What’s inside?

The first three chapters of this book set out the basic concepts of customer success management as a professional practice. It explains to the reader what customer success management is all about, how it helps the company that the CSM works for, and how it helps its customers realize more value from the products and services they purchase from that company. These initial chapters also explain how to prepare for the CSM role and how CSMs should manage their time, as well as the role of research, analysis, and planning within the context of customer success management and the critical path for CSMs to follow to maximize their effectiveness.

The major part of the book provides a detailed review of the Practical CSM Framework itself. Each phase within the framework gets its own chapter, which describes what happens within that phase, lists and explains the steps within it and provides recommendations and instructions for the best way of fulfilling each step. Additionally, a series of downloadable templates and checklists have been created to assist the CSM with their tasks, which are explained within the book and can be downloaded from the www.practicalcsm.com website.

The final chapter provides some concluding thoughts on how CSMs can best prepare themselves for their role and how they can avoid some of the most common customer success pitfalls and traps. The chapter also discusses how customer success fits within the overall concept of customer experience and concludes by providing some ideas around how the customer success management profession might evolve and adapt in the future.

About Rick Adams

Rick Adams is an independent author, trainer, and consultant, specializing in helping technology companies deliver measurable business value for their customers. Adams has over 25 years’ experience of working in the IT industry, including owning his startup software-as-a-service business, which he sold in 2012 to focus on writing, training, and consulting.

Delivering training and consultancy to hundreds of businesses and thousands of technology professionals in over thirty countries across four continents, Adams is now based on the rural west coast of Ireland, where he lives with his three dogs, Zeus, Terri & Brandi.

Adams’ recent work includes developing and delivering a global certification program on customer success management for Cisco Systems Inc. His book titled ‘Practical Customer Success Management: A best practice framework for managers and professionals’ was recently published by Routledge and is available from Amazon and all other book retailers. His current interests include helping individuals and companies develop best practices in customer success management and business outcomes-focused selling.

Outcomes

Customer success management is all about outcomes – outcomes for the customer and outcomes for the CSM’s own company. This book is also all about outcomes – outcomes for the CSM and for managers who set the customer success strategy, provide resources and lead the team. The outcomes that CSMs can expect from reading this book include a deeper understanding of the following:

• The nature of customer success management and its role within a modern business
• What skills, knowledge and experience the CSM needs in order to be effective in their role
• The types of research, analysis, planning and action-taking activities that CSMs get involved in
• The need for a customer success strategy and what should be in that strategy
• The Practical CSM Framework, its benefits to the CSM and how CSMs can engage with it to maximize the quality and efficiency of their work

• What the CSM should do to prepare themselves for engaging with a new customer initiative
• Approaches to onboarding and the role of the CSM in ensuring that onboarding takes place and is relevant to each customer’s needs
• How to engage with customer stakeholders and how to create meaningful stakeholder management plans and utilize those plans to develop high-quality relationships
• How to understand the customer’s business vision and strategy and how its business capabilities relate to that vision and strategy
• How to help the customer to understand which users will be impacted by the change and what those users’ needs are
• How to help the customer to build an adoption roadmap that includes a communication strategy, a training plan and a user support package for all impacted users
• The role of the CSM in helping customers to track and measure activity and to analyze and report on these measurements to show the value being realized
• The role of the CSM in helping customers to identify and overcome adoption barriers and to deal with risks
• How the CSM can develop their own knowledge, skills and experience over time to fully realize their potential as a highly competent and successful customer success professional