Are We Being More Strategic Yet?
By Russell Bourne
“Be more strategic”. Are we really still saying this in Customer Success? According to quite a bit of content I’ve seen lately, yes. Clearly, the advice of the past hasn’t stuck, and we need a fresh look at how to accomplish a simple, targeted focus in our work.
When I hear people express concern that they aren’t being strategic enough, it comes in two forms. First, they’re being reactive to customers or internal forces. You can’t control your work if you’re in reactive mode. Second, they may have control over their workflows, but the workflows are not the correct things that will lead them to hitting some strategic goal. Either way, the advice that follows applies.
I also want to make clear that this content applies to individual contributors and leaders alike. For an IC, it’s not easy to juggle your literal compensation plan goals against the constantly-changing list of needs from customers. Leaders often have to juggle goals against the constantly-changing list of needs from cross-functional teams, or worse, their own leadership hierarchy.
The 4-Step Plan
Ask just about anyone in Customer Success if they have enough hours in the day, and “no” is the most polite thing you might hear. A friend of mine who’s a CS leader recently changed companies and couldn’t believe the complicated mess of a playbook they inherited. A different friend thought they had a strategic, sustainable system built a handful of years ago, and only realized recently that it had been ravaged by scope creep.
Either way, if you feel your work lacks strategic impact, you need to do these 4 things as soon as possible.
Revisit your departmental goals. I’m talking about the existential, “why does this department exist at this company?” goals. The top 2-3. They probably have to do with retention, expansion, or satisfaction. Your CFO is a great person to collaborate with on this step.
Revisit your customer segmentation. We’ve written a helpful blog article on segmentation before to get you started. Segmentation is something that often falls into the scope creep trap, where companies start overlaying revenue bands against product suite, geography, and other things and end up with an unwieldy number of segments. Ideally you’d like to aim for no more than 4, or 5 as a stretch.
Revisit the customer journey for each segment. Chances are your customer journey has a few major gaps, and more than a few non-strategic actions. When creating a customer journey, refer back to the goals you surfaced in step 1. For each goal, what are the projects that would most help you hit that goal? And for each project, what are the daily activities that would most help that project be a success? For example, if you have an expansion goal, the biggest leading indicator of future bookings is whether you have enough pipeline, so creating pipeline is your project. And the most impactful activities for pipeline creation are research, and selling touchpoints. Now, no other touchpoint in your old journey is sacred. If it doesn’t fit into retention, it gets the axe.
Retrain the team. This is by far the most important thing you can do to make your new strategic plan actually happen. No one will change their behavior if you simply give them an updated journey map, even if you RACI it. You have to break the old habits, get people practiced and comfortable with the new ones, and then reinforce consistently after the fact. The plan only works if you follow it. Every old touchpoint you deleted will have at least one defender. Those defenders need to go through a good change management process so that they buy in to the new way, and training is a big part of that.
Saying No
Once you have a shiny new strategic set of journeys, you lie with the reality that they are never truly done. They’re living documents. Still, you want to hold off the return to scope creep for as long as possible. If you’re a CS leader, and you get cross-functional requests for side projects, it’s imperative to learn to say no so that you stay on your strategic path. Saying no is a skill that warrants its own article, but what I’ll say here is a CS team must communicate within the team to share the types of requests that create risk of creep, and let leadership address it holistically. Chances are, your cross-functional colleague requested something in good faith. Leaders, work together to categorize the need, and then you can make an informed choice on whether it warrants inclusion in the journey.
What about AI?
I’m sorry to burst any bubbles out there, but AI is not going to take over for an over-worked CSM. If you revisited your customer journeys and came to the likely conclusion that they’re bloated with non-strategic fluff, you shouldn’t want the fluff performed by AI either. Put another way, AI is not the dumping ground to automate unthoughtful journey steps. If you’re going to use AI, or any kind of automation for scale, it still needs to be designed and delivered thoughtfully.
I’m of the opinion that today’s AI capabilities are nowhere close to being able to execute strategic touchpoints on their own. Simple Support inquiries, sure; using intentional questioning skills with empathy and curiosity, or any other relationship-building, no. What AI can do, of course, is help in the research phase. It can scour and interpret large, and disparate, data sources in ways a human can’t, to help surface opportunity and risk, or to validate causation between what you’re doing and the success of your customers and your performance.
Need help retraining your team? The Success League is a global Customer Success training and consulting firm. We offer both public and private trainings for CSMs and CS Leaders, and teams. Visit TheSuccessLeague.io for our full list of offerings or contact us today.
Russell Bourne - Russell is a Customer Success Leader, Coach, Writer, and Consultant. In a Customer Success career spanning well over a decade, his human-first approaches to leadership and program management have consistently delivered overachievement on expansion sales and revenue goals, alongside much friendship and laughter. Russell serves on the Board of Gain Grow Retain as co-lead for Content Creation. He is passionate about equipping individual contributors and business leaders alike to lean on their Success practices to grow their careers and help their companies thrive. He holds a BA from UCLA, and in his free time plays guitar semi-professionally.
