The CSM Personal Evaluation Tool Context This article is lifted pretty much word-for-word from Module Nine of my upcoming “Certified CSM Professional” training and certification program. Module Nine covers Practical CSM Framework Phase 7: Engagement Evaluation, and the “Personal Evaluation Tool” is one of three topics covered in-depth within Video Two of Module Nine, the other two being the “Engagement Evaluation Tool” and “Using a Roadmap to Engage with Senior Decision Makers”. As well as receiving all the training materials, students of the “Certified CSM Professional” training and certification program also gain access

Customer Success Engagement Evaluation Why Evaluate What We Do? In Customer Success as in so many other professions it’s very easy to spend all of our time working in our role and forget to leave time to work on our role. What do I mean by that? What I mean is that just like all the best businesses have a process of continuing development that helps them to refine and improve what they do in order to become more productive, to increase the quality of their outputs, to be more relevant to their customers’ needs and so on,

Maximizing Success from your Initiatives Overview Our Mission at PracticalCSM.com is to provide customer success managers and indeed all professionals that have a customer facing role, with best practice tools and techniques that they can learn and apply to their real world situations to gain speedy and measurable benefits. This short article is about my RAPAM Model, and how you can apply it to complex initiatives to help maximize their success, both in terms of reducing the time it takes for your initiative to start delivering value, and in terms of increasing the

Value Realization and Performance Management This article is lifted almost entirely word for word from my company’s upcoming Certified CSM professional training program that launches this summer. More details can be found at https://practicalcsm.com Problems with Value Realization A friend of mine who is a senior manager in a customer success role wrote the following in an email to me not so long ago… “…it’s value realization that is probably the least understood, codified, and the most difficult to get the customer and provider on the same page. I understand each customer may

The 14 Tenets of Customer Success Here are a fourteen tenets (or principles) by which a CSM should live. Some of these may be obvious, but it is worthwhile reviewing all of them carefully as between them they explain both the role of the CSM and how that role can be successfully performed. Absorbing and understanding these tenets and then applying them in your work will go a long way towards helping you become an effective and productive CSM: Table 1.5: The 14 Tenets of Customer Success Management The reason why your company has

Providing a Joined Up Customer Experience The Role of Customer Success Managers in Providing a Joined Up Customer Experience What is a joined up customer experience? Put simply, it’s one where the customer doesn’t experience any issues around continuity of the quality of service being delivered to them as they undergo their customer journey with your company. To step back briefly for one moment, let’s first define what is meant by a “customer journey”. The customer journey is the sum of everything that customers experience as they go through the process of engaging

Who Benefits from Customer Success Management? Is Customer Success Management Worthwhile? Why bother? Customer success management is a lot of effort, so why take all the trouble? Would it not be simpler and cheaper not to provide customer success management services? After all, we survived for years without the need for a formal customer success management role, and the important stuff is already being done by our customer services staff, right? I hear the above questions fairly often, both from those outside and inside the customer success management profession. In all honesty the

Customer Success is a Game Changer If you have read my book Practical Customer Success Management: A best practice framework for rapid generation of customer success then you may recall from the first section of Chapter 12 entitled Who Benefits from Customer Success Management? that 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 benefiting the customer’s organization through the processes of

Common CSM Traps and Pitfalls Things that go Bump in the Night There are many things that can go wrong in business just as in one’s personal life. Sometimes these things are unavoidable either because we cannot foresee them in time to take any corrective action or simply because it is beyond our control to affect them. However there are some ways in which savvy CSMs can prepare themselves so that they both reduce the likelihood of these challenges occurring in the first place and reduce the negative consequences of them if they