By Johnny Daly and Stephan Thodesen (@Stephan)
“I understand why you would like to know, but what I don’t understand is what is in it for me.” In my years as a Customer Success Manager (CSM), I have heard variations on this statement countless times, and understandably so. It’s completely fair to expect something in return for sharing not only your time with a supplier but also aspects of your business that are generally not shared with an external audience. The onus is absolutely on us to help our customers understand – we, as CSMs, need to articulate better exactly why we are asking probing and in-depth questions. So let’s dig into this in a little more detail – what are the benefits to you as an executive sponsor to engaging with your CSM?
Strategic Consulting
The first point to understand is that the CSM role is predominantly strategic. Yes, we can help you fight the fires and quickly bring attention to critical issues, but that’s not how we are best used. The most fruitful partnerships I have had in my career are the ones where I am almost playing a consultant role, working alongside Executive Sponsors to understand the overall strategic vision of a company and then digging deeper into specific desired business outcomes.
From there, we work to identify defined, measurable success criteria before deciding how exactly we will work together to implement these. This forms the basis of a Success Plan – essentially a program of work which we can measure our progress against and replan where necessary. It is our role to guide you and show you the optimum path to value. It is also our responsibility as CSMs to remove the fear from our customers that when they share future plans or strategies with us, a sales pitch will automatically follow, rather than the consultant-style role that we should be adopting.
As you can see, if your Customer Success Manager doesn’t understand your business and your targets, they cannot work with you in order to help you plan out your route to success. It’s a mantra I repeat to all my customers – the more I know about you, the more I can help. I understand the hesitance, I really do – it sometimes doesn’t feel natural to speak openly and honestly about your business. We rarely want to show the “warts and all” side of our organization to outsiders. This is where I believe we as CSMs need to be better, too – we must work to be seen as an extension of the customer team, someone who is the advocate for the customer within Alteryx.
Utilization Growth
It’s not just business goals we want to know either-- we want to understand how you are using our products too. This can take the form of usage data and analytics, as well as current and planned use cases. We know the benefits of having access to this for a supplier are obvious. But why should you, as the customer, be happy to hand this over?
Let me tackle these one by one with some examples. By examining usage data, we can see where products are under-utilized. One thing that surprised me greatly when I first became a CSM is that many times product usage (never mind growth) doesn’t happen organically – users often need encouragement, enablement, or even awareness as to what a product can do for them. In combination with this, many companies aren’t aware that their investment is not being exploited to the full. Having access to this enables us to not only raise the point but also actively work with you in order to drive adoption and ensure you are getting maximum ROI on your spend with us. We can also do things such as identify usage spikes to enable you to scale resources up or down as needed, or if usage has fallen off, help you understand why, and mitigate the reasons.
Use Case Optimization
Understanding the use cases that you are running, and planning to implement, is important as well. In combination with our aforementioned grasp of your strategic goals, this allows us to ensure you are prioritizing the use cases that will bring value to you as quickly as possible. Using our in-depth knowledge, we can advise which are the best candidates for our products, and depending on the services you have purchased also work alongside you in order to help implement them.
There is also value in understanding and examining existing use cases too, whether that is in terms of seeing where efficiency gains could be made (whether technical, personnel, or process) or in providing us with that birds-eye view that will allow us to also understand where you are not using our products. Having an external set of eyes to suggest other areas where you can take advantage of your existing estate can be very valuable.
We have knowledge and experience in a wide variety of industries and companies. We urge you to take advantage of this by providing us with the knowledge to help you as much as we possibly can.
The beauty of the CSM role is that we are committed to your long-term success. Do we want you to purchase more licenses? Of course we do–customer retention and upsell are key measurable components of the job. But you are not going to buy something that isn’t going to provide more value for you. We understand that, above all, we need to build trust with you, our customers. It might seem counter-intuitive, but it is in our interest to be your voice within our organization. We need to be seen as trusted advisors who are working alongside our customers in order to be able to do our job effectively.
Conclusion
In summary, we need you to empower us to be able to use us! We dig into your business to get the information we require to be useful to you and your business and to provide all the benefits I have spoken about. If we have the information we need, you effectively have an additional team member. One who is incentivized to keep one eye on the long-term success of your relationship with our organization. One who will ensure you will extract the most value from your investment with us, both now and in the future. It is this focus on continuous added value that differentiates us from other roles and can make the CSM an invaluable member of your extended team.
If you empower your CSM to be your ally, you'll unlock the full potential of your partnership, ensuring maximum value for your investment now and in the future. Together, we can achieve great things.
