Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) are absolute table stakes for any Customer Success strategy. I’ve written <a href="https://csm-coach.com/6-things-that-make-great-qbr/" target="_self">before</a>, about the importance of QBRs and over time, the QBR remains the mainstay of assuring the value is delivered to your customers. What’s interesting about the QBR practice is the various ways that they are performed and what they may not include.

3 Tips to Up your QBR Game

SMART goals are goals that are:Specific: Stick with clear and well-defined goalsMeasurable: Ensure that the goal has a meaningful outcome that can be tracked/reported.Achievable: The goals you set with your customer must be attainable with minimal dependencies.Relevant: The goal must be in line with what your company does.Time-bound: Because your QBRs are…quarterly…try for deliverables and goals that can be achieved during that time frame (or faster).

1. SMART Goals

Considering that your QBR is a report card of sorts that is full of goal attainment reports and new goal establishment, this is not the time for surprises. You’ll likely have key stakeholders at your account in the meeting with you. Ensure that you’ve reviewed as many data points about the account before your meeting. Check things like:<ul><li>Account notes&nbsp;</li><li>Support case history&nbsp;</li><li>Usage data&nbsp;</li><li>NPS/CSAT or other survey data&nbsp;</li><li>Escalated account history&nbsp;</li><li>Open project plans&nbsp;</li></ul>

2. Research

Document, document, document. And document some more! Leverage your company’s CRM tool as much as you can. If you find that doesn’t work have a look at Evernote to see if it might meet your needs.Do what you say, say what you’ll do: This seems self-explanatory, but it’s easy to get distracted and forget to deliver on something that was promised. Don’t drop the ball on this one, delivery impacts your credibility with your customers.

3. Follow Through

This is a guest post by Keri Keeling. Keri is a results-driven Customer Success leader with deep experience in helping SaaS vendors build and grow their Customer Success team’s operations and…

Stashed ideas

People do many things with your application but only a handful of those actions result in a user achieving success. 'key activation events' (Kaes) aren't always obvious but they are there. Customers who Emailed customer support during their trial period were 9 times more likely to stick around.

Key Activation Events And The Secret For Bloody Brilliant Low-Touch SaaS Onboarding

Of all the actions a user can take in your application only a handful lead to success and even fewer actions lead to payment. Make a list of all the possible actions E.G. Updating profile, invite team members, number of team members invited, writing a post, number of posts written, sharing articles. Now examine the actions that your perfect customers performed during their trial phase. With this information you can create Hypotheses to investigate.

Identifying possible key activation events

Cohort analysis is a technique that groups a subset of users that share a common trait over a period of time. You then compare the impact of that shared trait on the desired outcome. A table shows a subset of users in one day who started a trial. The table also shows if they added their company logo to the Website and whether or not they signed up (and started paying) during their trial period.

A guide to cohort analysis

Make it clear why your user should take action and complete a key activation event. The word 'Because' makes it crystal clear that completing an action gets your user closer to their goal. "because" helps you make a perfectly rational case for why. And it helps your potential customers make the case for you too," says psychologist Robert Cialdini in influence: the psychology of persuasion.

The secret is… ‘because’

The three stages to activation are (1) pre-signup, (2) first user experience, and (3) post-signup. Think about each for bloody brilliant low-touch onboarding.

Putting this together: how to activate every user

With your new understanding of your key activation events, your pre-signup communications need to prime your user. This isn’t to say your users need to be told everything required to go live but if your application needs an integration with a 3rd-party app, or a code snippet needs to be added to their application, let them know about it ASAP.

Pre-signup

Onboarding In-App flow should be built around the key activation events. If a key activation event is adding a logo, make this part of the flow. If a key activation event is connecting a social media account, make this part of the flow. 90% of users who add a picture sell their car in 2 weeks.

First user experience

Emails are great for pulling users back to your application. 7 out of 10 customers check their Inbox more than once a day. Animated Gifs, step-by-step guides and videos are all great ways of delivering the same message (E.G. “add your logo ”) but in a clear and creative way. If users still haven’t Uploaded that elusive logo, (1) remind them they still need to (2) let them know why (Because-Bridge). repeat, repeat,

Post-signup

People want low touch but they also want guidance. They don’t want to talk to you but they do want to be hand held until their job is complete. This puts you in a bit of a dilemma really. Users have…

<ul><li>Their customers — what they want, what they need, and how to bridge the gap between what your product does and this desired outcome. </li><li>The Onboarding process is where new customers tend to get stuck, where they drop out, and what can help them get over those hurdles.</li><li>Usage — how well is the product working for the customers? Where they stop using it. What they’re hoping to find — and don’t. </li><li>Growth opportunities are when the customer will benefit from using more of the product.</li></ul>

How to Get Product Managers Excited to Work with Customer Success

A customer success team is only as good as its information. But why aren't other departments clamouring at their door for these insights too? most of us come from a tradition of strict departments. You do your thing; I'll do mine. Which, along with Territorialism and downright inefficiency, leads to data silos. You need a way to get your insights heard. Because you can’t give your customers what they need by yourself.&nbsp;

Customer Success: Information

Product managers and engineers have a very different way of communicating than Touchy-Feely customer success agents. Just like a good marketing campaign, lead with benefits to them (rather than the customer) and put them in bullet points with Metrics if possible. Product managers and engineers have a very different way of communicating than Touchy-Feely customer success agents.

Bridging the language barrier

Customer success data can pinpoint the trouble spots that matter most. But cs can't fix these problems themselves; they depend on Dev to come up with the solutions. What you think should be a "simple" change isn't actually asking for an overhaul of the entire Website. You can help Dev bridge that gap by understanding what the customer wants and making sure it Aligns with what they truly need. If you want a product to work,

Persuasive Benefit #1:  Do better work, more efficiently

When support tickets rise en Masse, many Ceos hit the panic button. This sends Dev into a flurry of activity (disrupting what they were doing) what if we built a new feature? What if we did one big update? What if we asked each departing customer why they’re leaving and solved all of those issues? It’s the fast track to the dreaded "next feature fallacy" and the "product death cycle"

Persuasive Benefit #2: Be less distracted by support tickets

Customer success already builds out ideal customer profiles, in which the ideal customer’s pain points and ideal outcomes are recorded. It’s not a great leap to also create user stories that help Dev answer the question, “why are we doing this?” and Prioritize accordingly. Success can even take on some of the burden of Prioritization, using user stories, as long as it’s part of a group effort — everyone has to agree to a unified scheme based on user impact, effort required and company priorities.

Persuasive Benefit #3: Feature Requests

The “ right” kind of feedback comes from ideal customers. The wrong kind of feedback can lead to wasting time on features that don’t serve your target audience. Customer success has already identified ideal customers. That means they know who to survey, and when they send the survey, they’ll get higher response rates.

Persuasive Benefit #4: Right feedback

Show Product Dev how their hard work impacts real people. Share customer stories and anecdotes. Share your numbers and stats. Celebrate successes.Too often, Dev is removed from the effects of their work. They don’t get to see the end users succeeding. They don’t see how what they do makes peoples’ lives better.This is a vital element to engagement and a big part of enjoying what you do.So give Dev credit where it’s due, and introduce them to the customers they’re really working for.

Persuasive Benefit #5: Have more fun

Which means that the company benefits, because you’re effectively maximizing lifetime value (aka. minimizing churn), which leads to growth.&nbsp;<ul><li>According to Bain and Co., a 5% increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 25% to 95%.&nbsp;</li><li>Retention had a 6.71% impact on a company’s bottom line. Acquisition only had a 3.32% impact.</li><li>Gartner Group found that, on average, 80% of a company’s future profits come from 20% of their existing customers.&nbsp;</li></ul>

The Partnership Between Customer Success and Product Development Benefits Everyone

This is a guest post by Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré. Nichole is SaaS Consultant & Customer Success Evangelist. Founder at Authentic Curation. Moderator at Product Hunt & GrowthHackers. Previously…

Customer success is the one thing your company cannot afford to not have a plan for. Many companies simply don't have a plan for customer success. It's a challenge to "herd the cats" in the beginning. Success rarely happens by accident. Make a plan that will enable you to ensure that your customers succeed from day one. He says if you want to grow your business, you need a plan.

​10 Things to Consider When Formulating a Success Strategy

People often ask me how I define and measure success. The first thing that you have to do in order to be able to answer that question is to identify what Success looks like from your customers perspective. Once you know your customer's definition, your definition of success should be very easy to define. Strive to align the two. Focus on only what’s important because there will be a lot of noise to distract you. Once you are crystal clear, seek the one measure that best represents that state and that’s your yardstick.

Define what Success looks like

<ul><li>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.</li><li>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.</li></ul>

First Steps: Creating Your Success Strategy

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.

MAPP Concept

​The distance of the road to success becomes shorter as soon as you take the first step.

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.

MAPP: Mission

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.&nbsp;

MAPP: Alignment

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.

MAPP: Principles

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.

MAPP: Plan

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.

Measure everything

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.

Measure Happiness

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.

Define the Journey

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.

Culture And Strategy

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.

Have A Process In Place

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.

The 6 P's Of Success

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.

Build-in feedback loops

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.

The Product You Provide

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.

Tools and automation are your friends

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.

Talk About Customer Success

I think we can all agree that Customer Success is the one thing your company cannot afford to not have a plan for if the goal is to succeed in the subscription business. Strangely enough, many…

Aha moment is when a new user first realizes the meaningful value in your product. This moment <a href='https://productled.com/training/' class="idea-content-link" target='_blank' rel="noreferrer">turns users into happy, paying customers</a>.

Three things happen when you (or a user) "feels" an aha moment:<ol><li dir = "auto">You understand exactly how a product can help you.</li><li dir = "auto">You experience the core value of a product.</li><li dir = "auto">You’ve achieved something very quickly that might have taken you hours previously.</li></ol>What aha moments look like in real life, for real companies.<ul><li>For <a href='https://www.airbnb.com/' class="idea-content-link" target='_blank' rel="noreferrer">Airbnb</a>, it's making your first booking.</li><li>For <a href='https://www.google.com/' class="idea-content-link" target='_blank' rel="noreferrer">Google</a>, it's finding an answer to something complex.</li><li>For <a href='https://www.facebook.com/' class="idea-content-link" target='_blank' rel="noreferrer">Facebook</a>, it's connecting with your friends.</li></ul>

What does an aha moment feel like?

They are the ones who become amazing at whatever it is that your product enables them to do. Your mission when speaking to such users is to identify what a success story looks like for this type of user. The easiest way to contact them is via email. Also, talk to your churned users to identify the value gap (discrepancy between what a customer expects from the product and the value received or perceived) The gap could be due to the customer not understanding the product’s capabilities or how to use it, negative mental or emotive response to the product, or friction.

Talk to Power users

Look at the customer behavior of both your good and bad customers. Doing this will help you to identify <a href='https://productled.com/blog/how-to-build-a-user-journey-map/' class="idea-content-link" target='_blank' rel="noreferrer">successful user journeys</a>. Follow the 5-step process<ol><li>Put a list together of all your product's features.</li><li>Pick a list of your most successful customers and analyze what features they used early on, continue to use regularly, and stopped/didn't use.</li><li>Write down what features got adapted and didn't.</li><li>You need to find the behaviors that, when performed, best correlate with continuing to use your product for an extended period of time.</li><li>You want to lead with the features that get people to upgrade.</li></ol>

Look for patterns

Here are a few to get you started…<ul><li dir = "auto">Using a specific set of features.</li><li dir = "auto">Achieving a particular outcome within a product.</li><li dir = "auto">Using your value metrics.</li><li dir = "auto">Using the product several times in the first week.</li><li dir = "auto">Watching an onboarding video before diving into the product. etc</li></ul>Prioritize experiments and keep track of them. Organize your potential experiments to test in an Experiment Log.

Shortlist and test potential behaviors

The aha moment is when the user realizes the value of a product. This is a complete guide on how to identify your aha moment, with examples from top companies like Slack, Zoom and Airbnb.

saas

3 Tips to Up your QBR Game

3 Tips to Up your QBR Game

Key Activation Events And The Secret For Bloody Brilliant Low-Touch SaaS Onboarding

Key Activation Events And The Secret For Bloody Brilliant Low-Touch SaaS Onboarding