That’s it! But think about it–if you make everyone work 80 hours a week, that would be a short term output boost, but everyone is likely to quit on you, thereby reducing your output long term. If your team isn’t engaged, they won’t work with as much passion, and will get less work done throughout the day. Understanding how to maximize productivity of each employee, whose motivations and goals are different, is nuanced and extremely difficult.

      Before going further into my definition I first want to highlight that I have observed two models that both work, although I use the second myself.

      1. Manager/Team Lead as independent job functions. They are a pair that  typically oversees up to 16 direct reports.

      2. Manager that handles both manager and lead responsibilities, who typically handle up to 10 direct reports.

      I break Manager Responsibilities into three categories:

      • People Management

      • Work Product Management

      • Operations Management

      People Management

      This is all about creating an environment that maximizes a person’s ability to achieve to the best of their ability. Understanding what’s going on in people’s lives is critically important (significant other broke up with them will impact work, it’s important to be sympathetic to situations), and sharing how their behaviors are impacting teammates can be difficult conversations to have. I once had to ask an employee to shower and put on deodorant after riding their bike to work due to Body Odor complaints from coworkers.

      People Management is about building the team, driving morale and career growth, and aligning with company values and culture. This is the area of focus where you are working with your team on the “people” side (vs. the work product side). Duties include the following:

      • Hire: Finding the right talent that matches our values and mission statement is a big part of a healthy organization.

      • Serve your team: A set of practices that enriches the lives of individuals and ultimately builds better teams by being open and honest.

      • Performance Management: employees who repeatedly exceed expectations need to be recognized and promoted while those who fall short of expectations must improve or exit the business.

      • Communication Management: managers are conduits of communication both to their employees (down), to their managers (up), and with peers (across). 

      • Engagement: managers are the most important factor in determining employee engagement.

      • Inter-departmental relationships: Good relationships with other internal teams make work happen more effectively and improve our customer experience.

      • Demonstrate Leadership: leadership gives the direct report a vision for the future and connects their contributions to the big picture. Employees who are connected to the vision and understand the greater impact of their contributions are more engaged.

      • Provide Feedback: be aware of behaviors and interactions to provide positive and corrective feedback.  Examples, how a direct interacts with peers, events outside of work that may impact work directly or indirectly, and proper time management.

      • Professional Development: helping the employee grow and develop to be an amazing talent regardless of the specific job function.

      • Weekly One-on-One: a weekly meeting with IC (individual contributor) is key to developing and maintaining the relationship with a direct.

      Work Product Management

      This involves digging in and providing active management to your team members on how they do their jobs. The only way you can help your team get better is by being there to help them and to actively review work and provide recommendations on how to improve!

      • Work Product Feedback: Everyone can improve.  Managers must provide work product feedback to help identify areas of excellence as well as areas of improvement to enable changes necessary for improvement to occur.

      • Management Work Review: Being aware of what is happening with our customers and the work we are doing for them is key to success for our team.

      • Escalation Point for Direct Reports: The expectation is that each direct report can work independently, ask peers for assistance when blocked, and then go to the manager if still unable to resolve.

      Operations Management

      Within a start-up, there are endless opportunities to improve and make an impact, not only for your team but for the organization as a whole. Sure members need to follow processes, but in a start-up, you also need to be creating those processes, driving cross functional alignment, understanding the actual capacity of your team, and predict when your team will exceed their capacity. All of these tasks and more are part of operations management:

      • Team Meetings: sharing of information between the direct reports increases each individual’s knowledge and improves their ability to proactively manage their respective work product.

      • Process Management: managers can improve productivity by maintaining/enforcing existing processes, ensuring processes achieve the intended results, identifying opportunities for improvement within existing processes, and identifying potential for new processes.  The customer experience must always be top priority in all processes.

      • Enablement: directs need to be trained on behavior, processes, and products to maximize productivity.

      • Workload Management: managers must also be reviewing and owning the larger outcomes their team is delivering.  Ensuring queues, tasks, and commitments are all meeting or exceeding expectations, and working to improve performance against today’s standard.

      • Reporting and Auditing: reporting, with continual analysis of key data is vital to running a successful team.

      • One-Off Activities: in spite of best efforts, managers need to be flexible and the company will leverage managers’ skills and expertise to just get the job done.

      Time Allocation

      Given the above job expectations, assuming 10 headcount maps to the following estimated weekly time commitment

      Downloadable Presentation

      I’ve attached a PDF for the presentation that goes into each bulleted item above in further detail. Please let me know what you think!

      Manager-Expectations-1Download