Preparing for a New Customer Engagement Part Seven (Final): Creating a Roadmap and Using Tools   Creating a Roadmap Roadmap components A roadmap is simply a high level timeline that makes it easy for both you as the CSM and for others that you share your roadmap with to track engagement progress and the completion of key milestones over time. The concept of a roadmap is that it enables you to break the entire journey into a series of shorter and therefore more manageable segments or phases. This makes the management of the journey more easily since at any one

Preparing for a New Customer Engagement Part Six: Information Gaps and Engagement Strategies   Managing Information Gaps What do we mean by “Information Gap”? Once you have gone through the process of information gathering it is highly likely that you will have discovered “information gaps”. An information gap is simply a piece of information that you need but do not (yet) have. This can happen for all sorts of reasons. For example maybe the person who knows the information you need has not yet become available for you to talk to them. Or maybe it turned out that the person

Preparing for a New Customer Engagement Part Five: CSM Requirements, Stakeholder Information & Third Parties   CSM Requirements Internal Outcomes As well as the customer’s outcome requirements your own company will (or should) have its own agenda for this engagement, and these could be defined as the “internal outcomes”. This might be as simple as “make sure as best you can that they renew their contract each year” but it might sometimes be more complicated than that. For example this might be the first time that your company has sold this particular solution type to a customer in their industry.

Preparing for a New Customer Engagement Part Four: Solution Information, Initiative Information and Outcomes 4.6 Solution information What have we sold them? Perhaps the most obvious information to discover is information about what has been sold. It certainly pays for the CSM to ensure they have a thorough understanding of this topic since they will be responsible for helping the customer to make sense of what they’ve bought and to get it up and running and creating value for them. A bill of materials or similar list that details on a line-by-line basis what precisely the customer has purchased is

Preparing for a New Customer Engagement Part Three: Internal Handover and Customer Information   Internal handover Types of Handover A great starting point for CSMs to prepare themselves for an upcoming customer engagement is to obtain some sort of handover from colleagues who have already been involved with this customer engagement. Typically this handover should come from the AM or other sales executive who has been actively leading the sales process, but others such as solution architects, service managers and implementation/configuration engineers may also be important to talk to. It really all depends on what your company sells and who

Preparing for a New Customer Engagement Part Two: Getting Hold of Information Accessing the Information You Need Where to Find Information At this early stage in preparing for the customer engagement you may well not yet have had the opportunity meet the customer’s lead stakeholder (I refer to this person as the SPL – Senior Project Lead) or other customer stakeholders and to introduce yourself and explain the role of customer success management in helping achieve their outcomes from their initiative. This will not always be the case – sometimes for example you may already know the stakeholders intimately because of

Preparing for a New Customer Engagement Part One: Why Preparation is Important What is Preparation? The Purpose of Preparation In this short series of articles we are going to look at what the CSM needs to do in order to prepare for a new customer engagement. Of course every customer and each customer engagement will be somewhat different, but whilst there will be variation in detail between customers and engagements, the process of engaging with customers is likely to remain the same or similar each time. Because of this, the way to prepare for this process of engagement can be

The Art and Science of Objection Handling Part B: Steps Four to Six Objections are Important Objections from customers’ stakeholders are inevitably going to be something that Customer Success Managers will come across from time to time. Perhaps one potential way of telling the mature Customer Success professional from the inexpert beginner is in how these objections get managed. Whilst the less confident CSM might try to avoid objections in the first place and handle them poorly when they cannot be avoided, the well-seasoned CS professional will recognize an objection not as a difficulty to be ignored or avoided but

The Art and Science of Objection Handling Part A: Steps One to Three Objections are Important Objections from customers’ stakeholders are inevitably going to be something that Customer Success Managers will come across from time to time. Perhaps one potential way of telling the mature Customer Success professional from the inexpert beginner is in how these objections get managed. Whilst the less confident CSM might try to avoid objections in the first place and handle them poorly when they cannot be avoided, the well-seasoned CS professional will recognize an objection not as a difficulty to be ignored or avoided but

Overview A LinkedIn contact reached out to me today with a problem, complimenting me (very kindly) on some of the free resources for CSMs that I have put out into the community and asking me if I had any articles or other content on the specific challenge they faced. The problem they had was a good problem, in the sense that it arose from the growth in numbers of customers that their company had been experiencing. Here’s what he wrote to me (very slightly paraphrased for brevity):   Good morning Rick, I read your articles and saw your videos about

Who Benefits from Customer Success Management? In short, both the customer initially and ultimately the CSM’s own company as well are beneficiaries of customer success management. These two beneficiaries could be looked on as being direct and indirect beneficiaries respectively, in the sense that the majority of what the CSM actually does is directly related to benefitting the customer’s organization through the processes of understanding and planning for and then actually undergoing the onboarding and adoption of and the value realization from whatever products and services they have purchased from the CSM’s company. In this way, the customer gains direct

Introduction Depending upon the product (or service) in question, full product adoption can be a potentially quite complex and even onerous task to perform well. As with all complex tasks, the secret is to break it down into its constituent components and then to deal with each component one at a time (as much as possible at least). There are many ways in which product adoption could be divided up and broken down into separate parts. The steps I have divided up adoption planning into are shown below: Step 1: Determine Adoption Requirements Step 2: Identify Process Changes Step 3:

Introduction Depending upon the product (or service) in question, full product adoption can be a potentially quite complex and even onerous task to perform well. As with all complex tasks, the secret is to break it down into its constituent components and then to deal with each component one at a time (as much as possible at least). There are many ways in which product adoption could be divided up and broken down into separate parts. The steps I have divided up adoption planning into are shown below: Step 1: Determine Adoption Requirements Step 2: Identify Process Changes Step 3: