The 10 Principles

Addendum to the 10 Principles

Real world tips

While we hope that our manifesto inspires others, we also realize that the devil is in the details. It is one thing to proclaim the principles we must strive toward; it is another thing to know how to do it. Below, we offer real world success stories and tips that have been shared within our budding Value Realization learning network, supplemented with examples from Method Garage research and practice.

1 - WE MUST discuss and document customer outcomes in a shareable form; ideally from a predefined value/outcomes framework that everyone understands.

• “The Head of Sales and I discovered that our sales team was collecting similar information to what the CSMs were actually trying to turn into a success plan. He was like, ‘What if we make the success plan in sales? The salesperson should make the success plan!’ It basically eliminated, you know, the two teams trying to document the same and not adequately talking to each other. So, we put fields in Salesforce that mimic the fields in our customer success platform for our plans. So those things actually are at least semi-filled in when it comes time for the handoff. And everybody's familiar with the basic components.”

• “Finally, we defined value templates with sales to be able to attach reasonable claims and metrics for certain solutions.”

2 - WE MUST expand the value conversation across customer stakeholders by speaking to them, clarifying and tracking what’s important to each.

• “You need to make sure that you're not single threaded through a single individual. Oftentimes, especially if you have a more complex product, you might have stakeholders who are in the business side. And oftentimes what is valuable to them is different. It's really impactful for your Customer Success Managers or leaders to understand what those value points are for the different stakeholders.”

• “I'm working to get my Customer Success Managers back to the basics of old fashioned white space mapping. CSMs know who the decision maker is, but they don't know who reports to who and what part of the organization and all the different roles. So, I ask them to just draw it on paper and they can't. We don't have the software in place that could show that in one piece of glass.”

• “We had a value engineering resource interview different stakeholders in the customer. He was positioned as an independent consultant. Their interviews with the customer would provide qualitative aspects to the value discussion. We got customers to do these interviews by explaining that it would help us create a stronger story for them - our champion - to pitch internally.” 

3 - WE MUST help customers verify and agree to smart goals (aka outcomes/value) during onboarding and at regular intervals throughout the relationship.

• “The CSM pulse checks goals with the customer starting with onboarding, and then every six weeks or so, and says, ‘Now that you're getting use of the product, have any of your goals changed? Are priorities shifting or your expectations shifting? What do we need to do to finalize this and make this measurable and then deliver upon that within a set time frame?’”

• “We introduce the Customer Success Manager basically when the ink is drying on the contract, so that they can validate what we know about their goals, suss out all of that information, come to an agreement with the customer, and then use that to draft their initial customer success plan.”

4 - WE MUST establish consistent, collaborative handoffs between sales, customer success and other team members.

• “For the sales to hand off, we created a checklist and made it a requirement - for our enterprise clients - that there was a meeting between sales, their manager, customer success, their manager, to go through the document together. This is one of the easiest things that we can do to drive accountability - having managers be involved as well. To have that meeting and have that discussion and document it. And go through who are the key detractors? Why did they want to buy? You know, it was all just distilled into a Google sheet that we all had access to and it made conversations so much easier moving forward with clients.” 

• “The value creation document that gets created presale lives on. When we hand over from Sales to CSM, we go through this document together, and it kickstarts the success planning conversation with the customer. ‘We have the goals you’re trying to achieve…’”

• “For collaboration between sales and customer success, we found during our process to bring in lesser experienced Customer Success Managers or even salespeople into the mix during handoff conversations with customers. It created this stair stepping for Customer Success Managers to grow from one account type to a different account type, either different verticals or different sizes requiring a different level of skill set. It created this mechanism and our climate to share information with each other. And I think that sort of proved itself out because our CSM-to-customer ratio started to become a little bit more balanced.”

5 - WE MUST make it fun - or at least worthwhile - for our customers and staff to complete value realization tasks and actions.

• “One of the things that we did that worked really well was create a party for the customers that were graduating from onboarding. They feel like a party. We would show up, the Customer Success Manager and Implementation Manager would put a virtual Zoom hat on. We show up and have a little fun and do a handoff and talk about the ongoing goals. ‘What do you want in the next part of the journey?’ ‘This is what we've already achieved. Let's celebrate this.’ ‘These are the things that you came in with, the original goals and these are going to carry through, right?’ So, just making sure it's incredibly seamless, but also a celebration and get them all excited about the next part of the journey”

• “We've started identifying milestone tasks in the onboarding process and sending cake to the customer when they achieve those milestones. So we actually give them prizes.”

• “If anybody uses Asana, they do a really good job. Every time you finish a task, you get like a flying unicorn across your screen. It’s kind of satisfying. My team has started to do that with an overlay. We use UserPilot to gamify onboarding a little bit and have people get rewarded with on screen stuff. The other thing that we started doing was implementing quizzes. So, when we get new users that are joining our teams that are growing, they can actually take a quiz and get a skill score. After that, they get sent something like points towards redeeming or stuff along those lines.”

6 - WE MUST assert ourselves as proactive guides in our customers’ journeys; helping to package their goals, approaches, resourcing and timing for optimal value realization

• “Rather than asking customers to come in with a clear ask on what value they want to get out of the product, we would come to them with suggestions ahead of time. We would say, ‘This is what your peers have done to define what value looks like.’ Creating that shared language around what value can actually mean in that definition. We really built it into our playbooks. We knew that there were 4 or 5 things that every customer wants to do with some basic parts of our product. So, if you understand what those are from a product management team, from engineering, from marketing, what are the things that our product can do and do well, And then, let's take those to the market and validate it with our customers. Once we get that defined, then we can go back to customers and new customers and say, ‘Here's what most customers are doing. If you have something else, then let's figure out what the measurement criteria are, what the metrics are.’ That made a huge difference in making value the mic drop moment.”

• “We are implementing a customer maturity matrix. I think value realization is super dependent on how far along your customer is and how familiar with technology your customers are. I'm constantly telling my team to meet our customers where they're at. And then, how do you tie a maturity matrix to value realization? It's all based on the customer's existing processes. Ideally your tech is enhancing or encouraging them to change their existing processes to do something more efficiently, save time or make more money and not every customer is created equal. If you can create a scale that you can help them evaluate themselves on how they are mature in that part of their business, and then where you can fit in, you can start to figure out a value model based on where the customer ranks, and then you can serve more customers in a different way.”

• “It helps if you understand your ICP. Your ideal customer profile. If you can understand that, then understand where the value prop is for each of your verticals, that helps with you being more prescriptive as you go into those conversations. This can oftentimes be really hard for companies, especially those who are startups that are just trying to figure out where they fit.”

7 - WE MUST introduce both the idea and the personnel of customer success earlier in the sales cycle to set a cohesive, clear expectation on how the journey to value will unfold

• “Everywhere I’ve gone I’ve tried to get Customer Success into the presale discussion with customers. I can position our differentiators and I can also establish a trusted advisor relationship with someone other than sales.”

• “CS for us was always a growth function and was already inserted in the sales process. Our Head of CS would come in and talk about CS as a differentiator. It turns out that customers really liked that part. And, they wanted to be able to track what CS was promising they would help them do.”

• “It started with customer success being involved from the beginning. I know that's not always possible because you get assigned after the sale. But, just having that initial conversation with the Account Executive and the client to say, ‘We're all on the same team.’ I think that helps a lot.”

8 - WE MUST redistribute tactical busy work and implement shared customer retention incentives in order to shift sales and customer success toward value realization as the core job

•  “Now that I took over sales, I removed a ton of technical product tasks from the CSMs and added customer goal tracking. CSMs are now in charge of mapping the customer’s business goals.”

• “One of the things we did right was to evolvedour CSM hiring profile from operational folks to industry-specialized folks who could speak the language of the customer and understood the business challenges of the customer. We also did a ton of enablement on how to get the attention of the C-Suite. How to have value led conversations instead of product led. How to use our business value map.”

• "We went through a period where we had a really slim budget and very few people. It forced us to revamp the way we did things. We ended up going back to basics and stripping away everything from the CSMs job except what customers themselves were actually needing to do. Not what we were putting them through. But what purpose was it if we were doing a certain type of training, why did the customer need that? What are they actually trying to do? And then we looked at other ways to get those things done. We ended up shifting a lot of CSM responsibilities onto our training academy.”

9 - WE MUST gain agreement up front with post sale stakeholders on which of our value metrics will be feasible, meaningful and attributable when it comes time to celebrate success.

• “We found that customers are never going to give you full credit for big numbers during value realization. Getting to an actual measurable number post sale is hard, often because we are engaged at the wrong level. Ops folks want to focus on their part of the world, not gathering intel for us. And, when we did get to the right people, they didn’t want to share the right data with us because they saw it as just a selling opportunity for us… which it absolutely was.”

• “Initially, we invested heavily in hard, quantitative value calculations. Now, the pendulum has swung back and we are using customer health and qualitative stories as a proxy for value. Stories are incredibly powerful. As long as you can prove that all the signals and success stories of delivery are there, in most cases, that’s good enough.”

• “At minimum, we needed a qualitative story of the value each customer gets. Our goal was to help the customer gain confidence in what we’re going to deliver from an outcome perspective, before any calculations. Eventually we would get to quantitative.”

10 - WE MUST curate and centralize real world content around value realization that can be shared and consumed by different stakeholders both inside and outside our organizations at scale

• “We launched an online community. One of the things that we did to sort of help define what success looks like for our customers is ask our customers to tell us. So, on our community, we started hosting a shared learning series. It's a webinar series where the customers teach each other how to do something in the software, and it's broadcast.”

• “There was a lot of turnover during the pandemic. We decided to start putting all of our content and documentation into Zendesk, including content around our industry and what we do overall. We started with the most frequently asked questions about our product. But also we found that when there was a relevant enough industry topic that we spoke about, that video would get shared with leaders within our customers. It offered advice to leadership because they were like, ‘Hey, this is a concept. We use this software now, and we want to have a larger conversation about that.’ This would actually drive a lot of conversation back to our team or implementation team.”

• “We implemented a combination of community and health center, which is where we try to route a lot of people to learn how to use the product. But, we also layered that in with lifecycle marketing. And what I'm finding at my current company is that we didn't actually have capacity or budget to hire a true lifecycle marketer. So what are we going to do with these customers? I actually had the opportunity to open a digital Customer Success Manager role and I was looking for somebody who had a combination of what customer facing experience and lifecycle marketing, that together those skill sets will be able to serve in that digital capacity. And so I'm going to be partnering with an enablement leader to bolster the health center and then also strengthen our community as well. So I think there's really three key critical pillars to it, like the community lifecycle marketing and then a health center to kind of pull that digital experience all together.

***BONUS***

WE MUST treat our channel partners as extensions of our own team and invest in them as primary players in driving customer value realization.

• “Relying on amazing CSMs isn't a way to scale value realization. Your success engagement process needs to be built for the masses to follow - including partners and resellers.”

• “Ultimately, CSMs and partners alike need to facilitate great value alignment discussions with their stakeholders. The missing piece is true enablement for the facilitators.”