40 Questions CSMs should ask themselves

Hi, Markus here. Welcome to a free edition of the Customer-Value-Led-Growth Newsletter.

Every week, I share strategies, guides, and frameworks to help you create exceptional value for your customers and company.

If you are not a paid subscriber, here’s what you might have missed:

• 5 highly effective Tools every CS Team needs to use

• The not-so-Secret to high Product Adoption

• How to build a Customer Success Metric System that rocks

• Customer Onboarding that drives Growth

• How to build a dedicated Customer Success Plan

Customer Success Management is not an activity game. It’s about making every activity count and scoring the big points.

You are spending 50-60 hours a week at work pouring your heart and your soul into elevating your customers.

But how much time do you spend reflecting whether the things you are doing work?

How do you measure your performance?

Ok, at the top level, it’s (relatively) straightforward to answer these 3 questions:

• How often do customers achieve their goals (success rate)?

• How much value do they get (customer ROI)?

• How much revenue do you create in return?

But there’s a problem - you can’t influence any of those outcomes directly.

Because these outcomes are the sum of much smaller parts - your activities.

Want to continously improve your performance?

Start to critically reflect on all the things you do every month.

In today’s post, you will find 40 questions spread across 9 areas you should ask yourself:

1. Customer Discovery

• How often do you have clearly defined customer goals?

• How often do you clearly understand the problems they need to solve?

• How often do you understand the education and training they require?

2. Success Planning

• How long does it take you to create a customer success plan?

• How many drafts of the plan do you need to create?

• How often do you have to adapt your plans without changes on the customer side (after the start)?

3. Success Program

• How often can your customers successfully apply their learnings (across different services and content)?

• How long does it take them to implement their learnings?

• How often do customers report that something is missing?

• How often do you get meaningful feedback on it (enabling you to improve it)?

• How often do you need fix issues after digital motions?

4. Measuring success

• How often do you have clarity about your customers’ progress?

• How many customers are willing to share their results?

• How often do you successfully detect risks? (how many customers leave undetected)

• How fast do you identify customer issues and risks (time between problem and solution attempt)?

• How many customers are open for exit interviews?

• How often do you understand why customers are leaving?

5. Value Demonstration

• How often do you perform value recaps in customer meetings?

• How often do you have to clarify the value customers have?

• How often do execs read your reports?

6. Monetizing Value

• How many customers are open to meeting for commercials?

• How many growth opportunities do you identify (monthly, annually)?

• How many of them can you turn into business cases?

• How many customers do you actively ask for referrals?

7. Customer Engagement

• How many of your customers are going dark (month or year)?

• How many of your customers attend your QBRs?

• How often do they reach out if they have a problem? (Trust)

• How often do they reach out to proactively inform you about relevant changes?

• How often do customers respond to your E-mails? (That requires a response)

• How many non-responsive customers have you re-engaged?

• How many champions have you created?

8. Resource Distribution

• How much of your time do you spend on bad-fit customers?

• How much of your time do you spend on redundant activities?

• How much of your time do you spend on improving core skills and growing your subject expertise?

• How much time do you spend on non-CSM activities (self-inflicted)?

• How often do you do something for your customers that they should do themselves?

9. Internal Collaboration

• How often do you meet with other teams to discuss cross-functional matters?

• How many reports do you share with other teams?

• How often do you address churn as a company-wide responsibility?

• How often do you actively demonstrate value to your leadership?

The more questions you can answer the more numbers you can improve the more value you will create for your customers, your company, and yourself.