As a CEO, you are often the most impactful salesperson in the company. That’s great and you should use that because growth is a core driver of your company’s success. But your customers’ success is an even more important driver long-term.
And you’re human. If you hear 10 data points from prospects and one from a customer, you will align the company’s strategy around the needs of prospects - for sure.
Make sure you meet a balanced ratio of existing customers and prospects. It doesn’t have to be 50/50 but it shouldn’t be 90/10.
To make this happen, since you likely meet more prospects at the end of your fiscal quarter or month, try to front load customer meetings in the beginning of the period. Challenge your team to get you to see X number of existing clients a week. And see them in their natural state - in their office, for coffee, etc. - not just during an escalation or a renewal.
Do Meet Your Users At Your Customers
In a similar vein, as a CEO, you likely have relationships with your clients’ execs. That’s great. But just like you don’t always know everything about your employees’ day-to-day life, don’t assume your customer’s leadership understands the real-world usage of your product. It might be disarming at times, but take a power user or an admin or a key manager at a client out to lunch some time and you’ll be blown away at what you learn.
Don’t Make Any Decision You’d Be Embarrassed For Your Clients to Find Out
This is probably the hardest rule. In the street fighting reality of business, things aren’t always pretty and decisions are rarely obvious.
But as you are making the tough calls, try to visualize a client in the meeting room, understanding the facts you’re wresting with. Would they be compelled by your rationale and your choice?
One simple idea there is to literally have one seat in each conference room and put some token (e.g., a stuffed animal or a cutout figure) to represent your customer.
At Gainsight, one of our values is the Golden Rule, so it’s intuitive to say “if we were in the customer’s shoes, would we approve of this process?"
Do Talk To Your Front Lines
I’m sure you have a decent flow of information from your management chain. You probably know about the hot issue and escalations.
But also take the time to sit down 1-1 or as a group with your front lines - with your Customer Success Managers, Services team, Support professionals and other customer-facing individuals. Ask them about the “little things” that haven’t yet bubbled up yet in the customer experience but which could explode over time.
Our Services and Support team is in Saint Louis, MO and I always come back energized and aware from my visits there because I hear a totally different level of feedback when I interact directly with the team.
Don’t Disempower Your Team
As CEOs, we’ve become human forwarding machines. Get an email and forward it. Repeat.
And that’s awesome. I’m sure you’re great at taking that hot customer issue and getting it in front of your team right away to act on.
At the same time, you have a team for a reason and make sure you don’t disempower them.
If you have a designated Customer Success Manager, make sure that CSM is in the loop on the customer escalation plan and is ideally running it. Let the client know you’re personally on the issue but that the CSM is also on the ball (and likely was escalating it on either your side or the customer’s side for quite a while beforehand - if they were good!) And make sure that the customer situation eventually goes back to a steady state where the core processes are followed.
If you don’t have confidence in your processes or team, change them. But don’t make failure a fait accomplit by disempowering your team.
Do Promote A Transparent Scoreboard
You probably do a great job driving sales because everyone can see the current state of play. You likely have a dashboard in your CRM system tracking every sale, every opportunity and every lead religiously.
Do you have a consistent way to tell how you’re doing in Customer Success? Whether it’s a white board, an Excel spreadsheet or a formal piece of software, make sure you have a scoreboard so everyone knows when they are doing well - and when they aren’t.
Don’t Ignore Systemic Issues
It’s easy to get upset when a bad customer situation happens - a poor support experience, a bad piece of survey feedback or, perish the thought, a churn.
It’s also easy to raise H-E-double-hockey-sticks with everyone involved - the CSM, the support person, your exec team, etc.
But unless you have the wrong team, 9 times out of 10, there is a root issue involved. Use the 5 Whys principle to discover what really caused the customer problem and determine root causes like:
Are you evolving the product too quickly?
Are you stretching sales outside of your true product-market fit?
Are your team’s compensation incentives aligned?
Are you sending consistent messages on priorities?
Do Define Success
On that last point, one of your biggest jobs in this area is to define what winning means.
In line with creating the transparent scoreboard above, what does Customer Success really mean?
Is it just about the renewals and retention? In other words, if customers stay even with a sub-par experience, is that fine?
Don’t rush the answer - think hard about this. In some businesses, the true answer is yes.
Is it about product adoption? How do you measure it? How does that correlate with your business goals? How does that correlate with the customer’s definition of success? Did the customer really buy your product just to “use” it? Or was there some goal in mind?
Is it about happy customers? Who needs to be happy? The execs? The managers? The users? All? Is that realistic? Does the customer even care if it’s users are happy?
Is it about measurable ROI? Who does the measurement? Who signs off on it?
Every business will have different answers to these questions. But I can tell you if your answer is “we wan’t everyone to be happy, everyone to use every feature, tons of ROI and super high retention,” you probably haven’t thought hard enough.
Don’t Make Critical Decisions Without Your Customer Team
If you have a CSM team or another group responsible for customer experience, don’t have critical meetings without them. Don’t hold your product roadmap planning meeting and include sales and marketing but not the CSM team. Don’t make major pricing changes and send them to the CSM team as an FYI. Don’t have a sales strategy session and decide to enter a new market but forget to let the CSM team know.
Do Celebrate Customer Success
Finally, as you know, everyone in your company watches your every move. They look to see what you commend and what you criticize to determine what matters in the company.
If you’re ringing the bell and popping champagne on the last day of the month or quarter but you’re not doing anything when a customer renews or goes live, what message are you sending to your troops?
If you come up with creative incentives for the sales team but don’t find any way (even non-monetarily) to recognize your CSM team, you’ve spoken without saying any words.
And by the way, make sure you get a bigger gong.
