#31: Want To Understand The Impact Of Your CS Strategy? Here is how.

It’s time we take a step back from the business of busyness in Customer Success.

Our teams are burning out from the constant push to squeeze every single activity of the CS playbook into their ever-larger install bases. 

Our customers are overwhelmed by the volume and underwhelmed by the value. 

Sure, we can optimize our processes, workflows, playbooks, knowledge bases and KPIs.

But what if, just for a moment, we pause to ask ourselves: Is this all really working?

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If you were to ask a Customer Success leader today, what activities drive the most value for their customers and have the highest bottom-line impact, you'd watch the room go quiet. 

Trust me, I've spent the last 6 months asking this question to seasoned leaders. 

From where I stand, it looks like most CS teams are flying blind.

The solution to this problem is simple: Multi-Touch Attribution (read more here)

In fact, marketing teams solved this problem years ago. And today, most businesses have the basic infrastructure to do that (a good CRM).

So why is Customer Success lagging behind? 

1. No Customer Journey
2. Lack of CRM Hygiene
3. No Data Analytics Resources

Let's explore these issues:

🗺️ No Customer Journey

A few weeks ago I wrote a newsletter discussing whether CS teams really need a Customer Journey. Spoil alert: they do. 

That's what marketing gets really right, they have a well-mapped nurturing path, simple KPIs at every stage, and a clear definition of what makes a qualified lead. 

CS is definitely not there yet.

And without standardising the touch-points of the CSM and the scale plays customers are engaging with, it's impossible to make sense of what drives value for customers.

That's because there is no data to make sense of.

All you are going by is the qualitative insights.

To understand what drives value and retention, you need 3 foundational things:

1. Map the engagements and the scale plays that are currently in place.
2. Ensure those are objects that can be recorded in the CRM.
3. Drive adoption with the CSMs to ensure the customer journey is being followed.

💩 Lack of CRM Hygiene

I continue to hear CS Leaders talk about poor CRM hygiene in their businesses.

The main reasons why this could be happening are that either your CRM set-up is overly complicated and it sucks for CSMs to use it, or, you have a coaching problem. 

Find out which of the issues it is and just solve it.

I had a manager who used to say: If it's not on the CRM, it didn't happen.

That should be your mantra and a well-maintained record should be added to the CSMs overall performance review. 

If that sounds too harsh for you, think about this: CSMs that are not inputting their work into the CRM are preventing the business from understanding performance and hindering improvement. 

🤓 No Data Analytics Resources

Lastly, we have CS leaders who have a well-adopted customer journey and have all the data relating to customer touch-points in the CRM. What they lack is the resources to analyse the data in any meaningful way.

This is the easiest of the 3 problems to solve.

If you have the resources in-house and can't get them to invest the time, what you need is a business case and an executive sponsor. 

A great executive sponsor is the Head of Finance.

They will understand at a deeper level that lack of visibility makes it impossible to make improvements that can improve productivity and cut costs.

Your case to the executive sponsor can be as simple as: Our CSMs are doing 10 calls with each customer per year, right now we don't know which of these yield value and which don't. If we were able to find at least one touch-point to cut, we would be able to increase rep productivity by 10% and that's $X in savings. 

If you don't have the resources in-house, then the same applies, but you'd be asking for a modest budget to work with a specialised firm that will take your data and extract the insights for you.

TL'DR:

In a world caught in the whirlwind of constant activity, it's time to hit pause.

With teams burning out and customers yearning for more value, it's a moment to question the effectiveness of our strategies.

The way to do it is to lean on multi-touch attribution.

Let's fix our poorly-defined customer journeys, double down on CRM hygiene and position this challenge to the right executive to get the right resources.

See you next Friday :D