4 Laws of Customer Success

Miller’s Law comes into play as you start to think about how to manage the accounts over which you have stewardship.

George Miller was an American psychologist who worked in, and established the field of, cognitive psychology at Harvard University, MIT and Princeton. In 1956 Miller asserted that there was a ‘magical number’, 7.

Miller’s law suggests that the average person can only keep 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working memory at a time.

Where you have fewer accounts to oversee, using a prioritisation based on any number of the following variables would be likely;

• Effort — a 2 x 2 grid with effort on one axis and return on another axis, each one ranked high to low.
• Focus — 4 categories of ‘Maintain, Adopt, Grow, Save’ or ‘Hyper Growth, Growth, BAU, Save’.
• Time — a 2 x 2 grid with time on one axis (Short term to Long term) and Impact or Complexity on the other.
• Proactive Value — evaluating proactive work that could be done, based on 4 categories of ‘Quick Wins, Value Add, Back Bruner, Long Term’.

Parkinson’s Law states “It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

If Parkinson’s Law is, therefore, to be believed, in this example, the CSM will be most successful if, after prioritising customers, they then seek out proactive activities and engagements that can scale across many customers, thus saving time in repetition or wasted rework, and in turn making better use of the time.

Gall’s Law states that all complex systems that work, evolved from simpler systems that worked. If you want to build a complex system that works, build a simpler system first, and then improve it over time.

Example: If I wanted to build a world renowned, globally successful, online retailer, it’s highly unlikely I would be able to build the next Amazon overnight, let alone in the next year. That’s because Amazon has evolved over the last 25 years to be what it is today.