How to deliver value with every interaction
If you’ve spent enough time as a CSM it’s almost impossible that you’ve never encountered the “golden rule”.
Similar to the advice of “being more strategic” most people who talk about it don’t know how to do it.
Most CSMs and CS teams are not even close to it as they even struggle to deliver value frequently for 2 reasons:
They don’t know what value means to the customer
They don’t know how to measure it properly
If you are suffering from
customers going dark frequently
a substantially high churn rate
and low opportunities from existing customers (expansion, upsell, referrals)
there’s a high probability that you are one of them.
But don’t worry because it’s never too late for building a high performance.
Here’s the 5-step process how:
1. Run effective customer discoveries
The most fundamental requirement to deliver value with every interaction is to understand your customers' needs.
What are customer needs?
I define them as the training and education customers require to close the gap between where they are now and their desired outcomes.
This gap is defined by
current performance vs. desired performance
process design and capability
skills and knowledge available
and will look different for every single company.
If you replace the discovery with guessing and assuming you will certainly not deliver value with every interaction.
It’s not even a 50:50 chance but more like 10:90 and that’s unacceptable.
2. Viable customer success plans
Most customer success plans I’ve seen fail.
Because they are built how the vendor thinks they should be and not on the results of a thorough discovery.
A viable customer success breaks down the road to the customers’ desired outcome into
Milestones
Problems to solve
Tasks to complete
Skills and knowledge to acquire
Education and training required
If you are selling a sales tool and your customer's goal is to grow their revenue by 50% next year this could look like this:
A milestone could be to create 100% more opportunities
a problem is running poor demos that lead to low conversions from SQLs to SQOs
tasks to complete would be to make the demos more customer-centric
skills and knowledge to acquire translating features into outcomes
that you provide through webinars or workshops
3. Build hypothesizes
Delivering value with (almost) every interaction is a work in progress.
You won’t achieve it within a month.
You won’t achieve it with the first iteration.
What you need to do is to start with a hypothesis where you are testing its validity.
In both, the content and the format.
A viable hypothesis: Customers are able to improve their demo performance by participating in our webinar that teaches them how to do a, b, and c.
A service or input that is not designed with a specific goal in mind is useless.
Customers can find a gazillion generic blog posts about every topic.
4. Measure effectiveness
In the next step, you validate or correct these hypotheses.
A critical mistake most CS teams do is to measure the quality of their inputs and services by quantities.
It does not matter how often your customers use your product.
It does not matter how often they watch a tutorial.
It does not matter how often they download your Ebook.
What matters is how many customers are able to complete the task or solve the problem after they’ve consumed your content or services.
Depending on the nature of the content/topic you should measure it after a reasonable amount of time (e.g. 1 month later).
5. Adapt
If your goal is to deliver value with 90-95% interactions logic dictates that you achieve a high accuracy on every service or input.
As outlined earlier, it’s an ongoing process to achieve such a high-performance level.
The fuel for improvement comes from your customers.
You need to find out what works, what does not, and why.
You don’t drive progress by asking “How useful did you find xy” on a scale of 1 to 10.
What you need to do is to talk to customers.
“Have you been able to solve x problem with the input you got from guide/training/webinar/consulting session/etc.?” is the right way to go about it.
If the answer is ‘no’ your next move is to ask why until you find out what’s missing, creates confusion, or lacks actionability.
This is another excellent use case for the 5-Why analysis, by the way.
If you want to deliver value with (almost) every interaction you need to start thinking like a scientist or engineer.
Discover, plan, test, measure, and adapt.
There are no shortcuts but once you are there, you’ll never look back.