​10 Things to Consider When Formulating a Success Strategy

• Getting the mission crystal clear should give the team a clarity of purpose and uncover any impediments that might exist. A clear understanding of mission will assist you in understanding what type of experience you want the customer to have along each step of the journey.
• Everyone is trying to do the right thing when dealing with their customers. Without proper alignment you’re going to run into challenges. Make sure each role knows their role and their responsibilities.

The MAPP concept focuses on looking at the core elements involved and helps you to define what your strategy is and where your challenges may lie. It’s a simple but powerful framework that assists you with understanding the underlying elements of your Success strategy, the “clay” you have to work with if you will. MAPP enables you to investigate your assumptions, probing them to uncover your ideal strategy.

Understand what the goals are, identify the measures of Success and ensure that you have the support of the entire group of key stakeholders, including the C-Suite. Remember, just because it’s on slides doesn’t make it so. Your ability to deliver Success is just as dependent on the people and the politics as it is on the plan and the strategy. Getting the Mission crystal clear should give the team a clarity of purpose and uncover any impediments that might exist.

Alignment is critical. If you don’t have it, it’s like knowing that you have the right key for a lock but not being able to get it into the keyhole. While I believe that in most cases, everybody is trying to do the right thing when dealing with their customers. I often find that their definition of the “right thing” is not in line with what the program or process says to do. It’s simple human nature, we believe we know what’s best and often times that leads to us doing what we interpret to be best thing, sometimes with less than optimal results. 

Establish the guiding principles. What type of Success organization do you intend to become? What is your organizational “North Star”? Start out as you’d like to finish. Document the principles for your Success program. This step is crucial as these principles are keystones and define the core values for your Success program and will have a profound impact on your culture.

Plan big or go home. Once you’ve gathered the above elements, you’re ready to start planning the work. Architect an overall plan, create a lean Success Plan and roadmap for the effort. One good way to visualize this plan is as a “product” release. A great way to do that is to use Agile practices. Create it as set of user stories, generate a backlog and then organize it into Sprints that lead up to a “Release”. This practice helps break the effort down into bite-size chunks that can be assigned to key players for delivery.

Lord Kelvin famously said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it” and he was spot-on. One of they keys to a great strategy is that you have built it with instrumentation in mind. You need to be able to identify how you are doing against your measure of success. Determine what your Customer Success Indicators (CSIs) are. Make sure that you have constructed your customer journey in a way that makes this data available.

The first opportunity you get, think about putting an NPS survey in place at each of the key milestones in your program. This simple step gives you the ability to understand how you are doing success-wise at each of the critical junctures via transactional surveys. Start with a transactional survey at the end of the onboarding phase to gauge how well you did. It’s a great trip wire and will help you to identify where you had a sub-optimal experience or fit.

There’s a lot of talk about the customer journey being key. It’s not BS. You absolutely have to get very clear on what the journey to success will look like for your Customers or you’ll end up feeling like you are spending a lot of time fumbling around in the dark. Use the exercise to understand where there is unnecessary friction in your customer experience. Look for the critical gates that a customer must pass through on their journey in order for them to be on the path to success. Tie it to your Engagement Model so that your choreography is solid.

You need to build a kick-ass strategy to be successful. Just don’t forget the people that power it. Make sure that you put in place the culture to support and drive your strategy. Get this wrong and it will make for tough going — unhappy employees will never generate happy customers.

Without documented process you’re going to stuck in tribal knowledge mode. Don’t stunt your growth, give yourself permission to set aside some quality time with Lucid charts to get things documented. It’s the only sure way to make things repeatable. The added benefit is you can use it as a powerful expectation setting tool when you combine it with your Service Promise. The clarity will enable you to know what is supposed to happen and when with confidence. Never underestimate the power of being able to properly set expectations.

Create Success plans for each of your products, customer segments and lifecycle phases. Include plays for each step in the plan (including actions for when things don’t go quite as planned). Remember the 6 P’s of Success — Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.

Metrics are great but, do you get feedback directly from your customers? Use NPS Surveys to capture sentiment and consider adding evaluations into each critical element of your process (but don’t go overboard with it). Performance Improvement Evaluations (15–45 days post-onboarding) can help you validate that you delivered success to the customer and highlight areas for improvement.

Look at your Product, what can be done to make it easier to get started. What are the critical things a new customer needs to do get “hooked” on your Product. Don’t chase features if your in-product onboarding experience sucks. Also avoid the fallacy that throwing bodies at a problem that can (and should) be solved in the Product is a viable long-term solution. You’ll hire way too many people and your margins will suffer. Instead, focus on nailing the onboarding in the Product.

Think about Success as an assembly line. You don’t build one and bring in the fancy robots until you know what it takes to assemble your “product”. Like a craftsman, build your Success “product” by hand with Excel and elbow grease first. Then once you have things “dialed-in” look to super-size your results through automation and tools. There’s no quicker way to fail than to bring in tools ahead of your ability to really use them.

Customer Success is a huge differentiator. Talk about what you’re doing to make your customers successful. More importantly, get your customers to talk about it. That’s right, there is no better lead gen than advocate marketing and referrals. Customers talking about how you made them successful is great social proof and will attract other customers. Success stories provide some awesome content marketing opportunities and they demonstrate that you’re more than just your software, you’re a trusted advisor who cares.