3 Ways to Become a Better Customer Success Manager
In an era where the client is always right, Customer Success has become one of the most important pillars of any blossoming startup. Even Fortune 500 companies like Oracle have made the conscious shift to rebranding their professional services teams to customer success in an effort to adapt to their clients’ needs.
This increase in customer-focused leadership brings with it a whole new set of best practices to continually add value and up your game. In 2018 alone, there was a 34% increase in Customer Success Manager (CSM) roles with no plans of stopping in the future. This article will focus on three key areas: transparency, value creation and assessing needs.
Transparency
As a CSM, you have a whole range of data at your fingertips to assess the health, adoption rate and ROI of your accounts. 9 times out of 10 you will manipulate that data in an easy to understand manner and relay it back to your client on a frequent basis.
The first issue here is that a lot of what you send is subject to bias because you want to paint a rosy picture to show your client that they are successful. However, the one under-looked aspect of data most CSMs miss is that your main point of contact on the client’s side is an EXPERT at their industry. So…why not send them all of the data and get their opinion?
This one simple act of transparency shows trust in that client and actually takes a lot of the work off of your shoulders to manipulate that data. If you create an ‘extranet’ of data across all of your accounts, there’s no telling what interesting insights your clients will come up with.
Don’t be afraid to share the full picture. It will grow the relationship and friendship.
Value Creation
A lot of great relationships are lost to the hands of being reactive (rather than proactive) and only calling your clients with issues. The key to great customer success is being proactive and constantly adding value.
Every good CSM makes it a habit of consistently creating new collateral and processes to help their client succeed even if they are not revenue-generating activities. I politely call this the ‘5 to 1 Rule’. For every 5 calls you make, only 1 should be with an ask or a problem in the account that needs resolving. The other 4 should all be calls focused on value-add activities or ways you’ve made your client’s life better.
The goal is to keep your client in the mind-frame where when they see your name appear on Caller ID…they pick up on the first ring because they can’t wait to hear what new thing you have for them. When you get to that level, then you know you have made it in the Customer Success game.
Assessing Needs
Just because you have a new title does not mean you should shake your consultant roots and just because you have new goals to reach does not mean you should solely focus on ROI.
The key to up-selling a client and increasing adoption will always be to understand their business and how you fit in. Tackle this challenge by focusing on where the client’s pain points are through weekly or monthly meetings and weave yourself into the fabric of the company.
Bonus Tip: Don’t be afraid to jump down a few levels of management and speak to the people actually using your software on a day-to-day basis. You’ll find a lot of good use cases and even testimonials that can be passed along to the main decision maker.
Customer Success is here to stay and competition for sought-after CSM positions will just keep growing. Continue the quest for getting a little bit better each day and add these tools to your belt to keep pushing forward.
Grant Horvath is a Customer Success Manager turned Top Producing Sales Representative.
