Tag Archives: Framework

The Pyramid of Customer Success

29 Apr
Customer Success is about proactively managing a customer relationship towards demonstrable value… and creating a great experience in the process. As anyone who has ever had the responsibility for doing this can attest, it takes more than just a CSM team to be successful. You’ve heard people talk about “a culture of customer success” or “a customer-centric company”, and while much of what it takes to win and be successful is empathy for and an understanding of the perspective of the customer, those can be pretty empty words without a way for the whole organization to put the philosophy into action.

 

In order for a company to help its customers achieve success, every part of the organization needs to engage… and deliver, but how do you do it in a way that scales?

 

As in many subjects related to Customer Success there is no one answer that fits every situation. The subscription economy is continually expanding and evolving, and what it takes to make an enterprise B2B customer successful can be very different than what it takes to make a large number of B2C customers successful. The model in this article can be applied to a number of different products and industries and is offered as a framework to ensure that different functions in your company are thinking about the success of your customers from every aspect of their experience.

 

As a software solution provider, you are no longer expected to just deliver a product. Your customers expect you to help make them better at what they do as a result of doing business with you, but it isn’t reasonable to think that hiring a bunch of CSMs is going to be either a scalable or an effective way of making that happen. In fact, if you’re expecting the success of a company and the satisfaction of your customers to be completely on the shoulders of your CSM team, then you’re setting yourself (and your CSM team) up for failure.

 

So how do you implement a culture of customer success across your organization?

 

A CSM can play many roles in the customer relationship. At any point in time, a CSM can be a number of things in a customer relationship:
  • A rudder – to steer the customer relationship in the right direction;
  • A thermometer – to truly understand the customer’s temperature,
  • A subject matter expert – who can provide guidance to a customer,
  • A relationship broker – who can connect the customer with the right resources inside the company in order help them be successful. These can be resources from product marketing, professional services, support, finance, or any other department
But actually delivering the value and making the customer successful takes much more than a CSM.

 

In fact, in many companies, the customer success organization doesn’t have a deep relationship with every customer, and in all companies, it isn’t the most scalable way to impact the customer experience (you do have a product, after all).

 

A pyramid provides a very effective model for how different aspects of what you do can influence the success of your customers, On the bottom of the pyramid, as a true foundation, are the components that scale the best, primarily because they are upstream in the user experience and reach the broadest audience. As you move up the pyramid are components that don’t scale as well; however they provide immense value to the subset of customers who need (and use) them.

CustomerSuccessPyramid

I wouldn’t argue that any of these is more important than another, and each type of product (consumer, SMB, enterprise) will have a different Customer Success pyramid, or will have different dependencies on different layers of the pyramid. In some companies and for some products, the specific levels of the pyramid may differ, and in consumer products, some levels may not even exist. The diagram I show here is designed for delivering Customer Success to B2B customers. A consumer-only product will likely not have a Professional Services component to it; however as even some “consumer” products are moving into the B2B space, they’ll need to add less scalable, and more specialized offerings in order to make their higher value customers successful.

 

Here’s a breakdown of the Customer Success Pyramid layer-by-layer:

 

1. Product
Customer Success starts with your product: It fundamentally has to work well; it must do what it is supposed to do; and it must do it in a way that ensures adoption of the features that truly differentiate you and will make your customers sticky. As your organization learns from customers, you need to ensure that you’re getting that feedback into your product. Every layer above this in the pyramid will only deliver incremental value to what your product offers, and if there are fundamental deficiencies or usability issues with your product, then you are eroding the potential incremental value that those layers can deliver. I can’t stress the importance of this enough as I’ve seen and lived it in the real world. If your product has fundamental shortcomings, the time and effort of everyone else in your organization is spent on “propping up” your core technology. You won’t have the time and credibility to deliver incremental value.  To some extent, no product is perfect, and the layers above will always help plug some gaps, but to the extent your product is intuitive and accessible, you can use the other layers to really provide a differentiated, service-oriented experience. It’s also important that you use every layer above Product in the pyramid to gather actionable information that will help you improve your product and the experience it delivers to your customers.

 

2. Documentation
Similar to the product, your documentation has the potential to touch every user… well, every user who can access it quickly and easily. Given the broad potential reach of documentation, it’s vital that your documentation is accessible, contextual, and modularized, with specific relevance to the part of the application or function that the user needs to learn more about. If your documentation isn’t easily accessible by your users *at the time and in the context in which they need it*, then many of them aren’t going to read it.

 

3. Training
Training material can take a number of forms, from multi-day customized on-site courses to short, focused, easy to digest, “how to” examples. Best in class companies have a range or training materials available and have implemented comprehensive LMS systems to gather feedback to understand which courses are providing the most value to customers. Course content should continuously be updated based on feedback gathered at higher layers of the pyramid. For example, if a significant number of cases are being opened related to system configuration, then your training team should be delivering additional modules around configuring the system. By creating those courses, you’ll not only be lowering the number of support cases that your support team has to deal with, you’ll also be creating a better customer experience by not having your customers face the issues at all. Your customers are telling you (via support) that parts of your application aren’t intuitive. The short term answer is to develop better training, the longer term answer is to make the product  more intuitive.

 

As your training curriculum evolves, it should be about more than just your product features, it should also include best practices for using your product and should complement your content marketing. For example, if you provide a CRM solution, your training shouldn’t just cover how to create an opportunity on your platform, it should provide guidance on what information is relevant in an opportunity as well as how best in class companies manage opportunities and how they use that information to better understand their forecasts and predict their business. If developed properly, training material will also highlight strengths and differentiators of your product without coming off as additional sales collateral.

 

4. Online resources
This layer can really help your organization scale and should be monitored and updated constantly: both proactively based on what you want your customers to know; as well as reactively, based on what your customers are asking you and what they are consuming. Online resources can be updated many times per day by many people. These updates can be as involved as developing best practices derived from a large number of customer engagements, then formally publishing them; or as effortless as having a customer or partner respond to an open forum question. The analytics around online resources can provide incredibly valuable insights around what your customers are reading, talking, and thinking about.
Some online resources don’t even need to be owned or managed by your company. Participate in forums that your company doesn’t manage, but are relevant to your space. If you have a partner ecosystem, both you and your partners should be providing online content for each others’ sites.  Many companies that provide solutions directly to consumers enable the vast majority of their customer success through these four layers alone, with the majority of content/investment/usage happening in layers 1 and 4 (product and online resources). By far, you get the most reach and scale from these first four layers as they’re all based on delivering  functionality and content to your audience in a “one to many” model. Working with your Marketing, Customer Support, and Professional Services teams you can target and develop content that will be relevant for and specific to a number of different customer segments.

 

5. Support
While the first four layers of the pyramid may be sufficient for some consumer products, enterprise products require enterprise support. World class enterprise support requires both rich and relevant online content (layer 4), as well as a strong team that can help customers dig in to complex issues. Your team members in support need to have deep product and technical skills in order to provide your customers with resolution to their issues as well as “soft” skills to manage your customers through challenging situations. For a great resource on how to deliver a great customer experience via your Support team, I’d highly recommend Flavio Martin’s blog.

 

6. Subject Matter Experts
Generally CSMs fit one (or in some cases both) of two profiles: 1) a subject matter expert; and 2) a relationship manager. Assuming the relationship manager role transcends all levels of the pyramid, subject matter expertise delivered by people who know your product, the industry, and your customers can help ensure your customers are getting off on the right foot and that they’re not getting “stuck” along the way in their implementations. A common question I get is “how is this role different than what a company should offer in professional services?” The main difference is that this subject matter expertise is delivered in very small doses, sometimes reactively, and in many cases at no additional cost to the customer. An efficient Professional Services organization would have a hard time delivering this expertise without a negative impact on profit margins. Subject Matter Experts can also help position the value of a deeper, longer term Professional Services engagement as a result of their interaction with the customer.

 

7. Professional Services
Professional Services are a great opportunity to drive success with higher value customers. Those services can be delivered by both your internal PS team and an ecosystem of partners. Generally, I’ve found the best services to perform with your internal team (vs partners) are the ones that meet three criteria:
  1. Services that your team can deliver successfully (this sounds obvious; however unless you’re really clear that the purpose of your PS organization is to drive subscription revenue in a way that is fiscally responsible, you can get caught up in trying too hard to indiscriminately drive Services revenue. As a result performing services that your company isn’t ready to do well);
  2. Services that are instrumental to your customers’ success; and
  3. Services which you can deliver while making sustainable profit margins and where you aren’t competing against low cost, “commodity” resources for a lower price.
While a professional services team needs to operate in a manner that contributes positively to the company’s margins, it’s fundamental purpose, if it’s part of a subscription software company, should be to drive the success, retention, and growth of your subscription customers. We measure our PS team’s performance not only on basic PS metrics, but also on delivery success, time to value, customer advocacy, and, yes, our renewal rates, because our PS team has significant impact on the success of our customers.

 

A common theme:
It may take a slightly different set of activities and roles to deliver success to your customers than the ones I’ve outlined; however a couple of fundamentals will hold true:
A) Your product is, without a doubt, the most scalable way to deliver a positive experience to your customer, so if you can take input from all of the other activities to ultimately improve the product experience, you will maximize impact and reach;
B) Product alone, CSMs alone, in fact, none of these layers by themselves can make customers, especially enterprise customers, successful. A culture of Customer Success needs to think about customer experience in the context of all of these layers.  As you focus on your customers’ experience, try to think about it in the context of this pyramid. Socialize it with the rest of your leadership team. Share it with the rest of your company. Especially as your colleagues ask “what can I do to help improve the customer experience?”

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The Customer Engagement Model

27 Jan

Proactive customer engagement. It’s a tenet of Customer Success. We all do it to some extent – some of us better than others. The question is “How do you best go about structuring that proactive engagement so that you can scale a team and provide a consistently great customer experience?” The answer is “With a good Customer Engagement Model.”

A good Customer Engagement Model needs to be flexible in two key ways:

  • It needs to accommodate different phases of the customer lifecycle; and
  • It needs to support both scheduled and unscheduled interactions with customers

In a prior article on Time to Value, I pointed out that it’s critical to keep momentum going once the initial sales deal is closed and ensure that you aren’t diverging from your customer’s original path to reaching their objectives. Your Customer Engagement Model should, therefore, start at the time of sale in order to maintain momentum and achieve a first “quick win”.

Good Customer Engagement Models should also help keep you focused on answering the three key questions you need to know about every customer:

  1. How is our customer measuring value?
  2. Are they achieving that value?
  3. Are we providing an experience that will result in loyalty and advocacy?

Irrespective of whether your company provides high personal touch Customer Success or whether your Customer Success model is more self-service, your proactive engagement with customers should be governed by an Engagement Model. A good Engagement Model helps you understand: A) what the engagement “moments” are for customers throughout their lifecycle; B) who in your organization is responsible for interaction with customers at those moments; and C) what the objective or expected outcome is for each of those moments.

I’ve illustrated what that model looks like conceptually in the image below:

EngagementModels_20140126.001

The Phases:

The first key point of an engagement model is that it needs to work across two very different phases of the customer lifecycle, the Onboarding Phase and the Ongoing Usage Phase.  The first phase, onboarding, is the much higher intensity, much more critical, and much more interactive of the two. I think of these two phases very much like the takeoff phase and the cruise phase of airplane flight. In the takeoff phase you’re in close proximity to the ground, there’s quite a bit at stake, it’s the phase where more incidents happen, and it generally requires a high degree of pilot focus. During the cruise phase of flight, it’s important that pilots monitor their instruments, ensure they’re on course, and pay attention to external factors. They can’t ignore that they’re flying an airplane during the cruise phase; however the workload, intensity, and immediate consequences are lower than during the take off phase. Pilot’s don’t need to give the airplane nearly as much of their attention during cruise as they do when they’re screaming down the runway, getting it airborne, dealing with heavy air traffic, and monitoring for even the slightest anomaly – which could have dire consequences if left unchecked. During cruise, a pilot can leave the cockpit to use the restroom. During takeoff, on the other hand… not so much.

The Onboarding Phase:

The Onboarding Phase serves two purposes:

  1. It ensures that your customers are getting off on the right foot and are set up for success with your solution; and
  2. It creates a logical opportunity for both you and your customer to think about, articulate, and agree on how you’re going to measure value in the ongoing phase.

In a “high-touch” customer engagement scenario, much of the onboarding phase may be done by a CSM or someone from the customer onboarding or training team. The customer needs to become familiar with your solution during this phase, and you need to ensure that they’re able to be self-sufficient when using it.

A “low-touch” customer engagement scenario will have the same objective, but will achieve it more with automated marketing/email campaigns, automated measurement and exception handling of early adoption indicators, and automated training for the customer.

In both the high and low touch models, it’s critical to measure early indicators of user adoption and determine what course corrections need to be applied. The method for measuring the indicators and for communicating to customers needs to be much more automated in the case of a low touch engagement model.

In addition to ensuring adoption and self-sufficiency, the onboarding phase in a high touch B2B/Enterprise Solution world provides an opportunity for you to validate key assumptions with your customer on how they are going to measure value and how they’re going to quantify the success of their implementation of your solution. If your sales process is value based, you have probably already begun identifying use cases, measurements, and customer ROI expectations. You may very well have also quantified the expected ROI from adoption of your solution. The bad news is that too many companies don’t do any further measurement once the deal is closed.  A good onboarding process not only ensures that a customer is adopting your product but positions you as a partner to help ensure they’re making progress against their stated objective.

Example Engagement Moments during the Onboarding Phase (some of which are included in the sample model above) include:

  • A kickoff meeting to ensure that the customer meets your team (either virtually or face to face, as appropriate)
  • Confirmation that the customer has dowloaded / activated / or logged in
  • Initial Product Training
  • A formal review of the first set of metrics delivered by your solution. These should provide an indication of the customers adoption, usage, and effectiveness (how well they are doing x, not just that they are doing x).
  • A checkpoint with the customer to ensure that they understand how the product works and that they feel self-sufficient

In the spirit of Time to Value, it’s vital during the onboarding phase that the process moves as quickly and efficiently as possible and that customer momentum is maintained in the process. I’d strongly recommend two things to manage momentum:

  1. Once you have defined your Engagement Moments, measure the time that it takes each customer to progress from one to the other. Analyze your metrics and determine whether there are any systemic delays in any of your phases of onboarding and work quickly to get to root cause.  I’ve had teams shave weeks off of implementation/onboarding by measuring individual phases, identifying root cause for the delays, and then fixing the process.
  2. Set escalation triggers if you don’t see adoption events occurring with your customers according to expected timeframes during the onboarding phase.  If your customers haven’t created x accounts in y weeks for example, that should trigger proactive engagement on your part – in addition to the predefined moments in your plan.

The Ongoing Phase

The focus of the Ongoing phase is to ensure that your customer is achieving the objectives identified in the Onboarding phase and that you’re keeping a pulse on their experience.

Engagement Moments in this phase can be categorized into one of two types: 1) Time-based; or 2) Event-based.

Time-based Moments

Time-based moments are ones that you can put on a calendar, such as a Quarterly Business Review, Monthly Metrics Review, Annual Account Review, or even Weekly Meetings for your highest of high-touch customers. Time-based moments are great ways to keep your customers interacting with you for the duration of the lifecycle – as long as you clearly set expectations and provide valuable feedback to them during those engagement points. If you aren’t continuously providing value to your customers during these moments, they’ll lose interest and stop attending regular calls/meetings, so be careful not to over-schedule them, and be sure to provide relevant engaging content in each of these engagements.  Dan Steinman from Gainsight recently wrote an informative blog post characterizing a good Quarterly/Executive business review.

Event-based moments are ones that are triggered by the occurrence of an event (or non-event in some cases), such as a customer logging a high-severity case with your Support Desk; a new product release from your company; a change in leadership or executive sponsorship at your customer; a poor or mediocre survey response; an absence of support cases over a defined period of time; a decrease in overall usage; or a decrease in key usage metrics from a given customer. The purpose of event-based triggers is to help you react quickly and appropriately to events that can influence the health of the customer relationship –  for better or for worse. In either case, the sooner your team reacts to the event that triggered the engagement, the better off you’ll be.

Customer Engagement Models are unique to companies, products, and customer types. An Engagement Model for an enterprise customer with a highly complex solution will look very different than one for a consumer with an off-the-shelf SaaS offering and both will engage different parts of the organization. Logically breaking down that model into two key phases (Onboarding and Ongoing) and defining the Ongoing phase in a way that supports both Time and Event-based moments of engagement with customers should help you optimize for your products and customer types. You will likely end up with more than one engagement model for different customer segments.

Have you employed a Customer Engagement Model and what methods or tools have you used to ensure that the model is consistently applied across your customer base?

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A Practical View of Your Customers

7 Oct

A few months ago I wrote a post about customer segmentation titled All Customers Are Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others.  I graphically represented the concept of customer segments with a pyramid, because it was a simple and straightforward representation of the concept.  When it comes down to actually segmenting your own customer base, though, and making decisions about how to service them, I’ve found the best way to do that is to use a Pareto Chart.

Pareto1

Figure 1: Pareto Chart of 2000 Hypothetical B2B Customers

The Chart Described

If you aren’t familiar with the concept, a Pareto Chart is great way to visualize how your revenue is distributed across your customer base and how much your largest customers contribute to your overall revenue.

The chart above came from a hypothetical set of 2,000 customers I created from data that I made-up to represent a typical B2B customer distribution curve. The grey portion of the Pareto Chart is actually a bar graph made up of 2000 data points in descending order. Each (very thin) bar represents a customer’s Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) and maps to the axis on the left – in MRR dollars.

The blue line shows the cumulative percentage of revenue represented by the customer base as it moves along the X axis and maps to the axis on the right – in percentage of total revenue.

Creating Your First Segment

The Pareto chart quickly shows you a couple of things:

  1. How your customers are distributed
  2. How many customers fall into each bucket so that you can efficiently allocate resources to manage a large percentage of your revenue base.

The image below takes this hypothetical (but not uncommon) B2B case and creates a first segment of customers. This segment happens to consist of approximately 10% of the customer base (It’s 200 grey “bars” wide, representing 10% of the 2000 bars in the graph) and approximately 45% of the revenue (the right edge of the green area intersects the blue “% of revenue” line at about 45%). You’ll also see that the MRR value at the right edge of the green area is approximately $5,000 – which represents the minimum MRR for a “Tier 1” customer.  Again, these numbers are examples. The process for creating customer segments requires a little art to go with this science and is going to take some iterations to get right; however 10% of your customer base is a reasonable baseline number for a high-touch CSM organization.  You may choose to make it larger or smaller for a number of reasons (which I’ll cover in a future post), but this framework is a good way to illustrate it and justify whether you’re covering a reasonable amount of your revenue base.

Figure 2: The First Segment

Figure 2: The First Segment

The Second Segment

Now that you’ve created a high-revenue customer segment that can justify a high-touch CSM, you might want to see whether it makes sense to cover another relatively small number of customers that still might represent significant revenue with a somewhat lower touch, but still personal, approach.  Based on this customer distribution, you can see that a second segment can be created that consists of twice as many customers as the first segment, and in combination with the first segment gives you coverage for approximately 75% of monthly revenue.

Figure 3: The Second Segment

Figure 3: The Second Segment

Pareto Charts can illustrate pretty clearly how much revenue is represented by each segment of customer as well as show the baseline MRR that can be used to define the “floor” of each segment.  Figure 3 shows that in this hypothetical situation, 75% of the revenue is represented by approximately 30% of the customer base, with an MRR of $1,700 and above.

So Now What?

Now that you have a framework for segmenting your customers, you can optimize your investment in your CSM function.  In this example, the first segment of customers represents significant revenue that can justify high-touch named CSMs who can engage with customers in a personal, frequent, and customized manner. The second segment consists of roughly twice as many customers and a little over half the overall revenue of the first segment, so the amount of engagement per customer that can be justified for each CSM is significantly lower. The third segment represents approximately 3/4 of total customers yet only 1/4 of total revenue and can be effectively managed with Customer Success Automation and Marketing Automation. I’ll discuss how to address these three very different customer segments in more detail, and how Customer Success Automation applies across all three in a future post.

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Demonstrating Value and Progress to Your Customers

9 Jul

Creating demonstrable value is the single most important objective of a Customer Success organization.  Renewals, upsells, references all happen when you have a relationship based on value with your customers.  While achieving that objective requires input and contributions from Marketing, Sales, Professional Services, and other parts of the company, the Customer Success function owns the primary responsibility.  Some companies do an incredible job at delivering and proving value to their customer base; however many companies (some would argue most) are working to put a model and plan together to demonstrate value for their customers.

The steps I propose for getting there are, at a high-level, very straightforward:

  1. Identify a Framework and Representative Behaviors for Each Phase
  2. Identify Meaningful Quantitative Metrics
  3. Perform a Benchmark
  4. Create an Improvement Plan
  5. Measure Against Plan, Provide Feedback, and Revise

Getting them right, however, is by no means easy. Each one of them takes thought, analysis of data, and iteration.  The metrics and behaviors you need to identify are going to be unique to your space – and if identified well, will actually be unique to your company, so that you can measure value based on true differentiators that you offer.

So I offer these 5 steps not to make the process look easier than it is, but rather to provide some guidance as you take on your most important task as a company: continuing to earn your customers’ business.

Step 1: Identify a Multi-Phase Framework and Representative Behaviors for Each Phase

Every exercise needs an objective, and ideally a roadmap to get there.  A framework provides your customers with a “bigger picture” view of the landscape and what they should be thinking about in order to be more effective at what they’re doing.  Frameworks also give customers some perspective on where they fall with respect to industry leaders and laggards.

Figure 1: Example of Maturity/Effectiveness Model

Figure 1: Example of Maturity/Effectiveness Model

One framework that works well is a Maturity (or “Effectiveness”) Model.  These models generally consist of 5 (plus or minus 2) categories that represent different levels of maturity/proficiency/effectiveness in your space.  In order to define these categories (or levels of maturity), identify behaviors that are characteristic of each of those levels and associate those behaviors with each level of proficiency/maturity as shown in Figure 1 above.

Customers can look at a framework like this and quickly conceptually grasp the types of behavior/activities necessary in order to advance along the model.  As you develop this framework for your product and space, ideally try to map some of the behaviors that are associated with maturity levels to features of your product, so that you can easily associate customer usage of valuable features with their progress along the Maturity/Effectiveness Model.

Step 2: Identify Quantitative Metrics that Matter and Can Be Measured

In order to objectively measure progress on an ongoing basis, you will need to identify relevant quantitative metrics that drive value, are measurable, and ideally are good indicators of customer health/stickiness.  For example, in the case of a CRM company, you may want to know your customers’ conversion rate of leads or opportunities in order to understand whether you might be able to help them become more effective with your marketing automation solutions.  In the next steps, you’ll compare this data to benchmark data for a given customer and measure improvement.  You can also compare these metrics to aggregates for “like” companies.  As you identify target metrics, you’ll need to distinguish which ones are considered “usage” metrics that you can obtain directly from your SaaS application and which ones will require consent and participation from your customers to obtain.

Step 3: Benchmark Your Customers on Day 1

It’s important to understand the specific stage where each of your customers fit in the model/framework you’ve created, and it’s also important to get some baseline data on quantitative metrics as well.  For larger, higher-touch customers, you should be able to understand this during a consultative sales process; however even with lower touch customers, you should be able to characterize/segment new customers based on system configuration, features purchased/implemented, and initial capture of the quantitative metrics you identified in Step 2 for that customer segment.

Step 4: Create an Improvement Plan

This step is critical and is a combination of art and science as it can be challenging to set targets at the right level.  Your primary objectives should be to:

  • Set targets that are based on incrementally improving from the baseline you measured;
  • Encourage practices and usage of product features that will advance your customers along the Effectiveness Model you defined in Step 1;
  • Create a structure and context for the ongoing digital and interpersonal communications you will have with your customers.

Step 5: Provide Constant, Ongoing Feedback on Progress Against the Plan – And Revise as Necessary

Now that you’ve defined a framework, key metrics, and a plan for improvement against a baseline which you’ve captured, you can engage with your customers in a meaningful way that is focused around helping them get value from your product and become better at what they do.  And you can measure their progress against defined objectives.

As a first step, you may want your CSMs to interpret system data and personalize recommendations to individual, high-value customers.

As you expand this offering to additional customers, you will need to define customer behavioral segments based on the metrics you’re capturing and provide those customer segments with extremely relevant digital content.  For example, if you’ve identified a subset of your customers whose systems data indicate that they haven’t been using a key marketing automation feature of yours and that their conversion data hasn’t improved since their baseline, you can begin a drip marketing campaign to them on best practices in marketing automation and how to use your product to improve those metrics.  That specific message should only go to that identified segment of customers, though, as you don’t want to “spam” your other customers with information that isn’t relevant to them. Your marketing team segments prospects based on behavioral data and delivers relevant content to them.  You should target communications to your customers using similar logic.  Great technology already exists to help you do this.

Helping customers improve and become better at what they do through their partnership with you is one of the greatest ways that you can demonstrate value.  You don’t need to demonstrate it for all customers on Day 1. In fact, the sooner you can deliver it to some customers, the better.  You can begin by implementing this model in a manual way with your most valuable customer segment, then roll it out to your broader customer base by segment – perhaps as you deploy additional Customer Success Automation and Marketing Automation tools. Hmmm… I bet a Customer Success Maturity/Effectiveness Model would fit in perfectly right about now…

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