From the course: Customer Success Management Fundamentals

14 tenets of customer success, part 2

From the course: Customer Success Management Fundamentals

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14 tenets of customer success, part 2

(upbeat music) - The CSM wants to help customers. They have to understand those customers, and in particular, if the CSM wants to help the customer attain his desired business outcomes, then the CSM will need to understand that customer, from a business perspective. This first of all means that the CSM must have a good general background understanding of what businesses are, and how they work. Module two, business fundamentals, will help to insure you have this background understanding. This will include things like why businesses exist and who they generate value for. How businesses are managed and who is involved in their management. How business strategy is formulated and actioned. The relationship between the business and its customers. How business capabilities combine to generate business outcomes. The role of business finance and the basics of financial decision making. And, how businesses strive to remain competitive in a changing world. Once you understand how businesses function in general, you can then research the specific customer, and if you're not already familiar with it, the particular industry to which the customer belongs. It's important to understand that two businesses that look pretty much the same from the outside, for example, they're from within the same industry, they're about the same size and operate in similar regions, and they sell similar products and services to similar customers, may be completely different on the inside. For example, Company A may just have received a large capital investment from a venture capital fund, and is in the process of expanding its operations into another region, and is looking to duplicate everything that it currently does in its existing region, within this new region. Whereas Company B might be hoping to get bought out by a larger company at some stage in the next year or two, and so it is trying to make its operations as efficient and productive as possible, in order to look more attractive as an acquisition. One company has a growth strategy, the other has a profitability strategy. These two very different strategies are likely to have a profound impact on what happens within each company's business operations. CSMs who understand this, and who make sure they are well briefed on the specific nature of their customer's business are far more likely to be received well by the customer's business stakeholders and much more able to assist those business stakeholders with attaining their desired outcomes. As we've seen from the previous tenet, about understanding the customer's business, CSMs need to be good at conducting research. Of course it's not just the customer's business that CSMs must know how to research. They must also be able to perform research about their own company's products and services, and potentially about third-party offerings that complement their own company's offerings, which the customer may also be purchasing and implementing. In addition, the CSMs will need to research into a wide range of topics, and especially into the needs of the people, who will be impacted by the products and services the CSM's company is providing, and/or, by the wider initiative that those products and services are supporting, as well as into the options and availability of training and certification for those people. One final aspect of research that is essential for CSMs to perform is research into KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, for measuring progress towards outcome attainment. Researching this information is the first step. But having found the information, the CSM then needs to make sense of it. This of course is the analysis aspect. CSMs need to be comfortable with applying the most commonly-used business modeling and project management tools, such as Porter's Value Chain and the Business Motivation Model, both of which are covered in Module Two. So the information they research, in order to make sense of it and to be able to both plan the CSM's own activities and to report meaningful information to others. The Customer Success Manager is, or should be, an expert in their own field. And that field is the onboarding and adoption of their company's products and services and the ability to maximize the value realized by customers from doing so. This makes the CSM a Subject Matter Expert, or SME, a Subject Matter Expert in how customers can maximize their success from the adoption and utilization of the CSM's company's products and services. When the CSM engages with the customer, typically, the customer will already be somewhere down the line of selecting, purchasing, customizing, installing, configuring and doing whatever else is necessary, from a practical perspective, to get the newly-purchased products and services up and running and ready for use. Other experts, such as account managers, product specialists and solutions architects, may have already helped the customer to decide what products and services they want, and how best to configure them, in order to get the desired outcomes they want from them. The CSM's role is to help the customer from that point forwards, in making those outcomes actually happen. That requires a lot of researching and analyzing, a lot of planning, and a lot of activity from the customer to turn their new acquisitions into functioning systems that are generating value. The CSM does not own the responsibility to make it happen. That's the role of one or more of the customer's key stakeholders. What the CSM owns the responsibility for is to provide consultative best practice advice and assistance to those key stakeholders, to help them make their plans and actions as productive and effective as possible.

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