has been declared the new mantra for customer success and it’s completely garbage.

Here’s a simple explanation of why:

Your customers don’t care about your efficiency or productivity goals.

What they care about is the value they get - more than ever.

The rise of the CFO is the final nail in the coffin for delivering mediocre outcomes.

What you really need is to do “better with less” or your customers will stop paying for your product.

You need to stop

Wasting your customers time providing services and inputs that don’t help them to move forward.

Applying “scaled” services and inputs for the sake of it where you end up spending more time on fixing things that went south than you would have spent in a 1:1 format.
Working with assumptions about your customer’s process and guiding them through in the wrong order.
Trying to make all customers successful which is a noble thing but never works out.

and start delivering more value with less waste.

Here’s how:

1. Doing the right things

If we break our customers’ desired outcomes down it’s the sum of solved problems and completed tasks.

Consequently, all the services and inputs we provide are dedicated to helping our customers to do so.

More specifically, educate, train, and consult them to build the skills and knowledge they need.

In the bigger picture, we want to do it in a way that at some point, they can do it (almost) without our help.

So how can we make sure we “deliver value with every interaction”? We measure the effectiveness of every interaction.

If we invite customers to a webinar, we measure how many people were able to successfully apply the learnings.
If we point them to a guide, we measure how many people were able to transform it into the outcomes we’ve anticipated.
…

2. Doing things the right way

Ensuring that customers achieve their desired outcomes is always the top priority.

There’s nothing to be gained in failing to do so in a “lean” way. SaaS companies need to stop doing customer success on their terms. It will never work.

In the second step, we want to improve the efficiency of our services and inputs. There are multiple dimensions to it

replacing formats e.g. doing a 10min tutorial instead of a 60min read
eliminating everything that does not add value up to whole pieces of content, material, outreach, etc.
automating things that can be automated to free up resources for better use

Do you see a difference here? Automation is not supposed to increase the number of customers each CSM can handle. It’s to serve our customers in a better way.

Being efficient also means to keep doing things 1:1 that can’t be automated.

If some piece of content has a 50% failure rate it means CSMs have to do a lot of reactive work in order to fix it.

If it takes more time to fix it than can be gained from automation you should provide it in a 1:1 format.

3. Doing things in the right order

A reason why services and inputs from customers success managers fail few have on their radar is that they are provided in the wrong order.

A few examples:

If you are helping your customers to have better sales conversations they need to talk to the right people (ICP) first.
If you are helping your customers to create more engaging content they need to first define what their company stands for
If you are helping your customers improve their product roadmaps, they need to figure out how to get quality feedback first

If we don’t help our customers to get the “basics” right there’s the possibility that all the inputs we provide are going to fail.

Doing things in the right order matters and it requires a thorough understanding of your customer’s processes.

4. Working with the right customers

In a perfect world, we would have 100% customers that fit the ICP in our portfolio. Despite the best efforts from marketing and sales, it’s never going to happen.

Of course, that does not mean we should not try. The higher the customer quality, the better the results and revenue impact becomes.

In reality, it’s a mix of great, mediocre- and bad-fit customers. As a customer success manager, you need to understand that not all of them will be successful.

I know this is difficult as it’s against the very nature of CSMs wanting to help people.

Further growing your strengths always delivers better results than trying to fix your weaknesses.

But your resources are limited and you need to put them where you get the highest ROI - for your customers and your company.

There are 3 parameters to decide who you are going to spend more and less time with

profitability and growth potential
success potential
relative ease to work with

Customer success teams play the main role in a SaaS company’s survival.

Make sure that you are performing at the highest level.

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Doing more with less