Our April 2021 CSM LDN event was such a hit. We had a panel of brilliant customer success leaders share with our community their tips and tricks on building customer success from the ground up. Our lovely panelists, Lulu Dermeche, Charlotte Cobbaert, and Alix Fenoll-Wattinne shared so many new takeaways and I summarised key highlights and takeaways from the session below. They have each built out a customer success function within a startup or a scaleup and they have
Align Customer Success and Sales
Make sure you work early and often with your sales team to ensure you are speaking the same language. It is best to educate your sales team about what is working and the pain points with your customers in the onboarding phase to ensure your sales team is selling to the right customer in the first place. Also, it is important to ensure your sales team is selling the value of the CS department as a whole, not just mentioning we have a customer success team. Work with your sales leaders to create a pitch deck on why customer success is such an asset and what they can expect from your customer success team in the journey of using your software.
Be Best Friends with the Product Team
In order to start Product Driven Sucesomer Succes, you need to become best friends with your product manager. The key to happier customers, in the long run, is CS and product alignment. Successfully aligned customer success and product teams have shared touchpoints in the customer journey. When you share this outlook with your product team you ensure that you are building the correct product that your customers not only use, but they love. Also sharing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) with your product team is a great place to start when it comes to product and customer success alignment.
Focus on Metrics not Health
Building a predictive health score might be a focus of a CS team down the line, but when you are starting off it is best to focus on correct metrics rather than the outcome of those metrics. First define your customer churn rate, ARR, and customer lifetime value before you build a customer health score. Make sure your metrics are 100% correct (or as close as possible) before you build out something on top of them. Having dirty or inconsistent data is a struggle we all face, but when we build a health score on unreliable data we end up causing double the work for yourself and your team.
Are there any other tips or tricks that I missed that you think would be beneficial for anyone building customer success from the ground up? If there are, please feel free to share them in the comments.