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 […]
Author: Kevin Williams
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Fear of Micromanagement Prevents Active Management
“I trust my team to do it the best way possible.” “If something’s wrong, they’ll tell me about it.” These are comments I hear from managers talking about how they empower their teams. Sadly, they are doing the opposite. A lot of this comes from the fear of micromanagement. Who hasn’t read or heard a […]
How to Structure Customer Success?
I once told my parents I inherited the Hosting organization (i.e. data center team). Two years later I overheard my mom telling a friend “my son’s the official greeter for the company!” She was thinking in restaurant terms apparently! Lesson learned: explaining what we do, correctly and succinctly, is very important. Structuring Customer Success is […]
